Some Plants Can Adapt To Widespread Climate Change

ScienceDaily (July 9, 2008) — While many plant species move to a new location or go extinct as a result of climate change, grasslands clinging to a steep, rocky dale-side in Northern England seem to defy the odds and adapt to long-term changes in temperature and rainfall, according to a new study by scientists from Syracuse University and the University of Sheffield (United Kingdom) published online in the July 7 issue of the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The experiment on which the study is based is one of the longest-running studies of climate change impacts on natural vegetation and may yield new insights into the effects of global warming on plant ecosystems.

"Contemporary wisdom suggests that climate changes cause plants to move or die," says Jason Fridley, study co-author and assistant professor of biology in The College of Arts and Sciences at SU. "However, our study suggests that if the changes in climate occur slowly enough, some plants have the ability to respond, adapt and thrive in their existing location."

The new findings resulted from the analysis of 13 years of data collected at the Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory (BCCIL) in the United Kingdom by Emeritus Professor J. Philip Grime and colleagues at the University of Sheffield. Established in 1989, BCCIL is a field laboratory of grasslands consisting largely of slow-growing herbs and sub-shrubs, many of which are more than 100 years old. As many as 50 different species of plants per square meter survive the region's hostile conditions by growing in shallow soil and in the nooks and crannies of limestone outcrops. The data analysis was supported by a grant Fridley obtained from the National Science Foundation.

The 13-year experiment at BCCIL involved subjecting 30 small grassland plots to microclimate manipulation. For example, some plots received 20 percent more water than normal during the summer, while other plots were covered with rain shelters in the summer to simulate drought conditions; heating cables were placed under some plots to simulate winter warming. The grasses in all of the plots were cut to simulate annual sheep grazing. A similar experiment was concurrently conducted on grasslands in Southern England for the first five years.

Data collected from the northern and southern sites was the subject of a study published by Grime and colleagues in Science (2000). In the 2000 study, the vegetation in the southern plots was substantially altered by the climate changes, while the Buxton vegetation in the north was virtually unaffected. The southern experiment was dismantled, but Grime continued the experiment on the Buxton plots.

"Based on the results of the five-year experiment, we suspected there was something unique happening in the northern grasslands that enabled the plants to resist simulated climate changes," Fridley says. "We formed two hypotheses -- the plants will eventually be affected, but it will take longer due to chronic nutrient shortage; or the grasslands won't change regardless of how long we manipulate the environment. All of our analysis suggested that the grassland ecosystem is stable, despite the climate manipulations."

The new results have yielded more questions than answers; foremost is why are some plants resistant to climate change, while others die, become extinct or migrate to other places? The answers may lie in the nature and behavior of the individual plants within a species.

"Individual plants may die or contract," Fridley says, "but perhaps they are replaced by those of the same species that are more adapted to the environmental changes. The closer we look, the more complex the systems become. There is actually a lot going on, but we may be missing it because we are looking at a broad spectrum of species instead of what is happening at the level of the individual plants within a species."

Adapted from materials provided by Syracuse University.

Interesting Editorial in the Washington Post...

Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.

By James Howard Kunstler
Sunday, May 25, 2008; B03

Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years -- inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.

Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.

The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.

These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.

Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.

We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.

James Howard Kunstler is the author, most recently, of "World Made by Hand," a novel about America's post-oil future.

Copyright: Washington Post, 2008

Frank DiSalvo to speak at Museum of the Earth this Weekend...

Climate Change Expert to Speak at Museum of the Earth
Saturday, June 7th at Noon





Frank DiSalvo is the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science and Director of the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future (CCSF). CCSF is a new center to bring Cornell faculty, staff, students, others together to address challenges in energy, environment, and economic development. He is also Co-director of the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute, a member of the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee of the Department of Energy, and a member of the National Academy of Science.

DiSalvo's lecture is entitled "The Climate/Energy Debate. This lecture is included with admission to the Museum of the Earth. For more information about Museum of the Earth please visit us on the web at www.museumoftheearth.org.

The Discovery Channel Goes Green!

Planet Green TV network pushes environmentalism

By Gary Levin, USA TODAY

Discovery Networks is hoping to parlay the "green" living movement into greenbacks with Planet Green, a new cable network due June 4.

And the channel is using celebrities — including rapper Ludacris, rocker Tommy Lee and Entourage star Adrian Grenier — to soft-pedal its mission and win over casual "armchair environmentalists."

The target audience: college students, baby boomers and new parents who have demonstrated an interest in improving the planet by changing their ways of living.

"It used to be that green was granola and left," says Discovery Networks CEO David Zaslav. But with interest in environmentalism broadening beyond the hard-core planet-in-peril preachers, Discovery is eyeing a mainstream audience for its brand of advocacy.

"We're not going to be 'The ice is melting,' " he says; the audience already gets that message. "We want to engage people in a fun way and in the spirit of what we can all do together."

Though other cable channels offer programming blocks, this is the first fully "green" channel. And in a rare move for a start-up, Planet Green plans a nearly all-original lineup of 14 personality-driven series this summer, three of which will air five days a week.

"The voices from Hollywood will help audiences find the network faster," says channel chief Eileen O'Neill. She says other experts will add a dose of credibility.

That means such shows as Battleground Earth, which pits Ludacris against Tommy Lee — neither of whom is known for his green thumb — in a series of challenges such as solar-powered racing and bamboo home-building.

"That sounds a little out of my element as far as hard labor is concerned," says Ludacris, who says his main environmental contribution so far has been keeping lights turned off and "putting my computer on sleep." But, he says, "I'm willing to do what I need to do to educate America. There's little things I know about, but I feel like there are other things I can learn."

And Grenier, whose Entourage HBO alter-ego is a party-hearty movie star, will produce and appear in The Green Life, which aims "to inspire on an emotional level" his own brand of environmentalism, including refurbishing a Spanish-style home with an ozonated pool and recycled shower water.

"We're attempting to avoid the more boring parts of what this show could be," he says. "We're not a bricks-and-mortar type show. The main focus is how to be creative when you're trying to do things you want to do anyway."

Told that Lee already has dubbed him "Luda the Polluta," Ludacris (aka Chris Bridges) came up with his own nickname for his soon-to-be nemesis (the show begins filming April 16): "Toxic Tommy."

"I was definitely not down to do another reality show, because we have too many of those, and they're stupid," Lee says. "But we're doing something for our kids. (Environmentalism) is a serious sort of subject, but you got to make it fun or you freak people out."

Planet Green replaces Discovery Home, an unsuccessful spinoff channel, and will be available in 50 million of the nation's 110 million TV homes June 4. It's part of the company's retooling that also has transformed Discovery Times into Investigation Discovery, and next year turns Discovery Health into the Oprah Winfrey Network.

In 10-year-old Discovery Home, "they've got a network on their hands that clearly is not working," says SNL Kagan analyst Derek Baine. "If they don't do something to get the image up and deliver viewers, they are in danger of having operators drop the channel (or) move it to a higher (digital) tier."

Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2008-03-30-planet-green_N.htm

Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

An Abrupt Climate Change?

Large Methane Release Could Cause Abrupt Climate Change As Happened 635 Million Years Ago

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Geologists Chris von der Borch (front) and David Mrofka (back) look for evidence of ancient methane seepage within tidal sediments seen in sea cliff exposures at Marino Rocks, South Australia. (Credit: M. Kennedy, UC Riverside)

ScienceDaily (May 29, 2008) — An abrupt release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, about 635 million years ago from ice sheets that then extended to Earth's low latitudes caused a dramatic shift in climate, triggering a series of events that resulted in global warming and effectively ended the last "snowball" ice age, a UC Riverside-led study reports.

The researchers posit that the methane was released gradually at first and then in abundance from clathrates -- methane ice that forms and stabilizes beneath ice sheets under specific temperatures and pressures. When the ice sheets became unstable, they collapsed, releasing pressure on the clathrates which began to degas.

"Our findings document an abrupt and catastrophic means of global warming that abruptly led from a very cold, seemingly stable climate state to a very warm also stable climate state with no pause in between," said Martin Kennedy, a professor of geology in the Department of Earth Sciences, who led the research team.

"This tells us about the mechanism, which exists, but is dormant today, as well as the rate of change," he added. "What we now need to know is the sensitivity of the trigger: how much forcing does it take to move from one stable state to the other, and are we approaching something like that today with current carbon dioxide warming."

Study results appear in the May 29 issue of Nature.

According to the study, methane clathrate destabilization acted as a runaway feedback to increased warming, and was the tipping point that ended the last snowball Earth. (The snowball Earth hypothesis posits that the Earth was covered from pole to pole in a thick sheet of ice for millions of years at a time.)

"Once methane was released at low latitudes from destabilization in front of ice sheets, warming caused other clathrates to destabilize because clathrates are held in a temperature-pressure balance of a few degrees," Kennedy said. "But not all the Earth's methane has been released as yet. These same methane clathrates are present today in the Arctic permafrost as well as below sea level at the continental margins of the ocean, and remain dormant until triggered by warming.

"This is a major concern because it's possible that only a little warming can unleash this trapped methane. Unzippering the methane reservoir could potentially warm the Earth tens of degrees, and the mechanism could be geologically very rapid. Such a violent, zipper-like opening of the clathrates could have triggered a catastrophic climate and biogeochemical reorganization of the ocean and atmosphere around 635 million years ago."

Today, the Earth's permafrost extends from the poles to approximately 60 degrees latitude. But during the last snowball Earth, which lasted from 790 to 635 million years ago, conditions were cold enough to allow clathrates to extend all the way to the equator.

According to Kennedy, the abruptness of the glacial termination, changes in ancient ocean-chemistry, and unusual chemical deposits in the oceans that occurred during the snowball Earth ice age have been a curiosity and a challenge to climate scientists for many decades.

"The geologic deposits of this period are quite different from what we find in subsequent deglaciation," he said. "Moreover, they immediately precede the first appearance of animals on earth, suggesting some kind of environmental link. Our methane hypothesis is capable also of accounting for this odd geological, geochemical and paleooceanographic record."

Also called marsh gas, methane is a colorless, odorless gas. As a greenhouse gas, it is about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and has largely been held responsible for a warming event that occurred about 55 million years ago, when average global temperatures rose by 4-8 degrees Celsius.

When released into the ocean-atmosphere system, methane reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and can cause marine dysoxia, which kills oxygen-using animals, and has been proposed as an explanation for major oceanic extinctions.

"One way to look at the present human influence on global warming is that we are conducting a global-scale experiment with Earth's climate system," Kennedy said. "We are witnessing an unprecedented rate of warming, with little or no knowledge of what instabilities lurk in the climate system and how they can influence life on Earth. But much the same experiment has already been conducted 635 million years ago, and the outcome is preserved in the geologic record. We see that strong forcing on the climate, not unlike the current carbon dioxide forcing, results in the activation of latent controls in the climate system that, once initiated, change the climate to a wholly different state."

As part of their research, Kennedy and his colleagues collected hundreds of marine sediment samples in South Australia for stable isotope analysis, an important tool used in climate reconstruction. At UCR, the researchers analyzed the samples and found the broadest range of oxygen isotopic variation ever reported from marine sediments that they attribute to melting waters in ice sheets as well as destabilization of clathrates by glacial meltwater.

Next in their research, Kennedy and his colleagues will work on estimating how much of the temperature change that occurred 635 million years ago was due solely to methane.

Kennedy, who directs the Global Climate and Environmental Change Graduate Program in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences, was joined in the study by UCR's David Mrofka; and Chris von der Borch of Flinders University, Australia. The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA Exobiology.

---

Journal reference:

1. Martin Kennedy, David Mrofka & Chris von der Borch. Snowball Earth termination by destabilization of equatorial permafrost methane clathrate. Nature, 453, 642-645 (29 May 2008) DOI: 10.1038/nature06961

Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Riverside.

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University of California - Riverside (2008, May 29). Large Methane Release Could Cause Abrupt Climate Change As Happened 635 Million Years Ago. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 29, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/05/080528140255.htm

From the We Campaign...

The clock is ticking for clean energy. The federal tax credits that support investments in wind and solar power are about to expire. Instead of acting -- Congress keeps stalling.

Tell Congress to renew incentives for clean energy now.

If Congress lets these clean energy credits lapse, 116,000 jobs and $19 billion in investments for 2009 will be immediately at risk. The clean power industry has been a bright spot in our economy -- providing good jobs, relief from skyrocketing energy prices and solutions to the climate crisis. The industry is poised to make great leaps in scale. Inaction from Washington to slow this momentum would be a mistake -- and could lead investors back to the polluting fossil-fuel industries of the past.

Add your voice today. We'll deliver the petition to the leaders of Congress to demand a vote on our energy and economic future.

On the couch...

An Unlikely Pair