Latest research from the field and the lab
California is likely to suffer more than any other state from worsening air pollution due to climate change by the end of the decade, according to a new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
The report finds that in 2020, “climate change-induced ozone increases” could result in nearly half a million additional cases of “serious respiratory illnesses” and add more than $729 million to the state’s health care costs. Continue reading California Likely to “Suffer Most,” Says Study
Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner, Tim Flannery, stopped by KQED this morning for an appearance on Forum, the station’s live call-in program. He spoke about the status of international climate agreements and expressed hope for the process, which is not something I came across very often as a reporter at the UN climate talks in Cancun last December.
“We’re slowly gaining the ability to cooperate globally,” he told KQED’s Michael Krasny. “It’s a race against time, and whether we win or not is an open question.”
Continue reading Australia’s Climate Chief Comes to CA, Urges Action
Researchers say sea levels haven’t been rising along the West Coast of North America for decades, but that could be about to change, according to a new study.
Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography say they’ve observed changing wind patterns that, if persistent, could soon speed up sea level rise along California’s shores.
Global sea level rise averaged about two millimeters per year throughout much of the 20th century and then accelerated to 3 millimeters per year in the 1990s, said researcher Peter Bromirski. But along the West Coast, he said, sea levels have been steady since about 1980.
“There are indications that a change is underway,” said Bromirski. Continue reading Are Rising Seas Returning to the West Coast?
We’re not the only ones who think iNaturalist is pretty cool. Save the Redwoods does, too.
The San Francisco-based conservation organization has teamed up with the biodiversity-tracking social networking site to create an iPhone app exclusively for monitoring redwood and giant sequoia forests. It’s called Redwood Watch. It uses the same technology as the iNaturalist iPhone app, aggregating data on a special Redwoods page within iNaturalist.org.
“We hope that this will help us have a better idea of where redwoods are, and then we can use that data to understand what kinds of conditions they can tolerate,” said Emily Limm, director of science and planning for Save the Redwoods. Continue reading Saving Redwoods: There’s an App for That
It’s not time to rename Joshua Tree just yet, says the author of a new study.
Climate change is threatening the Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park all right, according to a new report. But unlike the findings of recently-published study, this report finds the park’s iconic, spiky namesake is unlikely to completely vacate the premises over the next century.
The new report was funded in part by Joshua Tree National Park, and its author Cameron Barrows, a researcher at UC Riverside’s Center for Conservation Biology, says that he conducted it partly in response to the recent study by Ken Cole of the USGS, which found that the trees would likely be gone from the park within the next 90 years.
“I facetiously say if that was to happen, we’d have to rename the park ‘Creosote Bush National Park’ or something like that,” said Barrows. “It would be really sad if that’s the case.”
Continue reading Time for “Creosote Bush” National Park?
And the Smoking Gun that Never Fired
This week’s hearing on climate science before the House Committee on Science, Space & Technology had some observers on the edge of their seats.
Much of the pre-game analysis focused on Richard Muller, UC Berkeley physicist and author of Physics for Future Presidents.
Muller started taking hostile fire weeks ago when bloggers noted that the famously anti-climate-regulation Koch Brothers were providing funding for his audit of the global temperature data used in UN climate reports. When he was slated to testify, speculation arose that Muller was hand-picked by House Republicans to savage the prevailing science.
But if there was any agenda behind Muller’s remarks, it wasn’t in evidence at this hearing, as Andrew Revkin notes in his Dot Earth blog. After Muller’s opening statement, which was deadpan and laden with technical detail, committee members seemed to shy away from him and pursue soundbites from more colorful panelists, who included: Continue reading On the Capitol Hill Climate Hotseat
To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you can observe a lot by listening
It was interesting to hear a report from NPR’s Richard Harris on a “new” branch of science called “soundscape ecology.” Harris interviewed Purdue landscape ecologist Bryan Pijanowski, who is part of a group of scientists advancing a “research agenda” to fully integrate the discipline into the study of ecosystems.
“We’re trying to understand how sounds can be used as measures of ecosystem health,” Pijanowski told Harris. Pijanowski is hardly the first to make this connection. An article co-authored by him and seven colleagues for the the March issue of the journal BioScience cites references back to 1969 (and gives a nod to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which appeared in 1962). Continue reading Ecosystems by Ear: It’s About Time
Joshua trees, the spiky desert-dwellers that are so iconic to Southern California’s dry country that they got a national park named after them, will likely disappear from 90% of their current range by the end of the century, according to a new study by scientists at the US Geological Survey.
Ecologist Ken Cole, the study’s lead author, said that means no more Joshua Trees in Joshua Tree National Park, which is currently in the southernmost part of the species’ range. It also means elimination of the trees across wide swathes of other parts of Southern California as well as Nevada and Arizona.
Cole and his team used climate models, field work, and the fossil record to project the future distribution of Joshua trees. They compared the projected increase in temperatures for the Southwest (four degrees Celsius, according to a “middle of the road” IPCC scenario) to a similar rapid increase in temperatures nearly 12,000 years ago, at the end of the ice age.
Using fossil sloth dung and packrat midden, the scientists reconstructed how Joshua trees responded to that warming. (Sloths, which are now extinct in the region, and packrats, ate the Joshua tree fruit, spreading the seeds and leaving them behind for the scientists to track.) Continue reading Joshua Trees Losing Ground, Fast
A new study says melting ice sheets will likely be “the dominant contributor to sea level rise in the 21st century.”
About 110,000 years ago, global sea level began to drop as the planet cooled, and evaporating seawater was transformed into massive ice sheets that covered large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. About 10,000 years ago, the Earth warmed up again. The ice retreated dramatically, and sea level rose. Since then, the planet’s ice, and the level of the ocean have been more or less stable.
Continue reading Melting Ice Sheets Spur Sea Level Rise
A wet and wild February provided a huge boost to California’s water outlook
An unusually dry January started some folks thinking that maybe the tap had been shut off for this season. But last month winter came roaring back as Pacific storms brought epic snowfalls to the Sierra. The result: Today’s monthly survey shows the water content of the mountain snowpack at 124% of normal for this date–and even above its normal level for April first.
Major reservoirs are also above their normal levels for early March. But it still doesn’t mean that contractors on the State Water Project will get all the water they ask for. Officials say they still expect deliveries to come in at about 60% of the volume requested. That’s a number that typically gets adjusted throughout the winter. Continue reading Burgeoning Snowpack Sweetens Water Outlook
