Global Warming May Shift Summer Weather Patterns

By altering the heat balance between land and sea, manmade global warming may be altering summer weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, a new study found. The study, published on Sept. 30 in Nature Geoscience, shows that the sprawling high pressure areas that set up shop over the Western North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans during the summer months have become larger and stronger during the past 40 years, and these trends are likely to continue during the next several decades as temperatures increase.

These changing weather patterns could have far-reaching impacts, from redirecting powerful hurricanes toward the East Coast, to making the Southeast and Central states see-saw more frequently between extremely hot and dry summers and cooler, wetter summers. In addition, a shift in the strength and shape of the North Pacific subtropical high could affect the South Asian Monsoon, which is already being altered by warming and increased regional pollution. 

The study does not formally attribute the cause of the recent trends, but says that the future changes will most likely be driven by global warming.

Although highs (the big "H" symbols on your local TV weathercast) are typically associated with pleasant weather, the position and shape of these systems shape large-scale weather patterns, helping to determine the locations of subtropical deserts. More importantly for the U.S., they help steer the most powerful storms on Earth, and modulate rainfall amounts in the Central, Southeast, and Mid-Atlantic states.

The Atlantic subtropical high, more commonly known as the “Bermuda High” because of its semi-permanent location near that Western Atlantic island during the summer months, helps determine whether Atlantic hurricanes recurve harmlessly out to sea before reaching the East Coast, or make landfall with potentially devastating impacts.

Hurricanes tend to skirt around the edges of the high by catching a ride on the clockwise flow of air around the periphery.

The Bermuda High also helps draw warm and humid air up the Eastern seaboard, contributing to some of the most intense heatwaves on record.

The study, which relies on climate model simulations as well as weather data for the past 40 years, shows that the Bermuda High has already expanded westward, which could be making summertime rainfall in the Central and Southeast U.S. much more variable.

“The intensification and westward movement of the subtropical highs may cause more landfalling hurricanes/typhoons and cause more intense Southeast U.S. rainfall variability, leading to more extreme events in the[se] regions,” said coauthor Mingfang Ting of Columbia University in an email conversation.

A 2010 study published in theJournal of Climate found that a westward shift in the Bermuda High helped cause a marked increase in the frequency of summers with “strongly anomalous precipitation” in the Southeast. Recent summers have seen dramatic flips between punishing droughts and severe flooding in states such as Georgia, for example.

According to the research of Ting and her colleagues, the sharpened temperature contrast between land areas and the oceans, which is related to manmade global warming, is the main mechanism behind the intensifying and expanding Highs.

“... In the future warming scenario, we show that this pattern is intensifying, and land and ocean heat contrasts are intensifying. This leads to the intensification of the anticyclones,” Ting said.

In the Pacific, the consequences of the intensifying and expanding subtropical high could be just as serious, considering that the high helps regulate the South Asian Monsoon season, which provides vital water for irrigating crops.

By Andrew Freedman@climatecentral.org

Climate Change Video

The US National Research Council has been doing a lot recently to expand background knowledge of the climate system and of climate change. In tandem with a new report discussing strategies for advancing climate modeling, they have put up a an introductory web site on climate models (including some interviews with some actual climate modelers).

More comprehensively, they have helped put together a series of videos discussing everything from the definition of climate to attribution of climate changes and future projections. The series is in seven parts, viewable here. There are additional resources here.

Temperature Target May Doom Climate Talks

                                                                                          The U.N. Climate talks in Copenhagen.

At the much-heralded climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, world leaders agreed to limit manmade global warming to less than 2°C (3.6°F) above preindustrial levels. The agreement at Copenhagen, however, and in multiple rounds of subsequent negotiations, hasn’t led countries to make actual commitments to the kind of emissions reductions that would put the world on a path to meeting that 2°C target.

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, this seeming inconsistency is not just unsurprising: it was inevitable. By focusing on the 2°C goal, negotiators inadvertently guaranteed that their efforts would fail, because there’s no hard evidence that any specific temperature target marks a dangerous threshold, with clear consequences for crossing it (instead, there is plenty of evidence that more and faster warming entails greater risks of major consequences, such as the collapse of the polar ice sheets). This uncertainty, the study argues, provides an incentive for countries to be free-loaders, jumping on board with the agreement without making potentially costly emissions reductions.

The main message, therefore, is that countries should not rely so much on the notion of a climate change “red line,” beyond which catastrophe could occur, as the basis for making emissions reduction commitments.

This might come as a surprise to political leaders, who for more than two decades have struggled to reach agreement on what level of temperature change, or what atmospheric concentration of planet warming greenhouse gases, would constitute “dangerous human interference” with the climate. For them, just agreeing to the two-degree target was viewed as an accomplishment in Copenhagen.

The study is based on results from a simulation game played by 400 students, who played the game for real money. The students can be thought of as climate negotiators. Scott Barrett, a professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a coauthor of the study, said that in practically every simulation, despite having the equivalent of a temperature target to shoot for, the players in the game committed to emissions limits that allowed the amount of planet warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to soar to what would almost certainly be “catastrophic” levels.

The problem, Barrett said, is that unless uncertainty about the threshold can be reduced to near-zero, individual countries have an incentive to do less than what would be required to avoid exceeding the threshold. In reality, this uncertainty can never be reduced to near-zero, Barrett said, because of the inherent scientific unknowns about what causes abrupt and catastrophic climate change.

If uncertainty could be reduced to near-zero, though, climate negotiations would be transformed from a classic “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which countries have a perverse incentive to do less than what is required in order to solve a shared problem, and into a coordination game, in which countries would work with one another to ensure they are making sufficient commitments to meet a collective goal.

“The long history of climate talks and climate behavior is pretty clear, countries say one thing and do another,” Barrett said. He said this study, which shows that identifying a “red line” may actually hinder policy action, provides new insight into the failure of international climate talks.

“The purpose of all this research is to understand first of all why things have gone wrong,” he said. “You need a proper diagnosis of the illness before you order treatment.”

Barrett said negotiators should seek ways around the “prisoner’s dilemma,”  perhaps by designing a series of smaller agreements that target individual greenhouse gases, rather than trying to craft an all-encompassing treaty that sets emissions reduction goals for entire economies.

The next round of U.N. climate talks kick off on November 26 in Doha, Qatar. 

By Andrew Freedman@climatecentral.org

UK And US Newspapers Give Climate Sceptics Most Column Inches

Climate sceptics feature more prominently in newspapers in the US and UK than other countries, and their views are more likely to go unchallenged in right-leaning papers, an academic study has shown.

Friday’s report, which was published in the Environmental Research Letters journal, delved deeper into data that was first published last year. For the study, 2,064 newspaper articles from the US, UK, France, China, Brazil and India over two three-month periods in 2007 and 2009-10 were scrutinised for the quantity and type of climate sceptic voices featured on both news and opinion pages.

The authors examined in particular the political leanings of each newspaper and concluded that there was “little evidence” that this influenced coverage of climate sceptics in Brazil, India and China. However, in the US and UK, and to some extent France, the political leaning of the newspaper did affect coverage of climate sceptics.

“The strongest evidence for a distinction between left-leaning and right-leaning newspapers can be found in the opinion pages in France, the UK and the US, where right-leaning newspapers are much more likely to include uncontested [climate] sceptical voices,” concluded the authors.

There were some surprises in the data, though, said the authors, James Painter of the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and Teresa Ashe of Birkbeck College. For example, they found that there were slightly more articles of all types – opinion pieces and news stories – containing sceptical voices in the left-leaning newspapers from the countries studied, than in the centrist or right-leaning newspapers. But, in the left-leaning papers, the views of climate sceptics were far more frequently countered within an article by an opposing view.

The data was first released last year in a report entitled Poles Apart, published by the RISJ. It limited its search to two key time periods of climate coverage: the publication ofthe UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007, and the release online of the hacked “Climategate” emails in late 2009.

It also differentiated between three types of climate sceptic featured in the chosen newspapers: the “trend sceptics” (who deny the global warming trend); the “attribution sceptics” (who accept the trend, but question the contribution of mankind’s emissions); and the “impact sceptics” (who accept human causation, but claim impacts may be benign or beneficial, or that the models are not robust enough to know).

The authors refrained from trying to theorise about why climate sceptic voices featured more frequently in the newspapers published in Anglo-Saxon countries, but did observe that “the presence of organised sceptical groups or individual climate sceptics in [the US and UK], and their virtual absence in the other four countries, could have been just as important driver of media outcomes as editorial decisions [of newspapers]. They are adept at getting their voices heard in the media when the opportunities arise.”

Painter, the lead author, said: “These results are significant because they do seem to support those who argue that climate scepticism is much stronger in “Anglo-Saxon” countries, such as the US, UK, Canada and Australia, as measured by its presence in the media. The data would also suggest a lot of the uncontested climate scepticism is found not so much in the news reports but in the opinion pages of right-leaning newspapers in the US and the UK.”

Painter added that the study left some intriguing unanswered questions: “It would be interesting to know what has happened since 2010. Others have reported that climate coverage in the media has fallen since then, but has the incidence of climate sceptics appearing in newspapers remained the same, or even increased proportionately? Also, ideally, a wider range of countries needs to be studied, including the study of countries such as Australia, Canada, Norway and eastern Europe, where climate scepticism is known to be prevalent. There is anecdotal evidence, too, that climate scepticism is now on the rise in the Brazilian media.”

The newspapers chosen for analysis were the Guardian/Observer and the Daily/Sunday Telegraph in the UK, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in the US, Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo in Brazil, People’s Daily and Beijing Evening News in China, Le Monde and Le Figaro in France, and The Hindu and Times of India in India.

Separately, insurance company Axa published a survey on Thursday which showed that a higher proportion of respondents in the UK, US and Japan said they doubted climate science than in the other 10 countries polled, which included Turkey, Indonesia, Germany, and Mexico.

More than 13,000 people over the age of 18 were asked in an online survey whether they considered that climate change has now been scientifically proven. “Even in countries where people are least convinced of the scientific reality of this phenomenon (Japan, UK, the US), [climate] sceptics are in the minority (respectively 42%, 37% and 35%),” said Axa. Agreement was highest in Indonesia (95%), Hong Kong (89%) and Turkey (86%).

By Leo Hickman@guardiannews.com

Brazil: Rich Nations Owe More to Combating Global Climate Change

Major emerging economies' obligations to cut emissions under a climate change agreement should not be the same as those of rich countries, Brazil's chief negotiator said, signaling a retreat to an old position that has hamstrung years of U.N. negotiations.

Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado told Reuters during last week's U.N. General Assembly that Brazil is committed to working toward a global pact to cut emissions in both developed and developing nations as agreed at last year's climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

But Figueiredo said that agreement should adhere to the U.N.'s principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities," a line between developing and developed countries drawn in 1992 that enabled countries such as Brazil, China and India to escape mandatory carbon cuts, which the Durban summit had supposedly eliminated.

"Different countries would have different contributions in this fight against climate change, and these different contributions have to do with a number of factors of national circumstances," Figueiredo said, referring mainly to the belief that rich countries are responsible for "generating the problem."

The so-called BASIC bloc (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) in the U.N. climate negotiations stressed the point at a joint meeting in Brasilia last week to harmonize their position for the next round of negotiations in Doha, Qatar, which begin next month.

An agreement is to be formalized by 2015 and to take effect by 2020.

BUT WHOSE OBLIGATIONS?

The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the 1992 U.N. treaty that legally bound only developed countries to emission reduction targets because it did not place any obligations on the fast-growing economies, which are also major greenhouse gas emitters.

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change and head negotiator, has said the "common but differentiated" principle created an unwelcome "firewall" between developed and developing countries.

Following the conclusion of the Durban conference, Stern had praised the agreement for removing reference to the principle and said it reflected the "kind of symmetry" that the United States has pushed for since the start of the Obama administration in 2009.

Figueiredo stressed that the BASIC countries were not backsliding on what they had agreed in Durban or at previous summits in Copenhagen and Cancun where they pledged domestic voluntary commitments to curb carbon emissions.

"It is my hope that all countries would like to have a system that would recognize their own national needs and their national circumstances.

"If you factor that in, but also the need for a differentiation of action based on responsibility but also on capacity to act, there you may have the blueprint of something," he said.

FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES

The ambassador said that the distinctions between developed and developing countries will also be necessary if the issue of fossil fuel subsidies - estimated to have been $409 billion in 2010 - is addressed in a future climate agreement.

In 2009, the leaders of the Group of 20 countries agreed to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2020.

They reiterated the pledge at the U.N. conference on sustainable development that Brazil hosted in Rio de Janeiro in June.

Figueiredo said the subsidies issue would need to be addressed in a "tailor-made" way to recognize that some developing countries cannot immediately ban them because they have given their populations access to modern forms of energy.

"I think this is a fair discussion," he said.

reuters.com

‘GreenGrok’ Duke Dean Chameides on ‘Climate Conundrum’

Climate goals are ill-suited to ‘how our brains are wired,’ a Duke dean says in outlining the ‘huge task’ ahead on climate change communications.

A two-day retreat includes artists, scientists, students, and cognitive scientists in an effort to better understand climate change communications challenges.

Here’s the recipe:

• Include a dean and several professors, most but not all from Duke University;
• Sprinkle in a neuroscientist here and there and also, for good measure, a dabble from some other prestigious university’s psych department;
• Add an artist, maybe of the photographer/filmmaker variety;
• And, for good measure if nothing more, sprinkle with a few real live students.

So. What’s the dish being served up?

The dean of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, Bill Chameides, says it’s all part of an effort to resolve what he describes as a “climate conundrum.” And what he sees as climate scientists’ frustrations over how their concerns are being heard, or not heard, by the public at large.

“We continue to make progress on the science front,” Chameides wrote in a recent post at his The GreenGrok blog. He points in particular to efforts to “unravel the relationship” between climate change and extreme weather.

“But the American public seems at best concerned but unwilling to do much about it, and at worst dismissive,” he wrote, borrowing the vernacular from the “Six Americas” studies. He bemoans the situation in which climate science and climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts “have pretty much disappeared from the national dialogue …. scant few Americans will go into the voting booth on November 6 with climate change high on their list of vote-determining issues.”

Chameides in his post explores the notion of redefining the issue entirely, including changing the fundamental terminology of climate change/global warming and environmental protection more broadly. Some of what Chameides characterizes as “amazing insights” from cognitive scientists taking part in the two-day retreat near Asheville, N.C.

• People rarely make decisions based on information. Despite what most of us think, many a human decision is processed in the unconscious rather than the conscious.
• Subliminal messaging is very powerful. How powerful? Check out this video (and paper) on how millisecond-long exposures to an Apple or IBM logo affected the level of creativity in test subjects. (And if you want to test how easily you can miss a “hidden” message, check this one out.)
• People can receive messages in a defensive posture. For example, if someone has negative associations with environmentalists, a message containing the word “environment,” regardless of its content, can simply reinforce those negative associations, thus having the very opposite of the outcome intended. (That got me thinking about the term “clean coal.” Could it be a lose-lose phrase having the unintended effect of turning off both those with negative associations of dirty fossil fuels and those with negative associations of clean and green energy?)
• When given a non-specific, long-term goal, people tend to lose focus on it even as they make progress toward it — kind of an “I’ve done enough, time to move on” mindset. When given short-term, specific goals, on the other hand, people tend to accelerate toward them as they approach them — a “we’re almost there” attitude.

Given the retreat presentations by cognitive scientists, Chameides wrote, “It was pretty clear why messaging on climate science has been and will continue to be its own challenge, a challenge that is strangely a part of and an addition to the challenge of addressing the actual problem of a warming world.”

Despite what he sees as the “diffuse and long-term” goals of addressing climate change issues, “they’re just not well-suited to the way our brains are wired,” Chameides wrote. He looks ahead to a “huge task” of effectively communicating on the climate issue.

Acknowledging that a number of points and questions raised during the two-day discussion remain unanswered, Chameides said he and his Duke University colleagues and others will press forward on a number of fronts.

yaleclimatemediaforum.org

Developing Countries Most Vulnerable To Ocean Acidification

Developing countries that rely on nourishment from the oceans will soon find their sources of food and way of life threatened, according to an Oceana study released last week. The report,Ocean-Based Food Security Threatened in a High CO2 World, ranks the top 50 nations most vulnerable to climate change and ocean acidification in the context of their seafood and fish consumption.

Not surprisingly, those nations topping the list are among the least responsible for historic emissions of carbon dioxide.

The Comoros claimed the dubious distinction of most threatened, followed by Togo, the Cook Islands, Kiribati, and Eritrea. Other notable countries in the top fifty include Pakistan (8), North Korea (25), China (35), and South Africa (46). The United States did not make the list.

Just how big is this threat? Over a billion people rely on seafood as their main source of protein. Before mid-century, global population is expected to reach nine billion, creating further demand for ocean-based food. Many nations struggling with nutrition will be further challenged, and citizens of some developing nations will likely turn to inferior foods. The authors elaborate:

Losing [seafood] may mean more dependence on less healthy processed foods that are imported from abroad. Communities that have recently made a shift from eating traditional seafood items to importing cheap, processed foods have suffered widespread health problems. For example, in Pacific Island nations about 40 percent of the population has been diagnosed with diabetes, cardiovascular diseases or hypertension.

The combined rankings were based on three factors: exposure to climate change and ocean acidification, rates of seafood and fish consumption, and adaptive ability. It then predicted these conditions into mid-century for each country.

The report also considers the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification separately. The Maldives are the most threatened based solely on climate change predictions. The Cook Islands, which did not fare much better in the combined rankings, came in at number one in the ocean acidification rankings.

Scientists have already observed disturbing trends in ocean acidification and climate change. Since the Industrial Revolution, ocean pH has decreased by roughly 30 percent. The change in pH spells serious trouble for coral reefs and shellfish that rely on calcium to grow. In increasingly acidic waters, less calcium is available.

Ocean temperatures are also rising dramatically in numerous regions. This change is forcing some marine species to move closer to the poles or into deeper waters. Many fish species are predicted to shift towards the poles at a rate of around 20 miles per decade. Poorer nations do not possess the industrial fishing fleets to chase these moving populations.

Although the United States didn’t make the list, it isn’t safe from these changes. Atlantic codhave shifted farther north to compensate for increasing temperatures, and lobster populations are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disease as waters warm, wreaking havoc on seafood markets. Oceana stresses the effects climate change may have on American fisheries in its report:

Millions of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue are at risk if there are substantial losses in the capture, processing and sale of U.S. seafood due to regional climate impacts. Due to rising temperatures, the continental U.S. is projected to lose an average of 12 percent of its fisheries catch potential.

According to the Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post, ocean acidification is also endangering America’s fisheries. Despite not being the sexiest issue, ocean acidification is receiving increased attention as its effects become more pronounced. Eilperin notes that falling pH is putting pressure on America’s shellfish fisheries. In regions like the Alaska and the Chesapeake Bay, hits to seafood and fish harvests are not just a threat to industry, but a threat to culture.

While the U.S. still lacks the political will to make the necessary changes to adapt and slow climate change and ocean acidification, at least we have the technology and economic resources. The nations atop Oceana’s list do not. Their citizens will have little hope if the seafood and fish they have relied on for generations disappear.

By Tom Wittig@thinkprogress.org/climate

Peruvian Innovators Trying to Save Disappearing Glaciers

A workers carry buckets of paint up the slop of Chalón Sombrero. The paint will be used to whitewash rocks in an effort to recreate a glacier lost to climate change.


Peru is a dry country, dependent on glaciers for virtually all of its water supply. But as the climate changes, the glaciers are drying up and vanishing. But two Peruvian entrepreneurs have conceived homemade solutions to try and reverse the disappearance of Peru's lifeline.

Some 14,000 feet up in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, glaciologist Benjamin Morales stands in a windswept dirt parking lot and looks across a rock-strewn slope.

In the 1980s and 90s, Morales says, thousands of people came here to watch international ski tournaments. Back then, he says “all this was ice.”

The skiers raced down the glistening white Pastoruri glacier, whose broad white ramp unfurled from 2,000 feet above nearly all the way to this dusty lot. Since then, Morales has watched the glacier steadily melt away. Today, its closest edge is about a mile from the parking lot.

Global warming is eating away at glaciers around the world. In Peru, a few intrepid souls have decided not to sit by watching, but to try and do something about it.

“It’s been regressing year after year,” Morales said, “and this has caused the most important adventure tourism site in Peru to be all but closed.”

Morales knows that the Pastoruri glacier is hardly unique. Glaciers around the world are falling victim to global warming. In Peru, Morales estimates the Andes have already lost at least 25 percent of their ice.

And what’s at stake here is more than just a few ski slopes. Peru is largely a desert country and its thirst is relieved largely by glacier-fed streams. So glaciers here are a vital natural resource. 

That’s why a few years ago, Morales decided he had to do more than simply watch the ice melt.

“We want to find ways to stop this loss of good water,” he said as he tromped over the Pastoruri glacier in heavy mountaineer’s boots and a powder blue parka. “We want to start taking action to keep that from happening.”

Morales thought long and hard about how he could stop the local effects of a global problem. Then one day, it struck him: sawdust.

He’d noticed how sawdust is traditionally used in his hometown to protect ice brought down from the mountains from melting. And he thought, if sawdust can insulate a block of ice, maybe it could insulate a whole glacier.

So he bought 150 big sacks of it from a sawmill, hired a crew to cart it onto the tongue of the glacier, and had them cover a backyard-sized plot in about six inches of sawdust.

Today, ten months later, the impact of the experiment is stunning. The entire ice edge melted and sank in the summer thaw—everywhere except the sawdust-insulated portion, which remained stubbornly frozen. It looks like a shaggy mastodon towering above Morales’ head.

“So we have proven that it’s possible to prevent glaciers from melting,” he said.

Inventors call it a proof of concept. And having established that sawdust will insulate glaciers, Morales is now looking at other materials, like locally harvested straw, to do the insulating.

And he’s not alone in his efforts to save Peru’s glaciers.

Several hundred miles south, near the city of Ayacucho, herder Salomon Pichca is part of an effort to bring back a glacier that’s already gone away.

Pichca is a small man with deep set eyes who used to graze livestock in marshes nearby, until the local glacier disappeared and the marshes dried up. Today, he’s part of a work crew a couple of miles above the nearest road that’s slathering homemade white paint onto black boulders near a summit called Chalón Sombrero.

It’s backbreaking work. Pichca says the crew hauls lime up from the road on lamas, unloads it, then turns around and heads back for water. Then they mix the lime, water and other ingredients, lug buckets of the paint up the rugged slope, and slosh it onto the sun-warmed rocks.

Eduardo Gold, an entrepreneur from Lima who’s the project’s architect, says the idea for the project came from a simple idea. 

"The color white reflects light and prevents the transformation of that light into infrared radiation," he said.

Simply put, white rocks don’t get as warm as black ones.

Gold hopes an entire white slope will dramatically cool off high mountain breezes, and that summits like Chalón Sombrero could once again be cold enough to retain snow and ice year-round, beginning the process of rebuilding a glacier.

So far, Gold’s men have whitewashed an area the size of a supermarket parking lot and he says the paint has already brought back wisps of ice to the mountain. He hopes to prove his idea’s value once the crew has covered half a square mile of rock.

If it works here, he wants to do the same on other mountains.

The World Bank has named Gold’s experiment one of “100 Ideas to Save the Planet.” The project has also been embraced by regional officials. But some remain skeptical.

“From a theoretical point of view of physics, one can understand,” former park service chief Luis Alfaro said. “But the question is, at what price?”

Alfaro worries, among other things, about the environmental impact of the paint when it washes off the rocks.

Others argue that tiny projects like painting mountaintops or insulating glaciers can never save the hundreds of square mile of mountain ice that still remain in Peru. Instead, they say, Peru must build new reservoirs to capture and store the water once held in glaciers.

But Peru can hardly afford such huge investments. And with its life-giving water supply at risk, many here, like former Deputy Environment Minister Vanessa Vereau, feel the country can’t afford to dismiss any idea for saving its glaciers.

She says no one knows whether such experiments will work.

“But since we need to experiment and conserve water for the future, I think we should try. I think we should try," she added.


pri.org

The Face of Climate Change: Walloped Wildlife and Flowers in the Colorado Rockies

We arrived in late May this spring, as we always have for over three decades, to our summer subalpine field station in the Colorado Rockies. Driving past clones of leafy yellow green aspens, we watched dust clouds billow in our wake along the dry dirt road. Neither the aspens nor dust were good signs. Normally... no, I'm not sure what is normal anymore here in the Gunnison Basin, a heavenly mix of mountains, forests and wildflowers. But I remember in the '80s and '90s that late May meant snow-draped mountains, with mounds of the stuff about our cabin. I would trudge through slush as it rapidly melted under the hard spring sun, exposing yellow curled sprouts, ready to explode green and upwards, fueled by icy water saturating the soil.

Two years ago, the southwest drought had rained red dust on those white mountains. The dust and unnatural heat had combined to create a spectacularly rapid snowmelt. Copper Creek jumped its banks by the bridge, lightly flooding the road and puddling the lab road sign. Oldtimers had never seen or heard the like from previous generations at the lab. Things clearly weren't normal.

We got out of the car. My husband John looked around, commenting, "Not bad... for July," a portent for what was to follow. To understand fully how different this summer was, let's look at how a typical mountain summer, the type to which wildlife is adapted, progresses.

Snowmelt, the day at any one place when snow disappears, is the starting bell for plant growth. Typically it occurs here around late May, early June. The first plants grow up fast, flower and seed, before the next Ziegfeld act of even taller wildflowers pushes them out of the way. And so it goes. Throughout May and early June cold air coming down from the Arctic and mountaintops causes occasional nocturnal frosts and even late spring snow flurries that can cover developing plants. But because they are just beginning to show, the damage is pretty minimal. Most are adapted to late flurries. It's always amazing to watch a delicate glacier lily get briefly smothered by a few inches of snow, and then appear 24 hours later, none the worse from wear. Snowmelt water feeds these plants throughout the dry month of June until midsummer July rains kick in.

Plants are the green engine fueling the rest of wildlife. Insects feed and breed on plants. Deer, elk, bears, and other grazers will follow the snowmelt line up the mountain through the summer, breeding and fattening to survive the next winter. Hungry mice and marmots, the groundhogs of mountains, pop up from winter burrows and immediately start foraging. Weasels, coyotes and fox go after mice and marmots. Martens (think weasels on steroids), go after birds and more, while mountain lions and occasionally bear stalk the big grazers.

Freeze-dried Larskpur blossoms, victims of frost

But what happens if the plants take a hit? We found out this summer. Winter left a low snowpack in the spring. That, and unusually early heat caused a record-tying early snowmelt around mid-April this year. None of the effects on plants were good. The plants started shooting up on cue, but lacking snowy protective layers, they were vulnerable to late frosts, which killed leaves, buds and flowers on already well-developed wild flowers. Normally colorful spring fields were drab this early June. Attracted to a rare spot of color, I stared at a blue freeze-dried larkspur bloom, frozen in death. Living flowers were few, small, often damaged. At this point, wild flowers were in the midst of a mini-drought. Snowmelt water had long since run off, while banks of clouds rolled by daily, barely spitting into the dust as they passed. Fields of blooming blue lupine, and later, yellow aspen sunflowers and magenta fireweed, failed to show.

Sunflower field, Copper Creek Trail, 2008 and 2012

Butterflies seemed to be more numerous, an illusion created by the lack of plants that would normally hide them, noted one lab butterfly expert. Watching an emerging butterfly in a sunny dry field desperately trying to pump its wings open was a poignant example for me of how drought was affecting them. Competition for flowers became fierce. It was the first time I noticed a fly pushing a moth off a flower, while others dive bombed flower-hogging beetles. The early, warm spring fueled an explosion of mice.

Butterflies on the trail ahead, resting on the ground.

An emerging, overheated butterfly, exhausted from trying to pump up its wings.

I watched this fly butt-head the moth to the side... clearly, he wanted the scrawny flower to himself

Butterflies swarmed this group of large daisies, the sole ones blooming in a meadow

Below ground, the effects are equally dramatic. Lack of water inhibits soil microbes from breaking down organics and releasing nutrients, as well as plants and fungi from taking up those nutrients. One result was stunted vegetation. Normally six-foot tall cow parsnip were blooming at two feet tall. Other wild flowers were blooming at half their height. For fungi, which spend summer gathering nutrients underground, it meant that even after copious rains came in late summer, they did not create those large, luscious edible mushrooms prized by locals.

Last year's flowering stalks loom above this year's stunted blooming cow parsnip.

The effects of the floral devastation rippled upward into the larger grazers. John Wenum of the Colorado Division of Wildlife observed that summer deer and elk herds did their traditional trek up the mountains, but the virtual absence of rain from mid-March through June sent them down again into wetter, greener areas.

Summer fawn among the aspens.

An unusual number of bears were prowling for food opportunistically in towns, hunting out garbage cans and entering buildings as August waned, trying desperately to get the calories needed to survive winter. For a bear, Wenum noted, that's about 15,000 to 20,000 Calories daily, and means averaging 20 hours or more daily to forage for berries and other food. In this context, scoring two slices of discarded pizza was a windfall. Ultimately, though, the results are tragic. Two local bears have already been shot and killed by threatened homeowners as summer slides into fall.

Two bears have already been killed by threatened homeowners this season. (photo, courtesy of David Inouye)

How did the drought affect the local economy? The nearby town of Crested Butte thrives on summer tourism; a star July attraction is the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, located in the "wildflower capital of the world, Crested Butte." Festival Director Sue Wallace noted that despite news about droughts and wildfires, attendance was down only 8% from last year, although disappointment in feedback surveys invariably mentioned the lack of flowers. Despite this, 90% said they would return. About 75% come from neighboring, hotter states, however, with Texas leading the pack.

Sue further observed that the town's finance department reported an increase in the town's revenues for July, the peak summer month, from 2011, indicating an increase in tourism. This might sound counterintuitive. But, as in the wildflower festival, the tourists are coming from neighboring, hotter states -- indeed, states that were much drier and hotter this year than last. Despite our regional drought, it wasn't anything like Texas, and the uptick quite possibly reflected a migration of people away from the devastating heat elsewhere.

But what of the future? In 1990, the first field global warming experiment began at our lab, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) by John Harte, an ecologist and my husband. The experiment tracked how subalpine field plots fared under a constant warming of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the heating estimated at that time to occur under a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main gas behind global warming. Heated plots alternated with unheated ones.

The global warming field experiment at the RMBL. (photo, courtesy of John Harte)

The result? Basically, heated plots went from wildflower meadow to sagebrush habitat, while unheated ones kept their flowers. As John puts it, imagine the opening scene of the "Sound of Music" occurring outside Elko, Nevada.

Lately, the unheated plots are starting to show the same initial changes that the original heated plots showed, many years back. And now improved climate models indicate that a doubling of carbon dioxide will probably cause more warming than 3.6 degrees.

The effects of climate change are starting to be seen, and will get worse. What then?

By Mary Ellen Harte@huffingtonpost.com/green