On January 23, Bloomberg News reported Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), owned by his lucrative holding company Berkshire Hathaway, stands to benefit greatly from President Barack Obama’s recent cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.

If built, TransCanada’s Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline would carry tar sands crude, or bitumen (“dilbit”) from Alberta, B.C. down to Port Arthur, Texas, where it would be sold on the global export market.

If not built, as revealed recently by DeSmogBlog, the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side, and could include increased levels of ecologically hazardous gas flaring in the Bakken Shale, or else many other pipeline routes moving the prized dilbit to crucial global markets.

Rail is among the most important infrastructure options for ensuring tar sands crude still moves to key global markets, and the industry is pursuing rail actively. But transporting tar sands crude via rail is in many ways a dirtier alternative to the KXL pipeline. “Railroads too present environmental issues. Moving crude on trains produces more global warming gases than a pipeline,” explained Bloomberg.

A key mover and shaker behind the push for more rail shipments is Warren Buffett, known by some as the “Oracle of Omaha” — of “Buffett Tax” fame — and the third richest man in the world, with a net worth of $39 billion. With or without Keystone XL, Warren Buffett stands to profit enormously from multiple aspects of the Alberta Tar Sands project. He also, importantly, maintains close ties with President Barack Obama.

Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, BNSF and the Tar Sands

Many eyebrows were raised in August 2008, when two of the richest men on the planet, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, sojourned to Alberta’s tar sands patch. The Calgary Herald wrote “they took in the oilsands, apparently with awe.” According to a reliable but confidential source quoted in the story, the two men “visited the booming hub to satisfy ‘their own curiosity’ but also ‘with investment in mind.’”

And while he told the media he wasn’t interested in doing so at the time of the trip, Buffett soon became a major investor in tar sands related assets. A year after his visit to the oil sands, in November 2009, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased BNSF Railway as a wholly owned subsidiary.

BNSF Railway is the second largest freight railroad network in North America. BNSF “plans $3.9 billion in capital spending this year, an increase of 11 percent from 2011,” according to a recent article by Bloomberg.

BNSF serves as a vital cog in the oil sands procurement process. In the November/December 2008 edition of BNSF’s employee magazine, “Railway,” BNSF produced a piece titled, “Alberta oil Sands: No sour deal.”

The article reveals the exact role BNSF plays in the oil sands procurement process:

Before bitumen can move through a pipeline to its destination, it must be blended with diluents (diluting agents) such as natural gasoline (not natural gas, which is a gaseous fuel) or butane, which are composed of lighter weight hydrocarbons.

For the last two years, BNSF has been moving single carloads of diluents from U.S.refineries to the Canadian border (at Superior,Wis., Noyes, N.D., Sweetgrass, Mont., and New West minster, B.C.). The inbounds are then interchanged with Canadian railroads, then moved to Edmonton, with the final move to the oil sands’ processing center via pipeline.

Last year, BNSF moved about 9,000 carloads of diluents for the project, with the majority of loads originating from the Gulf Coast,California and Kansas. This year, about 12,000 carloads are anticipated to move.

(Snip)

In addition to moving the diluents, BNSF has also transported turbines, other large machinery and pipes for use at the drilling sites.

Not only does BNSF haul diluent materials in its freight trains bound for Alberta for tar sands oil procurement, but it also hauls pipes and pipeline materials.

Does this include materials for the KXL Pipeline? As the prospective pipeline is not yet officially dead, this is a key question to ask.

Look no further than to BNSF’s involvement in hauling the pipeline materials for the original TransCanada Keystone pipeline for crucial evidence.

BNSF Railway and the Original Keystone Pipeline

A South Dakota state government document shows that BNSF and TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, LP entered into a Pipeline License Agreement on August 1, 2008. The Agreement called for BNSF to carry pipeline materials from South Dakota up to the Alberta tar sands.

The Keystone Pipeline was the first TransCanada pipeline carrying tar sands crude down from Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma.

BNSF Railway, the KXL Pipeline, and Railway Alternative

BNSF’s ties to TransCanada are not limited to the Keystone Pipeline — they are also on the State Department’s “Distribution List” section of the Environmental Impact Statement report released in August 2011 on TransCanada’s KXL pipeline proposal.

In its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), the State Department acknowledged that railway is both a key alternative to the Keystone XL and capable of hauling dilbit around North America to vital markets through 2030, stating,

Even in a situation where there was a total freeze in pipeline capacity for 20 years, it appears that there is sufficient capacity on existing rail tracks to accommodate shipping…through at least 2030…[S]tatistics from the Department of Transportation,…conservatively estimated that the existing cross-border rail lines from Canada to the U.S. could accommodate crude oil train shipments of over 1,000,000 bpd (barrels per day).

Keystone XL, if built, is expected to ship 700,000 bpd of tar sands crude to Port Arthur, Texas, according to Bloomberg. Furthermore, the State Department notes that rail transport is also a dirtier alternative than a pipeline, due to the diesel cumbustion inherent in such a scheme.

In addition, there would be an increase in the emission of combustion products due to the use of diesel engines which could have an adverse impact on air quality along the route selected.  As compared to the proposed Project (Keystone XL), this alternative would have substantially greater GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions during operation due to the combustion of diesel fuel.

BNSF is eager to haul anything and everything it can. “Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul [and if KXL] doesn’t happen, we’re here to haul.” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for BNSF said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Buffett’s financial interests in the tar sands, though, go far beyond the Keystone XL saga, and into the development of the tar sands more generally, through Berkshire Hathaway’s extensive stock holdings in ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and General Electric. All three corporations are big league financial players in this game.

Berkshire Hathaway, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and General Electric

An August 2011 Fox Business story revealed Buffett owns 29.1 million shares of stock in ConocoPhillips, 421,800 shares of stock in ExxonMobil, and 7.777 million shares of stock in General Electric. All three of these corporations are deeply tied to the Alberta tar sands.

As of the Jan. 24 closing stock prices for the three corporations, this amounts to $1.73 billion worth of stock owned by Berkshire in these three Alberta oil sands profiteers.

ConocoPhillips’ website notes that it runs the Surmont oil sands project in Alberta. That project produces some 110,000 barrels of tar sands crude per day and is expected to run through 2015, according to Reuters.

ExxonMobil also has a massive stake in the Alberta Tar Sands through its Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil. As reported by Agence France-Presse in May 2009, ExxonMobil has plans, through its Kearl oil sands project, to begin producing 110,000 barrels of tar sands crude per day in 2012. ExxonMobil has future plans to produce over 300,000 barrels per day of dirty tar sands crude via the Kearl oil sands.

ExxonMobil is also deeply invested in oil sands pipelines, exposed in July 2011 for carrying oil sands crude down from Alberta through Montana in one of its pipelines. The pipeline ruptured, spilling 1,000 barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River.

Lastly, General Electric (GE), via its GE Water & Process Technologies and GE Canada subsidiaries, also has much to gain from tar sands oil development, particularly in the area of water holding and usage, once water has been contaminated during the procurement process.

A September 2010 press release reads,

“In 2007, GE entered into a $15-million technology development program with the Alberta Water Research Institute and its research funding partners. The program aims to develop technology to improve water reuse and management in in-situ oil sands operations. GE is also actively involved in developing and proving effective technologies for treating tailings water for industrial reuse, in order to help operators improve the efficiency of their operations.”

In addition to its tight-knit financial and research relationship with the Alberta Water Research Institute, GE also owns a water treatment facility in the tar sands patch through its wholly owned subsidiary, Zenon Environmental Inc., which it purchased for $760 million in 2006. Furthermore, in September 2011, Grizzly Oil Sands ULC announced that it had chosen GE’s water technology for its Algar Lake oil sands project in Alberta.

Buffett Raises Big Bucks for Barack

Buffett hosted an Obama fundraiser in August 2007, well before the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries. The minimum donation was $500 to attend and many gave up to $2,300.

“About 35 people who gave the higher amount or helped raise money from others met first with Buffett and Obama in a smaller room,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

Buffett did not limit his fundraising help in the Democratic primary process to Obama exclusively. He also hosted two multi-million dollar fundraising events for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2007, one in June in New York City and another in December in San Francisco.

“Guests at a high-dollar fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday were treated to cocktails, dinner and an hour-long business tutorial from billionaire Warren Buffett……[T]he fundraiser…brought in at least $1 million for Clinton…,” wrote the Associated Press of the June New York City fundraiser.

The San Francisco event, on the other hand, drew “about 1,200 people,” with tickets costing “between $100 and $2,300.” The event raised over $1 million for the Clinton for President campaign.

Once Obama won the Democratic Party nomination in May 2008, not long thereafter, Buffett endorsed Obama for President. A couple months later, in July, Buffett hosted a fundraiser for Obama with a required commitment of the individual maximum $28,500 per attendee, according to the New York Times.

Buffett has maintained tight ties with President Obama since his November 2008 victory, and has met with Obama to discuss economic issues on multiple occasions. Additionally, in February 2011, Obama honored Buffett with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At the awards ceremony Obama ironically scoffed, “Buffett doesn’t wear ‘fancy ties’ or drive ‘fancy cars.’ Instead, ‘you see him devoting the vast majority of his wealth to those around the world who are suffering, or sick, or in need of help,’” wrote Bloomberg on the scene of the the medal ceremony.

Most recently, Buffett has hosted Obama campaign fundraisers on September 30 in New York and October 27 in Chicago. Of the New York City Buffett fundraiser, CNN Money wrote, “The event will bring in a pretty penny for the campaign. The base price is $10,000, while a $35,800 donation will buy a VIP reception with Buffett, according to the schedule.”

The Chicago Buffett fundraiser was similar in its extravagance, “with a ticket price of $35,800 per person,” according to Bloomberg, or nearly $10,000 more than the 2010 median American income of $26,364.

Buffett also gave a $30,800 donation to the Democratic National Committee in October 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

From TransCanada Corruption to BNSF Corruption

While DeSmogBlog and many others thoroughly uncovered the corrupt ties between the Obama White House and State Department and the tar sands lobby, the additional Obama-Buffett-industry ties have gotten little play in the media until now.

Next week, we’ll reveal the findings of DeSmogBlog’s investigation into the Union Pacific/U.S. Chamber of Commerce ties to tar sands transport. Lo and behold, industry corruption is prolific on both sides of the political aisle.

Image credit: Pete Souza, Executive Office of the President

With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set to finally enact stricter air pollution standards in accordance with the Clean Air Act and two subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions requiring them to do so, powerful Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are working to make sure that the new standards never see the light of day. The specific measures being targeted are the EPA’s new standards for carbon emissions from power plant smoke stacks.

Fred Upton (R-MI), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, along with Republicans Joe Barton (TX) and Ed Whitfield (KY) sent a letter last week to the White House, demanding that the Obama administration take action to stop the EPA from regulating carbon emissions from power plants.

From their letter:

We are concerned about the regulation’s impact on jobs and the economy, and that it will not comply with all applicable Executive Orders…

In this rulemaking, EPA may be seeking to do precisely what Congress and the American public rejected in the last Congress. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation from the 111^th Congress would have significantly raised the cost of energy and driven US jobs overseas.

We ask for your help in supporting policies that will encourage economic growth and job creation rather than additional costly regulations that will raise new barriers to job creation and burden struggling businesses and families.

The three men certainly know how to include the buzzwords that appeal to American citizens – jobs, economy, raising energy prices – but when put through the truth test, their claims simply don’t hold up. For example, enacting the new standards has the opposite effect on the job market – it would create tens of thousands additional jobs for American workers, not destroy them. The conservative Heritage Foundation has also been beating the drum about regulations raising energy costs, which could actually happen. However, any rate increases would be a corporate decision, not a government decision. The electric energy industry in America currently generates $370.5 billion a year in revenue, with an average revenue of $9.88 per KwH sold. With the national average to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity being around 10 cents, that leaves the company a profit of more than $9 per Kwh of electricity sold, meaning that any rate increases are the result of protecting profits, not because they can’t afford the increase.

So why are these Republicans trying to dismantle the work of the EPA? Simple – they are in the pockets of the dirty energy industry. Fred Upton has received more than $640,000 from electric utilities over his career, and an additional $308,000 from oil and gas. Joe Barton has a combined total of more than $3 million from electric utilities and oil and gas over the course of his career. And Ed Whitfield has gotten more than $600,000 from the two sectors during his tenure in Washington. All of these men have a direct financial stake in the profitability of the dirty energy industry. After all, the more money these companies spend on complying with new standards, the less they have to purchase politicians in Washington.

These latest attacks on the EPA and the environment are not a surprise. In fact, the anti-environmental record of the US Congress over the last year was so awful that Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman, Edward Markey, and Howard Berman prepared a report last December detailing the numerous ways in which the 112^th Congress earned the reputation as the most anti-environmental Congress in history:

House Republicans have repeatedly voted to undermine basic environmental protections that have existed for decades. They have voted to block actions to prevent air pollution; to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of authority to enforce water pollution standards; to halt efforts to address climate change; to stop the Department of the Interior from identifying lands suitable for wilderness designations; to allow oil and gas development off the coasts of Florida, California, and other states opposed to offshore drilling; and to slash funding for the Department of Energy, including funding to support renewable energy and energy efficiency, by more than 80%.

The House of Representatives averaged more than one anti-environmental vote for every day the House was in session in 2011. Of the 770 legislative roll call votes taken in the House this year, 22% – more than one out of every five – were votes to undermine environmental protection. During these roll calls, 94% of Republican members voted for the anti-environment position, while 86% of Democratic members voted for the pro-environment position.

The Environmental Protection Agency was the most popular target of House Republicans. Of the 191 anti-environment votes, 114 targeted EPA; 35 targeted the Department of the Interior; and 31 targeted the Department of Energy.

And that was just in their first year. Imagine what they can accomplish the next round of elections this coming November.

Image credit – MZ ChelleyCredible Blog

The maps don’t mean changes or development can’t take place in Scotland’s wild areas, but they do give local authorities more and better information to base planning decisions on, says Simon Brooks, policy and advice manager for Scottish Natural Heritage. (Credit: U. Leeds)

U. LEEDS (UK) — A new map detailing Scotland’s wild areas is expected to help local authorities make decisions about development and land use.

So far, it hasn’t been a great winter for skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers and folks who depend on a lot of snow for their recreation and livelihood. Some states—Washington and Alaska—and some ski areas like Taos in New Mexico, and Telluride in southern Colorado, have gotten dumped on. But most resorts across the country are hurting for snow and hurting for dollars as a result. (See my colleague Kelly Henderson’s recent blog post on this topic).

Some people have been arguing that this is just a normal fluctuation that comes with El Nino and La Nina weather patterns as well as the position of the jet stream, and that a warming climate has nothing to do with it. You can see evidence of this in the comments in response to Kelly’s blog.

Those weather patterns certainly do effect seasonal precipitation. But what we’re seeing this winter is part of a trend which is the result of more than just the current La Nina weather pattern. It is also the result of a buildup of heat-trapping carbon pollution in the atmosphere. As the US Global Climate Change Research Program states, “Snowpack has reduced over the last 50 years, due to temperature.” See their very helpful map of the trend in decreasing snowfall near bottom of page 42. [wwp- reproduced here:]

NASA scientist James Hansen shows in a recent paper that heat-trapping pollution has loaded the climate dice. Not only are severe heat waves becoming much more likely, but the warmer atmosphere holds more water. In the summer that means heavier down pours when it rains and more extreme droughts when it doesn’t. In winter it means that a larger share of precipitation comes as rain rather than snow, but when it does snow we can expect bigger blizzards. California skiers know how frustrating this can be. Last year big blizzards often made it impossible to get to the slopes, and this year has been patchy at best.

Negative human impact on the climate and winter recreation hasn’t been lost on people like professional snowboarders and skiers. Protect our Winters (POW) was founded by one of the pioneering and most celebrated boarders, Jeremy Jones, after Jones noticed that so many of the places he was riding all over the world had less and less snow as the years have gone by. Jones and fellow advocates Grethen Bleiler (an Olympic silver medalist), and extreme skiing champion Chris Davenport, have taken their argument to Washington, lobbying members of Congress to pass legislation to cut carbon pollution. Big retailers like The North Face, Patagonia, Vans and O’Neill are behind POW–these companies make a lot of money selling winter gear. Less snow and shorter winters mean lower sales.

Other internationally known winter sports athletes, including two time Olympic gold medalist Seth Wescott, are also getting involved in helping boost support for cutting heat-trapping pollution

In a related development, as the Washington Post reported recently, the Department of Agriculture released a new plant hardiness zone map that shows generally warmer low temperatures for winter than the department’s previous map from 1990. The zones cover all 50 states and Puerto Rico and were drawn from the average winter low temperatures between 1976 and 2005 at 8,000 weather stations. The Agriculture Department did say, though, that the new map is not specifically a tool to measure climate change and that many of the boundary shifts are the product of better and more complete data and sophisticated computer algorithms.

As to the trend of overall human-induced warming temperatures, check out the recent New York Times article reporting on a new striking video NASA produced showing how temperatures around the globe have risen since 1880.

While weather does fluctuate year by year, and El Nino/La Nina do have an impact, the long-term trend is less snow and earlier snowmelt. This means more frustration for snow sport enthusiasts and a negative impact on the snow sports industry just as we are seeing in so many parts of the country this winter.

A massive crack extending for 19 miles across the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica was discovered last October by NASA scientists working in the area. The crack is 260 feet wide, 195 feet deep and will eventually extend all the way across the glacier, calving a giant iceberg that will cover about 350 square miles. This image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA’s Terra spacecraft on Nov. 13, 2011.

A snowy Denver neighborhood. Credit: dmooneyham/Instagram.

According to the National Weather Service, Gilpin County, Colorado, has already received 34.5 inches of snow, and 26.5 inches have fallen in Ward, Colorado, with 16 inches in Boulder, a foot in Denver, and 18 inches at Sand Creek Reservoir in Wyoming.

While snow in Colorado isn’t unusual, it’s rare for Denver and eastern Colorado to get a storm of this magnitude during February. Most of Denver’s snow comes during the fall and spring, and this storm may break records for the biggest February snowstorm.

To make the all-time top 10 list of storms in Denver, however, more than 22.1 inches would need to fall, which doesn’t appear likely. According to the Associated Press, the city’s heaviest snowfall on record was 45.7 inches, recorded in 1913.

The storm has forced the closure of large parts of Interstate 70 between eastern Colorado and Denver, and road conditions will worsen in Nebraska as the snow moves in. The storm has also hampered air travel at Denver International Airport, and may have played a role in a Learjet accident at Pueblo Airport, which caused no serious injuries. An avalanche warning was issued east of the Continental Divide, with a high risk of avalanches Friday.

Map showing areas of unusual warm weather (orange/red) and cold (blue/purple) between Jan. 26 and Feb. 1. The circles highlight the cold temperatures in Alaska and Europe. Credit: NOAA/ESRL.

This spring-like storm comes in the midst of a very unusual winter, with much milder than average temperatures and below average snowfall affecting most of the U.S., and extreme cold bottled up in Alaska. Many U.S. cities are on track to set marks for the least snowiest winter on record.

Recently, cold air has spilled into Europe, causing a rare snowfall in Rome, and killing dozens in Ukraine, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe as temperatures dipped well below zero Fahrenheit.

Writing for weather.com, Stu Ostro, a senior meteorologist at The Weather Channel, said that a combination of natural and manmade factors may account for this winter weather pattern, as well as the extreme weather trends seen during the past several winters:

“Weather extremes have existed for as long as there has been weather on Earth. That’s a fundamental reason why as a meteorologist who is routinely observing them I was so skeptical for so long that anything was out of the ordinary.”

“However, increasingly during the past decade or so, the extremes have been so frequent, and so extraordinary, and sometimes even at the same time and in such close geographical proximity to each other, that I have become convinced that something ain’t right. That while there have always been extremes, their nature is changing.”

Press Release 12-019
Global Extinction: Gradual Doom as Bad as Abrupt

In “The Great Dying” 250 million years ago, the end came slowly

The geology of Griesbach Creek in the Arctic tells an ancient tale of slow extinction. Credit and Larger Version

February 3, 2012

The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth’s marine life–and it killed in stages–according to a newly published report.

It shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events.

Thomas Algeo, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati, and 13 colleagues have produced a high-resolution look at the geology of a Permian-Triassic boundary section on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.

Their analysis, published today in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, provides strong evidence that Earth’s biggest mass extinction phased in over hundreds of thousands of years.

About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, Earth almost became a lifeless planet.

Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called “The Great Dying.”

Algeo and colleagues have spent much of the past decade investigating the chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction.

The world revealed by their research is a devastated landscape, barren of vegetation and scarred by erosion from showers of acid rain, huge “dead zones” in the oceans, and runaway greenhouse warming leading to sizzling temperatures.

The evidence that Algeo and his colleagues are looking at points to massive volcanism in Siberia as a factor.

“The scientists relate this extinction to Siberian Traps volcanic eruptions, which likely first affected boreal life through toxic gas and ashes,” said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

The Siberian Traps form a large region of volcanic rock in Siberia. The massive eruptive event which formed the traps, one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth’s geologic history, continued for a million years and spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary.

The term “traps” is derived from the Swedish word for stairs–trappa, or trapp–referring to the step-like hills that form the landscape of the region.

A large portion of western Siberia reveals volcanic deposits up to five kilometers (three miles) thick, covering an area equivalent to the continental United States. The lava flowed where life was most endangered, through a large coal deposit.

“The eruption released lots of methane when it burned through the coal,” Algeo said. “Methane is 30 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

“We’re not sure how long the greenhouse effect lasted, but it seems to have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”

Much of the evidence was washed into the ocean, and Algeo and his colleagues look for it among fossilized marine deposits.

Previous investigations have focused on deposits created by a now vanished ocean known as Tethys, a precursor to the Indian Ocean. Those deposits, in South China particularly, record a sudden extinction at the end of the Permian.

“In shallow marine deposits, the latest Permian mass extinction was generally abrupt,” Algeo said. “Based on such observations, it has been widely inferred that the extinction was a globally synchronous event.”

Recent studies are starting to challenge that view.

Algeo and co-authors focused on rock layers at West Blind Fiord on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.

That location, at the end of the Permian, would have been much closer to the Siberian volcanoes than sites in South China.

The Canadian sedimentary rock layers are 24 meters (almost 80 feet) thick and cross the Permian-Triassic boundary, including the latest Permian mass extinction horizon.

The investigators looked at how the type of rock changed from the bottom to the top. They looked at the chemistry of the rocks and at the fossils contained in the rocks.

They discovered a total die-off of siliceous sponges about 100,000 years earlier than the marine mass extinction event recorded at Tethyan sites.

What appears to have happened, according to Algeo and his colleagues, is that the effects of early Siberian volcanic activity, such as toxic gases and ash, were confined to the northern latitudes.

Only after the eruptions were in full swing did the effects reach the tropical latitudes of the Tethys Ocean.

The research was also supported by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Exobiology Program.

In addition to Algeo, co-authors of the paper are: Charles Henderson, University of Calgary; Brooks Ellwood, Louisiana State University; Harry Rowe, University of Texas at Arlington; Erika Elswick, Indiana University, Bloomington; Steven Bates and Timothy Lyons, University of California, Riverside; James Hower, University of Kentucky; Christina Smith and Barry Maynard, University of Cincinnati; Lindsay Hays and Roger Summons, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James Fulton, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Katherine Freeman, Pennsylvania State University.

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF, cdybas@nsf.gov
Greg Hand, University of Cincinnati, handgl@ucmail.uc.edu

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2012, its budget is $7.0 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives over 50,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes about 11,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards nearly $420 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

By 460 million years ago, CO2 levels were cut in half and the planet experienced a series of “mini ice ages”. Until now, it was thought that the arrival of larger plants and trees consuming the CO2 was the explanation, but a new study pubished in Nature Geoscience offers a new theory: moss. According to researchers, the invasion of land by primitive moss-like plants with voracious appetites for CO2 was a pivotal time in our history and could, indeed, explain the huge changes to our planet.

Credit: Geoff Grant

Traditional weather forecasting elders in northern Kenya’s Marsabit district meet to discuss problems with their predictions following unexpectedly severe drought. ALERTNET/Abjata Khalif

By Abjata Khalif

MARSABIT, Kenya (AlertNet) – Nomadic communities living off the dry terrain of northern Kenya have relied for generations on the powers of village elders to predict the weather. But the divinations of traditional forecasters were confounded by an unexpectedly severe drought in 2011, threatening herders’ livelihoods.

Now pastoralists and meteorological experts are trying to find better ways to cope with regional weather that is increasingly difficult to anticipate – a situation some believe is linked to climate change.

Herders in Marsabit district use traditional weather forecasting systems linked to the seasons and the calendar. These include phenology (the study of plant and animal life cycles), animal behaviours, astrology, studying animal entrails and divining.

Elders detect changes in temperature and humidity from a tree locally known as the marer. They observe the migratory patterns of species of birds, and trace the progress of stars in the sky or look for the presence of particular stars in constellations.

In the belief system of the Marsabit communities, all this information can be used to forecast particular weather events such as long or short periods of rainfall, flash flooding, dry spells, or cold weather that could cause illness in people and livestock. The level of pasture in the region can also be foretold on this basis.

When the elders predict a dry spell, herders may move to other areas with more water and pasture, or even cross the border into Ethiopia, to return once the situation has improved. They may sell their goats, sheep and cattle and buy camels, which are better able to withstand drought. Others slaughter their older cattle and preserve the meat to use as food during the dry period.

FAILURE OF PREDICTED RAINS

Using their traditional forecasting systems, the elders in Marsabit district predicted that rains would fail in the area from October or November 2010 until April 2011, but that after this dry spell the situation would return to normal. This information was relayed to the community through the network of traditional elders in every village in the district.

As anticipated, there were only erratic rains towards the end of 2010, and then a dry period. But the onset of rain predicted for April never occurred, and the situation rapidly turned catastrophic.

With livestock weakened, pasture diminished and the water running dry for people and livestock, thousands of herders crossed into southern Ethiopia in search of water and pasture, while others fled remote villages for towns in search of food and pasture.

Abdi Boru, from the Turbi area of Marsabit, said he lost 23 head of cattle in the drought, leaving him with just two.

“The situation changed to worse from (what the elders) predicted and everybody started losing livestock in high numbers. We could not move them across the border as they were weak, and we watched while they died,” said Boru.

When rains finally came in November 2011, they were so heavy that there was flash flooding, which the traditional forecasters also failed to predict.

Kunu Halakano, an elder in Dambalfanchana village, said he was shocked by the turn of events.

“We have given our community weather information for many years, and that assisted them in understanding what to expect and plan, but now I am seeing something else from what we predicted. We predicted good rains after the dry spell and (yet) the rains failed from April to October,” said Halakano.

The forecaster blamed the failure of the traditional predictions on powers beyond the elders’ knowledge and systems. Elders have met repeatedly to discuss what happened, and some say the problem lay with insufficient attention to signs in the natural world.

Boru Duba, an elder from Dirib Gombo village, said that he had predicted the dry spell from October to April based on the behaviour of cattle and sheep, particularly their lack of interest in mating, strange noises they had been making, and the cattle coiling their tails.

“These scenarios perfectly matched the dry spell or minor droughts that hit the region occasionally from October to April. The last time we saw this minor drought was 10 years ago, and the situation then returned to normal,” said Duba.

But he said that the elders had not properly taken into account other telltale signs, such as the non-appearance of certain migratory birds, and the failure of frogs to make certain noises at the time that the birds would normally arrive.

“Without these signs and behaviours from the birds and frogs, I knew something was amiss in our prediction,” said Duba.

Despite the failure of the forecast, pastoralists’ strong cultural ties to traditional systems of forecasting make them reluctant to stop believing in them.

“I still respect the traditional weather system and I will always follow (the elders’) advice. They have offered us valuable weather information during the worst drought periods like that the ones in 1984, 1992 and 2005, and their prediction was right,” said Abdi Boru.

“They have already told us the problem that caused the wrong prediction and I hope it will never happen again,” he added.

INTEGRATING PREDICTION

Development organisations within Marsabit district recognise that the belief in traditional systems is unlikely to be abandoned. In response, they are urging relevant agencies to team up with local elders in order to integrate their knowledge with current early warning systems that can produce accurate and timely information.

Kenya’s ministry overseeing the development of the north and other arid lands is now working with the country’s meteorological department to map the traditional system of weather forecasting with a view to mainstreaming it with the department’s modern system.

Integrated weather forecasts can be broadcast to the pastoralist communities through community radio in local languages, providing consistent information to each village. Officials believe that this approach will work as long as it does not downplay the traditional systems and ensures that their data are respected and reflected in the forecasting.

Tari Konso of Pastoralist Development Agencies, a local non-governmental organisation, said, “Such integrated collaboration could save lives, prevent displacements, save herds of livestock from decimation and reduce suffering to manageable levels.”

Abjata Khalif is a freelance journalist, based in Wajir, Kenya, with an interest in climate change issues.

Chile – January 9th, 2011

Visible at the center of this orthorectified image is Maipo, a stratovolcano in the Andes, lying on the border between Argentina and Chile. It is located 90 km south of Tupungato and about 100 km southeast of Santiago.

Maipo retains a symmetrical, conical volcanic shape, unlike many of the other nearby peaks, making it the best known peak in the region, though it is not the highest. (Nearby Castillo is 5,485 m high.) Maipo is also almost the southernmost 5,000 metre peak in the Andes. (That honor goes to Sosneado, about 50 km to the south).

Maipo is located within the Diamante Caldera, a feature of about 15 km by 20 km size that is about one-half million years old. It rises about 1,900 m (6,230 ft) above the floor of the caldera. Immediately to the east of the peak, on the eastern side of the caldera floor, is Laguna del Diamante, a picturesque lake that formed when lava flows blocked drainage channels from the caldera in 1826. The lake covers a surface area of about 14.1 km² and is one of the largest freshwater resources in the Province.

Lillgrund Wind Farm's wind turbines in the Sound near Copenhagen and Malmö. Wikipedia.

Today the Obama administration moved forward with plans to develop the enormous offshore wind energy resources along the Mid-Atlantic coast, using a “Smart for the Start” approach designed to expedite the siting process while incorporating strong environmental protections.

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior Department, (DOI), and the head of DOI’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, joined Governor O’Malley of Maryland in Baltimore to announce the latest developments.

The administration released plans for developing waters off New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. Offshore wind power could create tens of thousands of jobs and generate power for millions of homes in the region.

Specifically, the Department of Interior approved “wind energy areas” off the coasts of these states where projects can move through the regulatory approval process more quickly, as well as model lease language and environmental review documents for the initial site assessment process, which is the first step in developing an offshore wind project.

The smart-from-the-start approach means taking into account the need to protect ocean ecosystems, wildlife and existing human uses in order to site things where they make the most sense. This is the kind of progress anticipated to increase as the administration implements the National Ocean Policy created by the President in 2010.

Currently, the process for getting offshore wind power off the ground in this country takes far too long. The projected timeline for approval of an offshore wind project is currently 7-9 years, far longer than the typical siting process for a fossil-fuel fired power plant (generally 2 -3 years). It’s a crying shame that that it has taken so long to get clean, homegrown offshore wind turbines up and running while fossil-fuel power plants, with their plethora of health and environmental impacts, can be green-lighted in a fraction of the time.

And it’s one of several reasons why the United States is lagging behind the rest of the world in developing its offshore wind resources. In Europe, some 53 offshore wind projects, totally almost 3,800 MW of capacity, are producing clean renewable energy off the coasts of 10 European countries, with nine more major offshore wind projects under construction. In China, the country’s first offshore wind project has been built, with more underway.

In stark contrast, the United States has approved a grand total of one offshore wind project, and has zero in operation.  Cape Wind – the nation’s first-approved project, located in Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound — illustrates this problem clearly. The Cape Wind approval process took a decade, and project’s construction has still not begun, due to financing challenges and litigation launched by opponents of the projects. NRDC continues to be a strong supporter of the Cape Wind project, and has joined the legal battles as a “friend of the court” to support DOI and Cape Wind, together with our partners at the Conservation Law Foundation and Mass Audubon. We need to speed up the timeline for similar projects in the future if we want to get serious about advancing this promising source of renewable technology in America.

Today’s announcement gives us hope that the United States will now be able to develop our enormous offshore wind resources more quickly – and deliver the enormous economic, environmental and public health benefits that come with them. Already, a number of projects appear poised to move forward in the near future, including Deepwater Wind’s project in Rhode Island state waters, and Fishermen Energy’s project off Atlantic City in New Jersey. We need to scale up well-sited offshore wind projects throughout the East Coast in a sustainable way as soon as possible.

We’ll be carefully reviewing the details of DOI’s environmental review and model lease documents announced today to ensure that appropriate environmental protections and mitigation measures have been incorporated. NRDC will continue to use every opportunity to advocate for smart siting of offshore wind projects.

In many areas, this tame winter has been unusual but not unheard of. For example, in the Northeast, the winter has been one of the warmest and least snowy on record, but it has been warmer during past winters. (The Weather Channel has a nice comparison between snow cover charts from February 2011 vs. 2012.)

While winter temperatures have been increasing, on average, due to global warming, the mild winter this year is likely mainly due to natural climate variability, including a La Niña event in the Pacific Ocean and the orientation of the upper air jet stream.

Temperatures in the Northeast have averaged at least 5°F above average since December, with very little snow cover, according to Art DeGaetano, a Cornell University climatologist and the director of the Northeast Regional Climate Center.

“Although December 2011 and January 2012 have been warm, you do not have to go back too far to find a warmer period. The early winter of 2001-02 was the warmest at many Northeast U.S. stations. Over a longer time frame, the early winter of 1931-32 stands out as the warmest at the majority of Northeast U.S. sites,” DeGaetano said in a press release.

The same is true in other parts of the country, although in select locations this winter may rank among the top 10 warmest on record, depending on how mild February turns out to be. In normally frigid Minneapolis-St. Paul, for example, January featured temperatures that were 8°F above average. And across the U.S., January snow cover was the 3rd lowest on average, according to NOAA (H/T Paul Douglas).

Northeast temperature departures from average from Dec. 1 through Jan. 29. Credit: NERCC.

Scientists say the mild winter will reverberate throughout ecosystems during Spring, with bigger deer populations, thanks to more accessible vegetation for them to feed on throughout the winter. David W. Wolfe, a Cornell professor of plant and soil ecology, said the lack of severe cold “will benefit some insect pests and invasive weeds like kudzu.”

“On the positive side, if you are a farmer or gardener experimenting with crops or ornamentals that sometimes can’t survive a severe winter, this will be a good year for you,” he said. Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture released new maps of plant hardiness zones, indicating a northward shift has taken place, which reflects a warmer climate. Although the Agriculture Department did not characterize the shift as being due to climate change, the movement of the hardiness zones is consistent with climate change projections for the U.S..

The mild winter may also benefit insects such as mosquitos and ticks. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, is a professor of entomology and a specialist with the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program, “This year, lots and lots of hungry ticks will emerge even on warm winter days. I anticipate the mosquito problems we normally see to be much more intense and begin earlier than usual if the weather continues to be mild. Even the fleas have had a boost so far this winter and many people are complaining about flea problems right now, in the middle of winter.”

Mild temperatures during the past week have set records from the Central Plains to the East Coast. New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, for example, reached 64°F on Feb. 1, breaking the old record of 62°F set in 1989.

So far this winter, Alaska has been the only U.S. state that has seen consistently severe cold weather.

1)     She has little patience for people who are wasteful (This applies to many things; leftover food, lights left on etc.)

2)     And more importantly: What Gramma says, goes. (If you forget this rule, you might get a friendly ‘reminder’ pinch.)

Now don’t get me wrong – my Gramma is a caring, loving, kind person (the best Gramma, I would argue) but she certainly is firm.

My actual Gramma, Marie.  (The best, right?)

So when I saw the WWF National Sweater Day reminder video from Granny Ruth, I was immediately reminded of my Gramma. She and Ruth would probably get along quite well if they ever met.

VIDEO: National Sweater Day: Ruth

And I’m sure they’d agree that on February 9 -National Sweater Day – granddaughters and grandsons nationwide should turn down their thermostats a degree or two and put on a sweater (bonus points if it’s a Gramma-knitted original). Heck, why not leave the thermostat down all the time?

If not only to look fashionable in your sweaters, do it to save some money and help conserve energy.

Helpful Hints:

• -You can easily save energy in the winter by setting the thermostat to 68°F while you’re awake and setting it lower while you’re asleep or away from home. By turning your thermostat back 10°–15° for 8 hours, you can save about 5%–15% a year on your heating bill—a savings of as much as 1% for each degree if the setback period is eight hours long.

• -Open the drapes or blinds on sunny days and bask in the ‘free’ heat. Remember to close the drapes or blinds when the sun sets, to hold in the warmth.

Happy National Sweater Day, however you will be celebrating!

Dead cattle litter a field at Villa Minetti in the Argentine province of Santa Fe. Photo: Marcelo Banchi, Argentina Agrarian Federation

By Ana Belluscio

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AlertNet) – For almost two months, an intense drought has been damaging crops in Argentina, especially corn and soy, threatening the economic and food security of a country where agriculture and livestock account for approximately 10 percent of GDP.

German Cuadrada rents 220 hectares (540 acres) of land in Pozo del Molle, Cordoba province, where he grows maize and soybeans. Since December he has lost his entire maize crop and part of his soybeans.

“If we don’t receive a 100-150 mm (4-6 inches) rainfall within the next days we are not going to make it,” he said.

According to specialists, the drought is the consequence of a recent La Nina episode – the cooling of the surface temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that influences wind and rainfall.

In Argentina, La Nina causes rainfall below normal levels, coupled with higher than average temperatures, especially during December and January, said Pablo Mercuri, director of the Institute of Weather and Water of the National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA).

Scientists are working to determine whether there is a correlation between the higher incidence of La Nina events in recent decades and climate change.

WORSENING DROUGHT

Historical records show that La Nina-induced droughts formerly were not to be as long or severe as today’s, said Lucas di Pietro Paolo, climate change adaptation coordinator at the government’s Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development.

Although investigations are incomplete, Mercuri and his team have noted an increasing number of extreme climate events occurring in the country along with high climatic variability compared to recent decades. Both of these parameters are associated with climate change, the scientists say.

“Perhaps there is no rain for 30 or 40 days and suddenly 140 mm of rain in one afternoon” in a particular area, Mercuri said. Prolonged drought, intense frost and floods are also more frequent.

The current drought is affecting the centre and northeast of the country, areas traditionally associated with agriculture and cattle. Agrarian associations report up to 60 percent losses in maize crops due to the drought, and say that up to 30 percent of soybean production may be compromised if rainfall does not arrive soon.

The current drought “created a water stress situation very rapidly, affecting crops undergoing their maximum demand for water,” explained Mercuri.

December’s rainfall was at a historical low, according to Mercuri, and this combined with high temperatures led to a significant evaporation of water from the soil and from crops.

In Cordoba, Cuadrada says that he may go bankrupt without economic support from the government. Like most small-scale farmers, he relies on the revenue from seasonal crops to pay the rent on his land and to buy seeds for his next crop.

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT PAYMENTS

To alleviate the situation, the national government has designated 500 million pesos ($115 million) to help small producers. According to economic consultants Finsoport, the drought has so far caused an 11 percent reduction in grain crops this season, and over $1 billion of losses in crops and taxes.

But di Pietro Paolo believes that apart from palliatives for the current situation, long-term solutions must be found to the possible effects of climate change, which he says are likely to increase.

“We have to generate tools to seriously evaluate what is happening” to the climate, he said.

In December 2011 the national government presented the second phase of its National Strategy in Climate Change. The project involves aims to create a unified system, database and resource centre to coordinate the efforts of government ministries and agencies addressing problems related to climate change.

Projects in recent years have mostly been related to sustainable soil management and combating desertification, water shortages and climate variability. In addition, laws were passed to protect native forest and glaciers in 2007 and 2010, respectively.

Argentina recently applied to the Kyoto Protocol’s Adaptation Fund to implement a $4 million project to manage the water and weather impact of climate change in agricultural production in the most affected areas.

Di Pietro Paolo hopes this new project will “start generating good practices and experiences in management of the hydro-meteorological impact on livestock and agriculture,” in order to minimize the effects of possible new droughts or climate events.

Ana Belluscio is an Argentine journalist who covers environmental and science issues.

Public release date: 1-Feb-2012

Contact: David DeFusco
david.defusco@yale.edu
Yale University

From his vantage point high above the earth in the International Space Station, Astronaut Ed Lu captured this broad view of Hurricane Isabel. The image, ISS007-E-14750, was taken with a 50 mm lens on a digital camera. Wikipedia.

Tropical cyclones will cause $109 billion in damages by 2100, according to Yale and MIT researchers in a paper published in Nature Climate Change.

That figure represents an increased vulnerability from population and especially economic growth, as well as the effects of climate change. Greater vulnerability to cyclones is expected to increase global tropical damage to $56 billion by 2100—double the current damage—from the current rate of $26 billion per year if the present climate remains stable.

Climate change is predicted to add another $53 billion of damages. The damage caused by climate change is equal to 0.01 percent of GDP in 2100.

The United States and China will be hardest hit, incurring $25 billion and $15 billion of the additional damages from climate change, respectively, amounting to 75 percent of the global damages caused by climate change. Small islands, especially in the Caribbean, will also be hit hard, suffering the highest damages per unit of GDP.

The research reveals that more intense storms will become more frequent with climate change. “The biggest storms cause most of the damage,” said Robert Mendelsohn, the lead economist on the project. “With the present climate, almost 93 percent of tropical cyclone damage is caused by only 10 percent of the storms. Warming will increase the frequency of these high-intensity storms at least in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean basins, causing most of the increase in damage.”

The authors based their estimates on a future global population of 9 billion and an annual increase of approximately 3 percent in gross world product until 2100. “More people making a lot more income will put more capital in harm’s way,” he said.

Tropical cyclones today cause $26 billion in global damages, which is 4 percent of gross world product. North America and East Asia account for 88 percent of these damages, because these regions have powerful storms and well-developed coastlines.

The future economic damage from tropical cyclones will be less than $1 billion a year in Europe and South America because there are few storms there, and the damage in Africa will be low because, Mendelsohn said, there is “relatively little in harm’s way.” Damages in Asia and Central America are expected to grow rapidly in concert with high economic growth. The Caribbean-Central America region will have the highest damage per unit of gross domestic product—37 percent.

“When you calculate damages as a fraction of GDP, island nations are hit disproportionately hard,” he said.

###

The paper, “The Impact of Climate Change on Global Tropical Cyclone Damage,” is available at http://www.nature.com. It used a tropical cyclone integrated assessment model that was developed with Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT. “The paper demonstrates how to integrate the atmospheric science of tropical cyclones and economics,” said Emanuel.

The tropical cyclone model is used in conjunction with climate models to predict how the frequency, intensity and location of tropical cyclones change in the seven ocean basins of the world. The paths of 17,000 synthetic storms are followed until they strike land. The authors used historical data to estimate the damages caused by the intensity of each cyclone and what was in harm’s way. The paper revealed that minimum barometric pressure predicts damages more accurately than maximum wind speed.

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

No big decision is made overnight.  And many of the biggest take years to come together…  before finally, at a critical moment, all of the necessary pieces fall into place.

That is what is happening in the discussion around Asian carp and other invasive species that use the Chicago waterway system as a highway to move between this continent’s two greatest fresh water systems:  the Great Lakes and the vast inland network of the Mississippi River.  We have known for over a decade that silver and bighead carp are on a warpath toward our Lake Michigan fisheries, and while I have previously called the response to date a “slow-motion tragedy,” we still have a unique opportunity to do something about this biological invasion before it happens.

And rarely has a solution so straightforward presented itself:  separate the ecosystems by restoring the natural divide that once maintained their biological integrity.

A decade ago, the City of Chicago looked at the invasive species issue and suggested that course of action. Our colleagues at the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Great Lakes Fishery Commission followed up with a 2008 report that recommended that work move forward.  And two years ago, in response to some truly crazy rhetoric, NRDC released a high-profile report looking at where barriers could be placed in the Chicago River system to have the least impact on the region’s fading water infrastructure—offering some interesting strategies to revitalize our water infrastructure in the process.  Last year, we built on that further, working with MacArthur genius architect Jeanne Gang on her spectacular book re-imagining the Chicago River, Reverse Effect.

Today is the next chapter in this iterative process. The Great Lakes Commission and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Cities Initiative have released a new, in-depth analysis of the issue. Their $2 million study comes to much the same conclusions as we and other groups have made: separation is not only doable but necessary and can be a vehicle to fixing much of what ails the Chicago River’s sewage, flooding and transportation issues if the proper resources are marshaled.  And I couldn’t help but notice immediately the endorsements of Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel at the front of the report, calling it “a critical step forward” that “reflects an emerging vision for Chicago’s waterways, a future that includes cleaner water, less flooding and more efficient transportation.”

According to the Commission and the Cities Initiative – whose membership includes all eight Great Lakes States and dozens of cities along the Great Lakes, including the City of Chicago – the cost of separation could be as low as less than $1 per month, or $11 annually, if spread across the Great Lakes region, while providing billions of dollars of long-term savings from all of the costs of dealing with invasive species that we would avoid. This is an important report that refocuses the laborious anti-Asian carp efforts that have so far been heavy on short-term gimmicks towards a real and long-term solution for the larger invasive species.  Virtual fences and species-specific poisonings simply cannot stop all the plants, tiny animals and tinier viruses that make up the rogue’s gallery of aquatic nuisance species highlighted by the Army Corps of Engineers as dangers for traversing Chicago’s waterways.

And while no big decision is made overnight, there is no reason to dither on the big ones either.

This report continues the drumbeat for decisive action. Unfortunately, while consensus on the need to separate the waterways is growing two issues stand in the way of a timely solution to stop the invasions. First, while any solution must address the issues of the region’s shrinking transportation sector, the focus on preserving the system as it exists today, rather than looking at how it can bring deeper commercial connections is counter-productive.  More damaging is the Army Corps’ go-slow approach to studying the problem, which will not offer even a final report until at least 2015 (that is before any of the public input processes can begin—let alone construction!). Most scientists I have spoken with worry that there just isn’t time for that sort of delay.

The GLC has done a great job moving the ball ever further in the battle to protect the Great Lakes. My hope is that this report is the next salvo that pushes our representatives in Washington, DC to move the much ballyhooed “Stop Asian Carp Act,” which has been advanced by a who’s who of Great Lakes Senators and Representatives including Senators Durbin of Illinois and Stabenow of Michigan. That bill would force the Corps to move more quickly, but unfortunately, despite broad support in the region, it has been stuck for years in a dysfunctional Congress.

I am cautiously optimistic that this new study by the Great Lakes states and cities will help bring all the pieces together and show that separation not only can be done, but that it must be done if we want to safeguard if the Great Lakes are to be protected.  We need a smart decision here — and we need it soon — before it’s too late.

Asian Carp = Invasive Species image by jmogs via Flickr

Jumanne Kikumbi, a Rufiji delta village chairman, says farmers have lived in the region’s mangrove forests for decades. ALERTNET/Kizito Makoye

By Kizito Makoye

RUFIJI, Tanzania (AlertNet) – Thousands of farmers in Tanzania’s Rufiji Delta have been accused of destroying mangroves as they search for new land to grow their rice crops, which are being damaged by salt-water intrusion.

The salt water, pushed inland by surging tides from the Indian Ocean, is damaging fields of rice seedlings. Farmers in several villages in the river basin, which sprawls across the east African nation’s southern half, have seen yields fall as a result.

With thousands of hectares affected by saline intrusion, it is becoming harder for the inhabitants of Salale ward to earn a living from rice cultivation, which has been the mainstay of the local economy.

“It is the poor who suffer,” said Henri Laswai, an agricultural expert at Sokoine University in Morogogo. He attributed the problem to worsening climate change impacts.

Scientists have linked the growing problem of saltwater intrusion at least partially with climate change, as sea levels rise. Higher seas inundate wetlands and other low-lying lands, intensify flooding, and increase the salinity of rivers and groundwater tables, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In the Rufiji Delta, farmers have been moving away from the increasingly salty rivers, where most paddy fields are located, further out into the delta in search of fresh water and better land. But some are encroaching on protected mangrove swamps in their search for new, fertile fields.

The scramble for land has created conflict between Rufiji residents and government authorities who want to stop local people invading protected sites.

Saline intrusion has forced farmers in Nyamisati village in Salale ward, around 250 km from Dar es Salaam, to move to areas such as Bunga and Mchinga where the soil is still very fertile.

YIELDS DOWN A THIRD

“We have experienced one of the lowest crop yields in our history this year. Imagine – one hectare hardly gives you 20 bags of rice these days, whereas we used to get up to 30 bags of rice before,” said 76-year-old Swaleh Jongo, a farmer in Nyamisati. “This is caused by non other than salt water, which is harming our crops.”

The situation has forced farmers to clear some mangrove trees in the delta to find uncontaminated land where they can plant rice seedlings, according to Jongo.

“If we don’t do this, how do you think we are going to feed our families?” he asked.

Most households in Salale that have relocated their fields have to travel long distances to the new paddy fields they have carved out of the mangrove forest. As a result, they often build temporary accommodation in which they stay during the main farming season.

Government officials are concerned about the intrusion and increasing demand for fresh plots, saying that random forest clearing by farmers is harming the conservation of local biodiversity. Such clearing also contributes to climate-changing carbon emissions, releasing carbon stored in forests.

In the past two to three decades, over 5,000 hectares of Rufiji mangrove forest have been lost to rice cultivation, according to a recent remote-sensing study conducted by environmental group World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in collaboration with Sokoine University.

“We are trying to educate Rufiji dwellers on the need to protect the forest around them – that is why we encourage them to replant mangrove trees in their paddy fields,” said Zacharia Kitale of the donor-funded Mangrove Management Project (MMP), run by the Ministry of Tourism and Natural Resources.

EVICTION CONTROVERSY

Last October, the MMP conducted a five-day eviction exercise in a bid to protect the mangrove forests from further destruction due to increasing human activity.

The decision to remove paddy farmers from protected land in the mangrove forests caused an uproar. Villagers whose temporary huts were set ablaze argued that they and their ancestors had used and at times lived in the forest for generations.

The row has cast questions over plans to support community management of the region’s mangrove forests under the U.N.-backed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) scheme, which would link forest protection efforts with global carbon markets.

In November, WWF’s marine and climate change advisor, Jason Rubens, told Tanzania’s Business Standard newspaper that the land controversy could hamper such work in the Rufiji Delta as communities might suspect that any mangrove management initiative is part of a strategy to evict them from the delta.

Many farmers seem oblivious of the 2002 Forest Act that prohibits human activities in protected forests, including Rufiji, parts of which form an internationally recognised reserve. But other farmers say they follow the restrictions and are not contravening the rules.

Saidi Ali, who has a 10-hectare (25 acre) farm in the delta, defends the decision by local people to cultivate rice in unprotected forest zones.

“We respect the government,” he said. “That is why no one has dared to touch those areas we traditionally know are protected forests, like Kikale and Msindaji. But (that does not include) the whole of Rufiji.”

Changing weather patterns – including reduced rainfall in higher altitude zones – are also shrinking the area of the delta land suitable for cultivation, according to Ali. Paje, Ngazini and other higher-altitude locations, he said, had been traditional rice-growing places for centuries until recent decades.

“These days nobody goes there because when you plant rice, seedlings die from shortage of water and poor soils,” he said.

SPREADING PROBLEM

The situation is likely to get worse. Officials from the state-run Rufiji Basin Development Authority (RUBADA) expect salt-water intrusion to damage more land in the valley.

“We have done many studies, and they have proved that this problem will certainly spread, threatening our food security,” explained its chief executive Aloyce Masanja.

More than 90 percent of households in the Rufiji Delta and its floodplain – which have a combined population of more than 150,000 – make their living from rice farming.

They supplement their income with fishing and extraction of wetland products, such as weeds for making baskets. But in the past decade, population growth and unsustainable resource use, including cutting down trees for fuel wood and charcoal, is putting these activities at risk too.

Villagers fear their dwindling rice yields, coupled with government disruption of their forest farming activities, will force many to depend on food handouts this season.

“We invested massively in rice, but because of salt water, our fields are turning red,” said Jummanne Mwalekwa, a farmer in Nyamisati. “We can barely see the salt content in the soil, yet there is nothing we can do but to vacate the fields… Now the government says we have invaded its forests. Where can we go?”

Since the furore over the evictions, the government has eased its law enforcement efforts – at least for the time being – and is allowing farmers in the mangrove forests to continue their activities while it collects more data on their environmental impact.

MMP director Zawadi Mbwambo is hopeful that preliminary studies for forest protection projects will continue after the dispute is sorted out – especially given that the Norwegian government has already injected around $5 million to support local efforts to tackle climate change.

Kizito Makoye is a journalist based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. This story is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

University of Colorado Boulder Professor Gifford Miller is shown here collecting dead plant samples from beneath a Baffin Island ice cap. A new study led by Miller indicates the Little Ice Age began roughly A.D. 1275 and was triggered repeated, explosive volcanism that cooled the atmosphere.

A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study appears to answer contentious questions about the onset and cause of Earth’s Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures that began after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century. According to the new study, the Little Ice Age began abruptly between A.D. 1275 and 1300, triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism and sustained by a self- perpetuating sea ice-ocean feedback system in the North Atlantic Ocean, according to CU-Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, who led the study. The primary evidence comes from radiocarbon dates from dead vegetation emerging from rapidly melting icecaps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, combined with ice and sediment core data from the poles and Iceland and from sea ice climate model simulations, said Miller.

While scientific estimates regarding the onset of the Little Ice Age range from the 13th century to the 16th century, there is little consensus, said Miller. There is evidence the Little Ice Age affected places as far away as South America and China, although it was particularly evident in northern Europe. Advancing glaciers in mountain valleys destroyed towns, and famous paintings from the period depict people ice skating on the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, waterways that were ice-free in winter before and after the Little Ice Age.

“The dominant way scientists have defined the Little Ice Age is by the expansion of big valley glaciers in the Alps and in Norway,” said Miller. “But the time it took for European glaciers to advance far enough to demolish villages would have been long after the onset of the cold period,” said Miller, a fellow at CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Most scientists think the Little Ice Age was caused either by decreased summer solar radiation, erupting volcanoes that cooled the planet by ejecting shiny aerosol particles that reflected sunlight back into space, or a combination of both, said Miller.

The new study suggests that the onset of the Little Ice Age was caused by an unusual, 50-year-long episode of four massive tropical volcanic eruptions. Climate models used in the new study showed that the persistence of cold summers following the eruptions is best explained by a sea ice-ocean feedback system originating in the North Atlantic Ocean.

“This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age,” said Miller. “We also have provided an understandable climate feedback system that explains how this cold period could be sustained for a long period of time. If the climate system is hit again and again by cold conditions over a relatively short period — in this case, from volcanic eruptions — there appears to be a cumulative cooling effect.”

A paper on the subject is being published Jan. 31 in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. The paper was authored by scientists and students from CU-Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the University of Iceland, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Icelandic Science Foundation.

As part of the study, Miller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated roughly 150 samples of dead plant material with roots intact collected from beneath receding ice margins of ice caps on Baffin Island. There was a large cluster of “kill dates” between A.D. 1275 and 1300, indicating the plants had been frozen and engulfed by ice during a relatively sudden event.

Both low-lying and higher altitude plants all died at roughly the same time, indicating the onset of the Little Ice Age on Baffin Island — the fifth largest island in the world — was abrupt. The team saw a second spike in plant kill dates at about A.D. 1450, indicating the quick onset of a second major cooling event.

To broaden the study, the team analyzed sediment cores from a glacial lake linked to the 367-square-mile Langjökull ice cap in the central highlands of Iceland that reaches nearly a mile high. The annual layers in the cores — which can be reliably dated by using tephra deposits from known historic volcanic eruptions on Iceland going back more than 1,000 years — suddenly became thicker in the late 13th century and again in the 15th century due to increased erosion caused by the expansion of the ice cap as the climate cooled, he said.

“That showed us the signal we got from Baffin Island was not just a local signal, it was a North Atlantic signal,” said Miller. “This gave us a great deal more confidence that there was a major perturbation to the Northern Hemisphere climate near the end of the 13th century.” Average summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere did not return to those of the Middle Ages until the 20th century, and the temperatures of the Middle Ages are now exceeded in many areas, he said.

The team used the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model to test the effects of volcanic cooling on Arctic sea ice extent and mass. The model, which simulated various sea ice conditions from about A.D. 1150-1700, showed several large, closely spaced eruptions could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to trigger Arctic sea ice growth.

The models showed sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. This weakened heat transport back to the Arctic and creating a self-sustaining feedback system on the sea ice long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided, he said.

“Our simulations showed that the volcanic eruptions may have had a profound cooling effect,” says NCAR scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner, a co-author of the study. “The eruptions could have triggered a chain reaction, affecting sea ice and ocean currents in a way that lowered temperatures for centuries.”

The researchers set the solar radiation at a constant level in the climate models, and Miller said the Little Ice Age likely would have occurred without decreased summer solar radiation at the time. “Estimates of the sun’s variability over time are getting smaller, it’s now thought by some scientists to have varied little more in the last millennia than during a standard 11-year solar cycle,” he said.

One of the primary questions pertaining to the Little Ice Age is how unusual the warming of Earth is today, he said. A previous study led by Miller in 2008 on Baffin Island indicated temperatures today are the warmest in at least 2,000 years.

Other co-authors on the paper include CU-Boulder’s Yafang Zhong, Darren Larsen, Kurt Refsnider, Scott Lehman and Chance Anderson, NCAR’s Marika Holland and David Bailey, the University of Iceland’s Áslaug Geirsdóttir, Helgi Bjornsson and Darren Larsen, UC-Irvine’s John Southon and the University of Edinburgh’s Thorvaldur Thordarson. Larsen is doctoral student jointly at CU-Boulder and the University of Iceland.

Air pollution plays a significant role in reducing global crop productivity, finds a new study that shows the negative impacts of air pollution on crops may have to be addressed at an international level rather than through local air quality policies alone. (Credit: iStockphoto)

U. LEEDS (UK) — Air pollution from North America causes Europe to lose 1.2 million tons of wheat a year, a new study shows.

Satellite photo of the Tasman Sea. Wikipedia.

Oceanographers have identified a series of ocean hotspots around the world generated by strengthening wind systems that have driven oceanic currents, including the East Australian Current, polewards beyond their known boundaries. The hotspots have formed alongside ocean currents that wash the east coast of the major continents and their warming proceeds at a rate far exceeding the average rate of ocean surface warming, according to an international science team whose work was recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Paper co-author, CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai, said that while the finding has local ecological implications in the region surrounding the hotspots, the major influence is upon the ocean’s ability to take up heat and carbon from the atmosphere.

In Australia’s case, scientists report intensifying east-west winds at high latitudes (45º-55ºS) pushing southward and speeding up the gyre or swirl of currents circulating in the South Pacific, extending from South America to the Australian coast. The resulting changes in ocean circulation patterns have pushed the East Australian Current around 350 kilometres further south, with temperatures east of Tasmania as much as two degrees warmer than they were 60 years ago.

“We would expect natural change in the oceans over decades or centuries but change with such elevated sea surface temperatures in a growing number of locations and in a synchronised manner was definitely not expected,” said CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai.

“Detecting these changes has been hindered by limited observations but with a combination of multi-national ocean watch systems and computer simulations we have been able to reconstruct an ocean history in which warming over the past century is 2-3 times faster than the global average ocean warming rate,” says Dr Cai, a climate scientist at CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Research Flagship.

The changes are characterised by a combination of currents pushing nearer to the polar regions and intensify with systematic changes of wind over both hemispheres, attributed to increasing greenhouse gases.

Dr Cai said the increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been the major driver of the surface warming of Earth over the 20th century. This is projected to continue.

He said the research points to the need for a long-term monitoring network of the western boundary currents. In March next year, Australian scientists plan to deploy a series of moored ocean sensors across the East Australian Current to observe change season-to-season and year-to-year.

Lead author of the paper was Dr Lixin Wu, of the Ocean University of China, with contributing authors from five countries, many of whom are members of the Pacific Ocean Panel working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation.

The research was partly funded by a grant from the Australian Climate Change Science Program supported by the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

COMMENTARY
By Geoff Grant
Here’s a Monday morning conversation starter for the casual sports fan: did global warming cause Sidney Crosby’s concussion?

No, the National Hockey League’s biggest star did not sustain a head injury by slipping and falling on receding polar ice. But he is the victim of the same kind of resistance to science that has made climate change such an accelerating and intractable problem.

In hockey and other contact sports, doctors have been warning for years about the dangers of concussions, as more and more research shows how dangerous they are, how remarkably easy they are sustained, how much damage they can do to players’ brains over the course of their lives. But the NHL has done almost nothing until recently to begin preventing them. And even in taking the tiny steps that they have – short suspensions for players delivering blatant, intentional hits to the head from the blind side of an unsuspecting opponent – they do not accept the considerable body of science that says so many of these players will experience unnatural cognitive decline as they age.

Crosby — and if you’re not a hockey fan, think Albert Einstein on skates — has been sidelined for much of the past year, including sitting out Sunday’s All-Star Game in Ottawa. Despite missing it’s most marketable star for an agonizingly long stretch, the league has been slow to try to reduce the risk of brain trauma for its players. Alarmed experts and many fans have called for the elimination of all hits to the head, rules common in international hockey, but they have been met with stubborn official resistance. The NHL’s, ahem, brain trust does not believe the game needs fundamental change.

Worse, evidence has emerged that another of the NHL’s traditions — fighting — has taken a heavy toll on its practitioners’ brains. Three notable enforcers died in the summer of 2011, all under circumstances that could be linked to the head trauma that was a part of their jobs. As the New York Times’ John Branch detailed in a comprehensive three-part series, one of the league’s most fearsome fighters, Derek Boogaard, had his brain examined by researchers at Boston University after he died of a drug overdose. He was found to have advanced CTE, a disease closely related to Alzheimer’s and believed to be caused by repeated head trauma. Unfortunately, it is not something that can be diagnosed until after death. Boogard was the fourth hockey player examined by the BU researchers and at 29, by far the youngest. All four had CTE. The center has been studying football players as well, 19 in all, and 18 had CTE.

The NHL’s response to its bleak summer news was more denial. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman called the research “preliminary” and defended fighting on the grounds that fans like it. To Bettman, and the team owners for whom he works, fans’ entertainment is higher on the league’s priority list than the health of its players’ brains. They don’t want to change the game and risk affecting its popularity and thus, their bottom line.

The parallels to the battleground that is climate change are startling from front to back. There is the science that people feel free to discount, even as evidence mounts pointing inexorably in one direction. There is the economic resistance to change, an unwillingness to consider a new business model. There is the inability to grasp consequences far down the road, even as cues emerge that the consequences are coming sooner than expected.

That resistance is all too familiar to climate change. Although climate science has evolved to the point where scientists are virtually certain that humans are causing the warming of the planet and there is every reason to believe that at least some potentially cataclysmic effects will result from climate change, public policy has changed little. It’s been 14 years since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, and the only thing different today is that greenhouse gas emissions have increased to even more alarming levels.

Even among politicians and business leaders who do grasp and appreciate the risks, there has been little momentum summoned for the real changes needed to keep climate change from becoming catastrophic. There appears to be a mysterious tipping point we have not yet reached when the dangers are alarming enough for society to loosen its allegiance to the atmosphere-choking status quo.

With climate, as with hockey, people seem to be waiting for the definitive A-leads-to-B line to be drawn for them. But just as it’s impossible to link one hurricane in Florida to climate change, doctors cannot say with absolute certainty that any one hit, or even any one concussion, leads to long-term brain damage and functional decline. In climatology as in medicine, science is rarely an open-and-shut case. Certainties reside in mathematics, not science. And waiting for scientific certainty when lives are on the line almost always has a very high cost.

As Ken Dryden, a Hall of Fame NHL goaltender and former member of the Parliament of Canada wrote on Grantland.com, by waiting for absolute proof . . . ,

“thousands of asbestos workers and millions of smokers died. The fact is, as a society we rarely have the luxury of waiting for science on big, difficult, potentially dangerous questions to meet its standard of proof. We need to take the best science we have, generate more and better information, then apply to it our best intuition and common sense — and decide.

“There are debates among doctors, now played out in the media, over the correlation between hockey’s blows to the head and CTE, between blows suffered now and a player’s long-term future. These debates will continue. But there can be no debate about the impact of those blows on players now. . . . This is about what we can see. This is what we absolutely know. This is about now.

“We look back on those people 50 years ago who defended tobacco and asbestos and think, How could they be so stupid? (Commissioner) Bettman and the NHL cannot wait for this generation of players to get old just so they can know for sure.”

Sound familiar? People who want absolute certainty in hockey are sacrificing the health of the current players, despite growing certainty that the news will only get worse. Climate skeptics are doing the same with the health of our planet.

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, MMA-NYC, 1851. Wikipedia.

The painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” is instantly familar to just about anyone who ever took a class in American History: it depicts the Revolutionary War commander and future first President crossing from Pennsylvania to New Jersey on Christmas of 1776 to surprise Hessian troops in Trenton and win a great victory. Anyone who has actually seen this part of the the Delaware in winter, though, might wonder why you pretty much never see it choked with ice.

It’s not manmade global warming that’s to blame: thick ice started to be rare on the lower Delaware in the 1800′s, ages before the effects of heat-trapping carbon dioxide began to appear. The ice largely went away with the ending of the LIttle Ice Age (LIA), an all-natural episode of global cooling that lasted for hundreds of years around the middle of the last millennium. What caused the LIA, however, has never been fully explained. One theory involves the so-called Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced sunspot activity — which in turn is linked to a slightly dimmer, cooler sun. The problem there: the Minimum began in the mid-1600′s and was over by the early 1700′s, but the LIA started centuries before that.

Now comes a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, based on ancient lake sediments in Iceland and plant residues from Baffin Island, Canada, that claims to explain the LIA. The cause: a series of four massive volcanic explosions (think Krakatoa or Tambora), starting in 1275 A.D., which threw up massive amounts of aerosol particles that blocked sunlight and cooled the planet. It was an all-natural version of what some scientists now propose as a form of geoengineering. The aerosols eventually fell to Earth, but the repeated jolts of cooling then, say the authors, led to more ice cover in the North Atlantic, which reflected extra sunlight and altered ocean currents, keeping the planet chilled for centuries.

Mystery solved, then? Maybe. It’s rare for a single study to accomplish such a feat, no matter how convincing it might seem. But if further research confirms the idea, it could turn out to be an important piece in the puzzle of how Earth’s climate works.

The latest U.S. Drought Outlook shows continued dry conditions in the Southwest are likely for the rest of the winter.

During the past three years, the level of Lake Mead has followed a boom and bust cycle, dropping to a record low in 2010 during an intense drought, then recovering during 2011 thanks to record mountain snowfall, and now dropping again in the midst of a dry winter.

According to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, water managers are forecasting the lake level to drop by about 13 feet due to the dry winter so far. As the newspaper reported:

“In December, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was predicting a roughly 11-foot rise in Lake Mead over the next year. Now the bureau expects the nation’s largest man-made reservoir to shed about 13 feet by January 2013.

One acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, which is enough water to supply two average valley homes for one year. At current consumption levels, the 2.45 million acre-foot reduction in Lake Mead’s forecast since last month represents enough water to supply the entire Las Vegas Valley for a decade.”

During the past 11 years, a particularly dry and warm climate has lingered in Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Southern California, leading to reduced flow along the Colorado River. In fact, scientists have already shown that the stress on the water resources in the Southwest region is consistent with the effects of a warmer climate, and that increased emissions of heat-trapping gases are linked to recent changes in river flows and winter snow pack. Adding to the region’s water challenges is the fact that cities that draw water from Lake Mead, such as Las Vegas, have grown in recent years and are further taxing the water supply.

(This Climate Central chart shows how the demand for water from the Colorado River Basin has recently outstripped supply.)

Last year, Climate Central ran an in depth series on water issues in the Southwest, as well as a story that explored how climate change may affect water supplies in the coming decades.

In this 2005 file photo, Zimbabwe peasant farmer Loyce Nkala stands amid her drought-devastated maize crop in Filabusi, southwest Zimbabwe. REUTERS/Howard Burditt

By Madalitso Mwando

ESIGODINI, Zimbabwe – Whether rotating her crops, sowing seed from previous harvests or gathering rainwater, Susan Gama is pulling out all the stops in an attempt to keep her livelihood going.

Subsistence farmers like Gama in this southern African nation are reverting to traditional farming knowledge and local experimentation to cope with the challenges of poor and unpredictable rainfall, which experts believe is linked to climate change.

That is producing mixed results – and considerable frustration for government agricultural experts, who believe traditional knowledge alone will not be sufficient to protect farmers against changing rainfall conditions.

“We have always known that our grandparents kept seed from the previous harvest for planting in the new season, but… some people were instead advising us to buy what they termed drought-resistant varieties,” Gama said from the small plot of land where she grows maize and groundnuts in Esigodini, 43 km (27 miles) from Bulawayo.

But Gama said that the newer varieties have not consistently produced a good crop on her community’s land, apparently because of very poor rains. So she and other local farmers are conducting their own experiments on what seed works best in poor rain conditions.

“What we do is mix our planting and combine the harvested seed from the previous year and what we buy from the shops and compare outcomes,” she said.

According to villagers, this mixing of seeds has helped improve the harvests.

Where Gama’s plot previously produced 50 bags of maize at 90 kg each, last season she harvested 70 bags, spurring others in this small farming community to experiment with her method.

REJECTION OF NEW METHODS

Government officials say that although rural women farmers are being advised about new farming methods to deal with climate change challenges, many still prefer to use their own traditional knowledge systems.

“There is still a lot of convincing to be done in some parts of the country,” said Thelma Ruvimbo, an officer from the Lands and Agriculture Ministry.

“If farmers try something on their own and it works, how they do you convince them about the effectiveness of new technologies?” Ruvimbo asked.

Government agricultural extension officers have encouraged farmers to practise conservation farming, for example, by using hoes instead of oxen to work the land in order to conserve both soil and water.

But farmers have in some instances opted to explore other options. While crop rotation has been practised for years, the new challenges posed by changing weather patterns have driven farmers such as Thandekile Sibanda, also from Esigodini, to do it with greater frequency, and with a wider variety of crops.

Now, each planting season, she ensures that she plants a different crop – maize, groundnuts, watermelon or pumpkin – in each area of her field, to help ensure something survives the dryer conditions to produce a harvest.

Sibanda believes her program is producing more consistent harvests as rainfall reduces. But Ruvimbo says wider crop experimentation has sometimes led to further losses when the farmers are unaware which crops are best suited for their regions.

“The frustration of the rural women is understandable as climate change is essentially volatile,” Ruvimbo said.

Zimbabwe’s Meteorological Services Department had predicted that this season’s rains would peak in late December 2011. But while heavy rains came in December and January to the provinces of Midlands, Harare, Manicaland and the three Mashonaland provinces, areas such as Matebeleland, where Gama lives, are threatened with drought.

While the government’s Civil Protection Unit announced in early January that it was placing some parts of the country on a flood alert, the continued absence of rain in other areas serves to highlight the climate-linked problems that are impoverishing rural communities.

RAINWATER HARVESTING

One consolation for Gama and her colleagues is that when the rains do come, they will be able to harvest the water.

The hard red earth of Gama’s land does not retain much water, and she has built furrows along her plot to control run-off. At the same time she uses tanks donated by a non-governmental organisation to harvest water from her rooftop.

Here, each drop counts.

“A nongovernmental organisation donated some plastic drums and water harvesting equipment (such as) pipes connecting from our roofs, and we have been able to use this for our plots,” Gama said.

But this is not enough to allow her to fully irrigate her crops, she added.

According to the Plan International, an international children’s charity that works with subsistence farmers in Matebeleland, rainwater harvesting is a good option for millions of poor farmers across Africa and has helped improve yields despite persistently low rainfall.

“We only hope something can be done to make the rains come,” Gama said, recalling the times when the government carried out cloud seeding programmes as the rainy season approached.

But Zimbabwe’s government suspended this and other agricultural programmes, citing a lack of resources, when the country’s agricultural production began to plunge a decade ago following a government land redistribution effort.

Madalitso Mwando is a journalist based in Harare, Zimbabwe. This story is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

A new study has documented a decline in songbird populations in Arizona as a result of climate change.  What gets less attention in this story is that this decline is caused by elk over-browsing the plants that provide cover and nesting sites for the birds.  With warming temperatures leading to decreased snow pack over the last 22 years, elk have been staying at higher elevations for longer periods of time, leading to the intensive browsing and resulting reduction in songbirds.

We know that songbirds also declined in the Yellowstone area due to over-browsing of streamside habitat by elk. However, the reintroduction of wolves 15 years ago has facilitated the return of both the habitat and the songbirds, as well as a host of other species such as beavers and frogs.

Given the role that wolves played in restoring the ecosystem in and around Yellowstone, one can’t help but wonder whether the beleaguered Mexican wolf population might be able to help mitigate the Arizona songbirds’ decline if only they were able to recover across the Southwestern landscape.  By keeping elk on the move, wolves would likely reduce the potential for over-browsing in any particular area.  This is supported by the researchers’ finding that in areas where elk were experimentally excluded and vegetation was allowed to recover, there were three times the numbers of songbirds than in areas that were browsed by elk.

If Mexican wolves were able to reduce the browsing pressure in Arizona and enable the return of some of these songbirds, it wouldn’t be the first example of wolves helping to lessen the impact of climate change for other species.  Back in Yellowstone, researchers have found that wolves also provide a year-round supply of food for scavengers of all kinds, including ravens, eagles, coyotes, and bears.   In the absence of wolves, winter elk deaths were largely dependent on snow depth, and in years with less snow few elk would die—leading to a food shortage for many of the park’s animals.  With the reintroduction of wolves, however, there is now a steady supply of food throughout the winter – regardless of whether the season is mild or severe.

The authors of that study credit the wolf – and predators in general – for buffering the ecosystem from climate change, stating: “We’re finding that ecosystems that have lost a keystone predator may exhibit less resilience to the impact of climate change.”

The lessons we have learned from the return of wolves to Yellowstone show us what we are missing in the areas where top predators have been intensively removed.  Each new study adds to the already overwhelming amount of evidence that predators are a key part of our ecosystems and their presence is essential to maximizing adaptability to changing environmental conditions for all species.

The Mexican wolf population has been struggling to recover in the wild after facing decades of political resistance, but a new recovery plan is currently in the works.  And the evidence suggests that if the wolves are allowed to succeed, we’ll ultimately be recovering much more than just the wolf.

Photo credit: USFWS Mexican wolf

In a study published in the January 2012 issue of Geology, Swart suggests that the large changes in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates which occurred prior to the major climatic event more than 500 million years ago, known as “Snowball Earth,” are unrelated to worldwide glacial events. UM/RSMAS

In a study published in the journal Geology, scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science suggest that the large changes in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates which occurred prior to the major climatic event more than 500 million years ago, known as ‘Snowball Earth,’ are unrelated to worldwide glacial events. “Our study suggests that the geochemical record documented in rocks prior to the Marinoan glaciation or ‘Snowball Earth’ are unrelated to the glaciation itself,” said UM Rosenstiel professor Peter Swart, a co-author of the study. “Instead the changes in the carbon isotopic ratio are related to alteration by freshwater as sea level fell.”

In order to better understand the environmental conditions prior to ‘Snowball Earth’, the research team analyzed geochemical signatures preserved in carbonate rock cores from similar climactic events that happened more recently — two million years ago — during the Pliocene-Pleistocene period.

The team analyzed the ratio of the rare isotope of carbon (¹³C) to the more abundant carbon isotope (¹²C) from cores drilled in the Bahamas and the Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The geochemical patterns that were observed in these cores were nearly identical to the pattern seen prior to the Marinoan glaciation, which suggests that the alteration of rocks by water, a process known as diagenesis, is the source of the changes seen during that time period.

Prior to this study, scientists theorized that large changes in the cycling of carbon between the organic and inorganic reservoirs occurred in the atmosphere and oceans, setting the stage for the global glacial event known as ‘Snowball Earth’.

“It is widely accepted that changes in the carbon isotopic ratio during the Pliocene-Pleistocene time are the result of alteration of rocks by freshwater,” said Swart. “We believe this is also what occurred during the Neoproterozoic. Instead of being related to massive and complicated changes in the carbon cycle, the variations seen in the Neoproterozoic can be explained by simple process which we understand very well.”

Scientists acknowledge that multiple sea level fluctuations occurred during the Pliocene-Pleistocene glaciations resulting from water being locked up in glaciers. Similar sea-level changes during the Neoproterozoic caused the variations in the global carbon isotopic signal preserved in the older rocks, not a change in the distribution of carbon as had been widely postulated.

While restored wetlands may look superficially similar—and the animal and insect populations may be the same—the plants take much longer to return to normal and establish the carbon resources in the soil that make for a healthy ecosystem. (Credit: FloridaStock / Shutterstock)

UC BERKELEY (US) — Even after a century of restoration efforts, some wetlands are never able to return to their original natural state.

What’s the wait?  New York needs to take the next step to invest in solar. Policies such as the New York State renewable portfolio standard (RPS) have done a lot to bring new renewables like wind and biomass into the state’s clean energy economy, but they have fallen short in valuing localized economic, jobs and air quality improvement benefits that solar can bring to communities and utility consumers throughout the state.  Two distinguished leaders within our New York Solar Jobs Act coalition, Jackson Morris of the Pace Energy and Climate Center and Adam Browning of the Vote Solar Initiative tell us in “prime time” on CUNY TV’s Brian Lehrer show why solar is a great investment for New York and why the New York market needs certainty, longevity and scale if the state is to become a true solar leader. The solar segment is part of Brian Lehrer’s “Planet White House” segment that begins at  minute 21 and goes through minute 43.

Image extracted from video.