environment Politics: agriculture National Research Council rising sea levels sustainability Water
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 4: Stop Me Before I Strike Again!
California’s gonna get a soaker sometime soon (SF Chronicle):
Global sea-level rise, induced by the warming climate, will hit California’s coastline harder than the other West Coast states over the coming decades and on through the end of the century, according to a new report from the National Research Council.
Oceans around the world are rising, but seas around California will rise even higher – by more than 3 feet before 2100, the report says. Tide gauges and satellites show that the rate of sea-level rise has increased steadily since 1900, and with each passing decade, storm surges and high waves will put low-lying regions like the Bay Area at heightened risk of dangerous flooding.
The forecasts come from the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which appointed the 12-member committee to investigate earlier estimates of sea-level rise and factor in all new available evidence. The result was a 260-page report issued Friday.
The report was commissioned primarily by California’s Department of Water Resources, along with state agencies from Oregon and Washington in order to aid their planning efforts.
Another job-killing bureaucracy to kill! Sent June 23:
The next few decades are going to be ones of drastic transition for many Americans. Insulated by our wealth and elaborate consumer lifestyle, we have lost sight of the fact that ultimately our lives entirely depend on our increasingly tenuous control of water.
Now, as rising oceans transform our coastlines, inland states anticipate water shortages. Even as our vulnerable aquifers are overused by an expanding population, climate change makes weather more unpredictable and droughts more extreme. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to see that this future isn’t going to be kind to us, despite the glib pronouncements of denialists in politics and the media.
In a sensible world, the National Research Council’s report on global sea-level rise would be a wake-up call for all of us, everywhere. Since our world is anything but sensible, what are the odds that the next Republican “jobs” bill will also eliminate funding for the NRC?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture biodiversity idiots infrastructure public health
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 17: I Have A Banana In My Ear!
U.S. News and World Report acknowledges that the Public Health picture is far from rosy, in an article entitled “Expert: Climate Change Will Increasingly Become Global Health Issue”:
Previously just the worry of climate scientists, environmentalists, doomsday prognosticators, and gas-price watchers, climate change is starting to worry some others— public health specialists, who say that global warming could affect large swaths of the population.
In a paper published in the journal PLoS Medicine Tuesday, a group of European public health experts write that climate change could alter “patterns of physical activity and food availability, and in some cases [bring] direct physical harm.” Slight temperature increases could also change disease distribution in colder regions and make hotter regions less hospitable to humans.
“Certain subgroups are at more risk—mainly the young, the old, and the poor,” says Peter Byass, director of the Umea Centre for Global Health Research in Sweden. “The middle age and wealthy will be better off. It’s a crude way of looking at it, but it’s not so far off the mark.”
That means more prevalence of diseases that affect the poor, such as malaria and dengue fever, and heat stroke in drought-afflicted areas.
For years, scientists have warned about more extreme hurricanes and weather patterns, but until recently, not much emphasis was put on less noticeable changes.
The comments include much stupidity, in highly predictable formats. Sent June 6:
The public health consequences of climate change are going to be very significant. It’s more than just hotter days and crazier weather; it’s invasive insects migrating to keep pace with environmental transformations and bringing tropical diseases with them; it’s the potential damage to our infrastructure that will make hamper sanitation; it’s allergies and asthma and a host of other debilitating ailments that will make our lives and those of our children progressively more difficult in coming centuries.
But even this does not begin to fully address the problem, for what affects humans will affect other life as well. Many species will be unable to cope, and we can anticipate losing much of the biodiversity that forms Earth’s priceless genetic heritage. Your headline announces that climate change is becoming a “Global Health Issue.” Indeed. It’s not just the people who live on it, but the planet itself that is deeply ill.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture extreme weather media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 2: Howdja Like Them Apples?
The Ionia County Sentinel-Standard tells us about their local fruit growers, who’ve been having a rough time. Naturally, the article never uses a certain phrase that rhymes with “primate strange.” Read it and weep:
IONIA COUNTY, Mich. —
Michigan’s unseasonably warm winter and late April freeze means a near-total loss to many Ionia County growers of apples, peaches and other tree fruits.
“It’s been a severe year as far as all Michigan cherries, apples, plums, peaches,” said Alex Hanulcik of Hanulcik Farm Market and Hanulcik Pick-Your-Own Peach and Apple Orchards in Ionia. “It’s all pretty much gone across the state.”
More than half of Michigan’s apple crop, and possibly more, could be lost, according to The Packer, a news source for the fresh fruit and vegetable industry.
In southwest Michigan, damage to tree fruit was even more grim, although the extent won’t be known until early June.
Hanulcik estimated his loss at “approaching 100 percent.” Luckily the strawberries were only minimally damaged, but that is small comfort.
“When two-thirds of what you grow is gone, I’m dependent upon what little is left,” he said.
“I’ve been through a number of years, and I haven’t seen anything like it,” said Hanulcik, who has been farming since 1985. His grandparents started the business in 1936.
“People have told me this is similar to 1945, when it was a complete wipeout,” he added.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. Sent May 23:
It’s not just Michigan. New England’s fruit growers also confronted the possibility of crop devastation from severe and unpredictable weather. And it’s not just the United States, either. All over the world, farmers are confronting a dangerous new reality in which weather patterns that have been consistent for centuries are transforming faster than human agriculture and infrastructure can cope.
But in the USA, an anti-science political party has framed the phrase “climate change” in exclusively ideological terms, thereby impossibly hamstringing any public discussion of critical issues like the plight of Michigan’s orchards.
Scientists have predicted for years with ever-increasing accuracy that mounting atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will lead to unpredictable and extreme weather, and Ionia County fruit growers are confronting this new reality for themselves. No one on Earth can evade the effects of climate change, and American news media should no longer evade direct discussion of the issue.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 29: Getting So Much Realer All The Time
The Ledger (Lakeland, FL) runs a piece by Charles Reynolds, addressing some implications — and taking a dig at the chuckleheads along the way.
Some people believe the concept of climate change, also called global warming, is a plot cooked up by tree-hugging liberals to get everyone else to stop treating planet Earth like a trash heap. But governments and multinational corporations worldwide don’t think climate change is a hoax.
Among corporations taking an active role in finding solutions for problems caused by ever-worsening weather patterns are Weyerhaeuser, DuPont, Boeing, Georgia-Pacific, Deutsche Telekom, Royal Dutch/Shell, Toyota and Ontario Power Generation. Hardly bastions of liberalism. And speaking of the flip side of altruism, the government of communist China is becoming increasingly concerned about the damage climate change is causing.
The organizations mentioned are, of course, worried about their bottom lines. It’s the world’s biologists, botanists and scientists who are distressed over the effects of climate change on hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals.
Sent in a rush, 5/19 – getting ready for the Flutes concert.
When confronted with the facts about climate change, denialists respond in one of several extremely predictable ways. By far the most popular is a mix of guilt-by-association and ad hominem attack, as in the endless attacks on the integrity of former Vice President Al Gore. Another “greatest hit” for self-styled skeptics is the argument from incredulity — “it must be impossible, because I don’t understand anything about science.” And, of course, we’re always going to hear from the tinfoil hat brigade, with their increasingly far-fetched conspiracy theories: “global warming is a hoax cooked up by socialists in order to enforce global redistribution of wealth from the hands of the job creators into the pockets of greedy climatologists,” or something like that.
Meanwhile, the researchers who are actually working in the field keep finding more information that suggests the problem is actually significantly more dangerous than had been previously thought. While warmer weather is excellent news for gardeners in the short term, the steady increases in planetary temperature are going to make feeding our civilization exponentially more difficult in the centuries to come — something which should (eventually) engage the attention of the denialists.
Would those who reject the validity of climate science be willing to sign insurance waivers, relinquishing any damages from the effects of global warming? Let’s see them put their money where their mouths are.
Warren Senders
Education environment: agriculture Gardening IPCC scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 12: Not Phrenology, Phenology
USA Today runs an article on phenology. Ominous:
As the climate warms, many plants are flowering 8.5 times sooner than experiments had predicted, raising questions for the world’s future food and water supply, a new international study concludes.
Higher carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels can affect how plants produce oxygen, and higher temperatures can alter their behavior. Shifts in natural events such as flowering or leafing, which biologists call “phenology,” are obvious responses to climate change. They can impact human water supply, pollination of crops, the onset of spring (and allergy season), the chances of wildfires and the overall health of ecosystems.
To better understand this, scientists from 22 institutions in Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States studied 1,634 species of plants across four continents. They compared how plants responded based on historical monitoring data and on small-plot experiments in which warming was artificially induced.
Jeez. Nobody saw that coming, did they? Sent May 3:
It’s unsurprising that researchers studying the responses of plants to increased atmospheric CO2 found their predictions nearly an order of magnitude too low. The uncomfortable fact is that almost without exception, scientific forecasts have underestimated the magnitude, speed and significance of climate change and its effects. There are two important reasons for this disconnect.
The first is that scientific language is inherently conservative, striving for accuracy without emotion. A phrase like “statistically significant correlation” doesn’t immediately trigger anyone’s adrenalin — even when it’s linking greenhouse gas concentrations to a warming planet. The second is that scientific research is usually specialized, thereby minimizing the effects of interacting factors in a complex situation — and if any situation deserves the term “complex,” it’s global warming.
America and the world must mount a robust and meaningful response to the climate crisis, if we are to avoid a future full of unpleasant surprises.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture conservation infrastructure Republican obstructionism Water
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 6: Here’s Your Allowance For The Next Decade, Sweetheart. It’s All In Pennies.
The New York Times reports on a scary new study:
New research suggests that global warming is causing the cycle of evaporation and rainfall over the oceans to intensify more than scientists had expected, an ominous finding that may indicate a higher potential for extreme weather in coming decades.
By measuring changes in salinity on the ocean’s surface, the researchers inferred that the water cycle had accelerated by about 4 percent over the last half century. That does not sound particularly large, but it is twice the figure generated from computerized analyses of the climate.
If the estimate holds up, it implies that the water cycle could quicken by as much as 20 percent later in this century as the planet warms, potentially leading to more droughts and floods.
That’s pretty fucking alarming. Sent April 27:
A projected twenty percent acceleration in Earth’s water cycle holds the potential for catastrophic ripple effects throughout our lives and those of our posterity. Without a steady supply of water throughout the growing season, agriculture on civilization-feeding scales will become exponentially more difficult. While its impacts on farming will be profound, the drought-or-deluge model predicted by Paul Durack and his colleagues can be expected to transform beyond recognition many of the local and regional ecosystems our forbears took for granted.
To avoid the worst-case scenarios implicit in these findings, we must begin planning for a future in which water supplies will be irregular and extreme. We’ll need expanded and reinforced storage and conservation, water-stingy techniques of manufacturing, a completely re-imagined waste-processing system, and the infrastructure required by a host of other functions. Most difficult of all, we need to make our paralyzed political system respond constructively to an imminent crisis.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture oceanic acidification Oysters
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 21: Shed A Bitter Tear
The Bend Bulleting (Central OR) runs a story from the Seattle Times concerning a little problem they’re having with Oysters. Hint: the phrase “dying by the billions” is not one you want to hear, unless it concerns plague bacteria:
Researchers for the first time have found definitive evidence that changing ocean chemistry from increased carbon-dioxide emissions are at least partially responsible for massive oyster die-offs in the Pacific Northwest.
The research published Wednesday by scientists from Seattle and Oregon State University is the first anywhere to show that increasingly corrosive seas already are killing marine organisms in North America.
“This is the smoking gun for oyster larvae,” said Richard Feely, an oceanographer and leading marine-chemistry researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle and one of the paper’s authors. “This is the clearest experimental evidence yet that lower pH is making oysters die.”
Said Alan Barton, another of the paper’s authors, “It’s now an incontrovertible fact that ocean chemistry is affecting our larvae.”
Since 2005, wild oysters along the Washington coast and oysters at a commercial shellfish hatchery in Oregon have been dying by the billions. Leading scientists long have suspected that one of the causes is the increasing corrosiveness of ocean waters that frequently rise up from the deep during high winds to lap against the shore.
How much more will it take? Sent April 12:
Sigh. Let’s put the news about oyster colony die-offs and ocean acidification on the pile, shall we? On the pile with fruit farmers in New England worrying about crop losses in the aftermath of a winter that wasn’t. On the pile with the projections of shrinking acreage available for chocolate cultivation in Africa. Put it on the pile with drastically reduced coffee yields, grain crops impacted by increasingly severe and unpredictable weather, trees infested by pine-borer beetles, and all the other ways in which climate change is affecting humanity’s prospects for the future.
And perhaps when the pile is big enough, our politicians will finally offer meaningful policy instead of empty theatrics. Perhaps the professional denialists in the media will stop trying to hinder America’s ability to respond to a clear and present danger. How much more evidence do they need?
Oysters, grain, fruit, coffee, and chocolate are local manifestations of a planetary emergency. Failure to recognize it as such is an error with grave implications — not just for our descendants, but for all life on Earth.
Warren Senders
Education environment: agriculture monocropping sustainability timescale
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 19: Too Soon Old And Too Late Smart
The Peoria (IL) Journal-Star discusses a recent study by scientists from Arizona, on the impact of climate change on the “corn belt.” Hmmm…not so encouraging:
PEORIA —
The Corn Belt may be in trouble as the planet gets warmer, according to a decadelong research effort on climate change.
The study, published this week by a team at Northern Arizona University, shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate quickly.
Researchers found that long-term warming resulted in the loss of native species and encroachment of species typical of warmer environments, pushing the plant community toward less productive species, said Bruce Hungate, a Northern Arizona professor and a senior author of the study.
“Ecosystems have feedbacks. The initial response might not be the long term one,” he said.
Squirrel! Sent April 10:
The key word in any discussion of the Northern Arizona University study of plant survival in a transformed climate is “long-term.” For the past century, our civilization has steadily lost the ability to imagine a future more than a few years away. With the support of a complaisant media, our civilization has built a 24-hour news cycle and a fashion-driven consumer economy that is entirely dependent on the predictability and dependability of our food supply. Since scientists’ predictions have consistently underestimated the severity of climate change, it’s a fair bet that our agricultural infrastructure is far more vulnerable than any of us ever believed.
With enormous industrialized monocropping, we have accomplished prodigies of predictability and productivity — but lost our ability to think in the long temporal cycles that governed agriculture until the advent of chemical fertilizers and giant factory farms. To survive and prosper in the coming centuries, our species must reclaim this wisdom before it’s too late.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 6: Let’s Have Another Cup Of Coffee, Let’s Have Another Piece Of Pie
New Hampshire’s fruit growers are getting worried, reports the Nashua Telegraph:
When you were basking in record warmth last week, farmers were worried. They knew the abnormal weather was making some plants vulnerable when seasonable weather returned.
On Monday night, their fears were realized.
“It got down to 21 degrees in some spots. On apples, we could have lost as much as 10 percent,” said Chip Hardy, owner of Brookdale Fruit Farm in Hollis. “If it had gotten down to 15, we could have lost 90 percent, so we were lucky it didn’t get that cold.”
The problem is that trees and bushes were fooled by a stretch of 80-degree days last week, producing their flowers roughly a month earlier than usual, leaving frost-sensitive buds exposed.
Fruiting plants from apple and peach trees to blueberry bushes and grape vines are vulnerable, as are some decorative plants such as magnolia trees.
We are so fucked. Sent March 30:
Yes, the early spring seems like good news for those who want to get out and bask in the sun. But farmers are right to be worried. When weather is this unpredictable, agriculture is impacted in countless ways, with ripple effects throughout our society. Large monocrops are more vulnerable to extreme weather and invasive insect pests, and food prices inevitably go up as availability goes down.
And yet our society is remarkably resistant to connecting the dots between isolated regional weather events, and the broader transformation of our climate that shows every sign of accelerating into a planetwide disaster. David Brooks’ article downplayed the obvious link between New England’s “winter that wasn’t” and global warming — a connection that we dismiss at our peril.
What is happening in New Hampshire is happening in thousands of regions all over the world; we must wake up to this clear and present danger.
Warren Senders
Education environment Gardening: agriculture Gardening timescales USDA
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 7: Don’t Forget To Mulch
The Albany Times-Union runs another piece on the USDA hardiness zones:
Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its Plant Hardiness Zone Map for the first time since 1990. This is the colorful map that is on the back of most seed packs that helps gardeners match their region’s climate to plants’ climatic tolerances.
The updated map has many new features, including finer-scale resolution and more interactive technology such as the ability to view specific regions by ZIP code. However, the most notable change is a nationwide shift in planting zones to reflect how climate change is altering our climate and plant-growing regions. The vast majority of the country finds itself in a warmer zone, including large areas of the Capital Region and the rest of New York.
This update makes concrete what many researchers have been saying for some time: that climate change is not just the province of the future.
I have a lot to do this evening, so I just re-used another letter on the same subject — rearranged all the words, used synonyms as appropriate, etc., etc., etc. Sent February 1:
The new map of hardiness zones from the USDA will probably make some gardeners very happy. What’s not to like about locally-grown mangos in Minnesota? But as we change our seed orders to reflect these new climatic norms, we need to remember that they’re only temporary benefits — and they aren’t unmixed blessings.
For every new tropical fruit or vegetable we can grow, we’ll lose some of the resilience and interconnectedness of our local and regional ecosystems. Beneficial flora and fauna may suffer from changing weather conditions or the introduction of invasive insects and plants from hotter regions (perhaps the most genuinely dangerous class of illegal immigrant).
The agricultural infrastructure which provides our corn and wheat is extremely vulnerable to the epiphenomena of the rapidly burgeoning greenhouse effect. The USDA’s map makes for pleasant contemplation in the short run — but the longer-term picture is not a pretty one.
Warren Senders