Frost Heaves

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 Note: This program first aired April 25, 2015. 

It seems this year that spring has come with an abruptness that has startled even the most optimistic among us. Day after day of warm sunlight, no fire in the wood stove, and a snowpack that gets smaller with every hour. Each day brings with it a new sign of spring, first the turkey vultures appeared, now the alders are shedding pollen, the skunk cabbage are in bloom, the phoebes have returned, the chipmunks are out, the osprey are back. Every winter we forget it is possible, and every spring is such sweet relief and wonderment.

One sign of spring that I think we could all do with out, save those kids sitting in the back seats of the school bus, is the return of frost heaves to the back roads so many of us drive every day. I happen to live within a mile of the official “Worst Road in Maine 2014”, Rt. 15 in Blue Hill, so I know of what I speak. A year later, the roads aren’t as bad, but still require vigilance and restraint if you hope to come through the season with axels and wheels intact.

Frost heaves are a function of the interplay of water and the road bed, liquid water, frozen water and soil that has just the right amount of capillarity. When winter sets in the ground freezes from the top down, a frost front moves down into the soil, freezing the water in the soil in to a solid mass. In the spring that frozen water starts to melt, especially during the day, only to freeze again at night. We end up with a layer of ice sandwiched between a thawed surface layer and an unfrozen deep layer below the frost line. The interplay between the frozen layer and the unfrozen soil below it results in the bumpy driving this time of year, and the pot holes we contend with the rest of the time.  

People used to think that a frost heave was simply a function of solid water taking up move volume than liquid water, a phenomenon I have experienced more than once when I left a full water bottle in my car over night in sub freezing temperatures. Liquid water expands when it freezes, and as a result, those water bottles don’t work any more. With frost heaves, we have learned that the increase in ice volume isn’t enough to account for the destruction that occurs. The ice volume is part of it, but so is the ready supply of liquid water that happens most commonly in the spring. As more and more snow and ice melts, there is more and more liquid water around to feed the sub surface ice. As long as it stays cold enough for the ice to keep freezing at least some of the time, the liquid water running beneath it feeds those ice crystals, and they grow upward. Most of us have seen these crystals bursting out of bare soil or gravel. The asphalt on the road surface is essentially impermeable though, so the ice crystals can’t thrust up through it, and they cause the road surface to bulge up. And there is our frost heave. If the road heaves up enough, the asphalt cracks, and those cracks become the starting points for pot holes that will form later, after the ice has melted away.

On the road surface the unevenness of the frost heaves are an indicator that the fill used in the road bed is inconsistent, or that ground water is interacting with the road bed in some places but not others. That’s why simply repaving doesn’t solve the problem for more than a few months. To address the underlying issue the entire road has to be dug up and rebuilt, which takes time and money and can cause a huge inconvenience.

To me though, the frost heaves, though annoying, represent an opportunity. They remind me to slow down as the pace of life speeds up as we head into the long days of summer. And they show me that the transition from winter to summer can be rough, not just for me, but for the earth under my feet as well. And just like my life, once summer arrives the roads smooth back out, perhaps a little worse for wear, but no longer bucking me off every journey I attempt.

References:

http://www.mbtaonline.org/Newsroom/FixMaineRoads/tabid/93/Default.aspx

Climate Change Part 21: Adaptation

Note: This program first aired April 11, 2015.

 

We’ve done it, we’ve reached the last episode in the Climate Change series. Over the past several months we’ve looked at the mechanics of the climate system, how the various components are changing, the sources of the carbon, the current and possible future impacts, and what to do about it.

For a time it seemed like all the talk was about mitigation, how do we stop climate change? How can we prevent this from happening? And that conversation is still happening the world over. Along with this a second conversation has emerged, one that acknowledges that some degree of change is now virtually certain, and that much of the disrupted weather the world has recently experienced is in fact the leading edge of this climate change trend. This conversation is not about giving up and giving in, or throwing up our hands and joyriding in the SUV because we’re already screwed, its about getting real about the fact that things in the climate system are in motion and changes are already happening, even if we stop emitting fossil carbon tomorrow.  The question then isn’t, how can we stop it, because there is a certain amount of change already embodied in the climate system that we can’t, the question is how do we prepare for what will happen along side our efforts to prevent additional change? Preventing further change is called mitigation and preparing for the inevitable embodied changes is called adaptation.

Adaptation can be a hard sell in the climate change movement, because it implies a bit of defeat and acceptance, and because there is nothing sexy about counting culverts and storm drains. Assessing and improving infrastructure is a big part of the adaptation movement. We already know that changes to precipitation patterns (either not enough or too much all at once) are among the first wave of climate related impacts we are experiencing. Droughts get all the attention, because they are devastating in their own right, and because much of our food supply stands to be disrupted by water shortages. But look at what happened to Boston this winter, snow literally disabled a major US city. Look at what happened to lower Manhattan during the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. And of course, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Between extreme precipitation events and sea level rise exacerbated storm surge, the threat that flooding disables critical infrastructure is painfully real. Here in rural Maine, there are lots of roads, and sometimes only one road to a place. If that road gets washed out, all the people on the other side are cut off from services they may need. Infrastructure doesn’t just mean keeping track of the New York City subway system, it also means the roads that supply our food and fuel systems and are the conduits for emergency services. Over the past couple of years here in Maine we have become well aquainted with extended periods with out electricity; now picture that week without power being totally cut off from town by an impassible washed out road. No way to get fuel for your generator, no way to get help if you need it. Suddenly making sure the culverts are clear and of sufficient size doesn’t seem like a crazy idea after all.

Adaptation planning draws heavily from the disaster preparedness community, and if we have learned anything from the natural disasters of the past decade, it is that we are never really prepared. This has to happen at the community level; which roads are the most likely to flood? What areas will be inundated by a storm surge? Where do the elderly people live who will need transportation to a cooling center during a heat wave? What location do we have in town to set up said cooling center? How do we get the word out about where to go? These conversations require all of us, and if anything good comes out of climate change, it is this.

In closing, I leave you with a quote from Russell Libby, the late director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, and accomplished poet. This is from his poem A Pledge. It sums up the adaptation sentiment perfectly, and as the world around us changes and perhaps grows unrecognizable, keep it in your heart to help you stay focused when things get overwhelming. It goes like this, “if the world we know is to crumble, the world we rebuild can only start where we are”. Isn’t that perfect? It is only in our own communities where our real work starts. So start it now.

Thanks for bearing with this for 21 long weeks. It’s an important topic, perhaps the most important topic of our time, and I hope it was as helpful to you to hear it as it was for me to write it. 

References:

Still haven’t heard enough? Check out UMaine Climate Change Institute Director Paul Mayewski’s take on why Mainers should care about a warming Arctic: http://climatechange.umaine.edu/news/article/2015/04/06/5_reasons_maine_should_care_about_warming_arctic_waters__p_mayewski

Yep, nothing sexy here: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/adapt-tools.html

Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange: http://www.cakex.org/

Russell Libby’s poem “A Pledge” http://gulfbookpoem.blogspot.com/2012/12/russell-libby-poem.html

Climate Change Part 20: Mitigation

--> Note: This program first aired March 28, 2015.

We’re reaching the end of our story about climate change, and the question that remains is: What do we do about it? Last week we looked at various proposals for geoengineering, methods of mimicking and manipulating natural processes in order to accelerate the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Next we review the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 report on climate change mitigation efforts. The IPCC defines mitigation as anything that reduces the sources or enhances the sinks for green house gasses. Geoengineering is all about enhancing the sinks, so today we focus on reducing the sources.

To read an IPCC report is to realize there is not just one model or one set of predictions out there. You have to sift through 8 or more different alphanumeric codes, each one representing a different climate mitigation scenario, from good to bad to the worst; business as usual. Policy makers and scientists have recently coalesced around one scenario in particular as the one we should be aiming for as we move into the future. Unless there is some kind of zombie apocalypse, the best case scenario is to reach a stabilized carbon dioxide level of 450 ppm by the year 2100. The thought is that this carbon dioxide level would keep the world at a 2 degree Celsius or less average temperature increase, an increase that would change things, but hopefully not catastrophically. You may have heard the figure 350 ppm floating around out there, it’s also the name of a significant climate action coalition who’s goal is to promote fossil fuel divestment and get the Earth back to an atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 350 ppm—the last level thought to be “safe” for sustaining life as we knew it on the planet. We’ve blown past 350, hitting a historic 400 this past year. At this rate, 450 sounds pretty optimistic to me.

So how does the IPCC propose we do this? By reducing carbon dioxide, and other green house gas emissions. When quantified, it means, by the year 2050, green house gas emissions 40-70% lower than emissions from 2010. That sounds like a big drop doesn’t it? Where are we going to cut all these green house gas emissions? If you look at the 2010 spectrum of green house gas emissions, you will see different economic categories of sources: the energy supply sector, agriculture/forestry, industry, transportation, and buildings. The largest source of these is easily the energy supply sector, basically where heat and electricity are generated, electricity that then goes to various places, including industry, buildings and a little bit of transportation to get used. Fossil fuels are used to generate this energy. Energy is what fuels the modern economy, it was easy access to energy that allowed the industrial revolution, and it is continued easy access to energy that enables our extremely comfortable standard of living in the industrialized 21rst century. Economic and population growth are the “most important” drivers of increases of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. When we look to the energy supply sector to decrease its emissions, we need to remember that economic growth is what raises people out of crushing poverty, and with populations increasing, more people than ever need that lift. This is why developing nations balk at strict emissions agreements. They don’t see a viable path to economic development without an energy supply driven by fossil fuels, and thus by turning away from a fossil fuel economy, they doom their citizens to continued poverty. What is clear at this point is that “peak oil” or “peak any fossil fuel” is not going to be the limiting factor in the fossil fuel economy in any time frame relevant to the current climate situation, so decarbonizing the economy in a way that can still allow for economic development, especially in the developing world, will have to be done consciously, by choice. The IPCC estimates that we need 3 to 4 times the amount of zero or low carbon energy (from sources including renewables, nuclear power and fossil or biofuels that utilize carbon capture and sequestration technology), and to do that significant investment is needed, particularly in the next two decades.

In other words, there is no time to waste. The IPCC report says it best, and I quote it here: “Delaying mitigation efforts beyond those in place today through 2030 is estimated to substantially increase the difficulty of the transition to low longer-term emissions levels and narrow the range of options consistent with maintaining temperature change below 2 °C relative to pre-industrial levels.”  Clearly now is the time. Right now.

Even with this imperative, it was heartening to read the Summary for Policy Makers version of this report, in that the work is clear, what needs to be done is clear, and it some how miraculously, while an enormous task, doesn’t seem impossible. When you see the weird volatility in oil prices, and the industry’s response to low oil prices, investment in renewables makes a lot more sense. The divestment movement seems a little less out in left field when viewed from standing on a $40 barrel of crude oil. What this report does is help triage our mitigation efforts, after reading it I can see that we need to focus our big efforts on the energy sector. In terms of global mitigation that needs to be our focus in the next twenty years if we are to have any hope of holding off the changes that could diminish the quality of life for all of us living on this planet. Reduce, reuse, recycle, yes, but also and perhaps more importantly, support zero carbon power initiatives too.

References:

IPCC “Climate Change 2014L Mitigation of Climate Change http://mitigation2014.org/

Science Daily digest of the slowing of the Gulf Stream (includes link to original study): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150323132746.htm

About the “Pause” in global warming from the Pacific oscillation http://www.decodedscience.com/global-warming-ocean-heat-sink/49728

The Skeptical Scientist take on the Pacific oscillation: http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=2647

A really different take on climate mitigation, and our individual responsibility for it: https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/

350.org http://350.org/

Climate Change Part 19: Geoengineering

Note: This program first aired on March 21, 2015.

 

The last thing to think about as we wind down our climate change series is the big question: What do we do now? We’re in quite a pickle, but the good news is we have lots of options, the bad news is not all of them are easy, or likely to occur.

We are a technology obsessed society, and there is a faction out there who, while fully accepting climate change as a reality, believes that we should be able to engineer our way out it, an option known as geoengineering. And most climate scientists concur that at least some attempt at geoengineering needs to be part of immediate climate change mitigation.  Broadly defined, geoengineering specifically pursues mechanisms to mitigate climate change and as climate change is a planetary phenomenon, the scale of most of these geoengineering projects must also be planetary.

Most geoengineering proposals follow one of two paths, to either remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using enhanced biological or abiotic processes, or to increase the reflectivity of the Earth or its atmosphere, thereby decreasing the amount of energy entering the climate system. There are many variations on the first theme, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They start with strategies as simple as reforestation. Strategically replanting deforested areas can result in large amounts of carbon being taken out of the atmosphere and fixed away in the biomass (aka wood) of the trees as they grow. For this to be considered truly long term carbon sequestration however, the trees that grow can’t be then burned or even allowed to rot. Healthy forests do tend to be net carbon sinks, or places where carbon accumulates, but at the same time, they will slowly release carbon dioxide as organic matter breaks down. “Normally” this is a good thing, carbon dioxide is a critical nutrient for photosynthetic plants, so the carbon in/carbon out cycling in forests supports that. At this point though there is enough excess carbon in the atmosphere that we need strong measures, we need carbon to come out of the atmosphere and stay out. That has lead to various schemes in which natural processes are enhanced. For example, land plants are often limited by a lack of available nitrogen. One carbon sequestration  plan is to fertilize trees with nitrogen—if they aren’t limited by nitrogen, they can grow even faster! Another scheme that has gotten some press in the last few years is that of ocean fertilization. The idea with this is that in many parts of the ocean, iron is the limiting nutrient for phytoplankton, the base of the oceanic food web. If low productivity areas of the ocean are seeded with iron, primary productivity would increase, drawing large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. And unlike the forest systems, when the plankton die (if they die without being eaten by zooplankton or fish), they sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking that carbon with them. The bottom of the ocean then becomes a pretty good carbon sink (and this is in fact the mechanism by which some fossil fuels are created, which got us into this mess in the first place). Dumping a bunch of iron sulfate into the ocean violates a couple of different UN conventions, but that didn’t stop some folks from trying it in the Pacific northwest a few years ago. The research on whether or not a significant amount of carbon was sequestered has been mixed, but what is clear is that the experiment resulted in an increase is salmon runs two to three years later. Increased primary productivity means a burst of extra energy into the ecosystem; these results show that least some of the carbon didn’t in fact sink to the bottom of the Pacific, but instead was metabolized in the oceanic food web.

Other carbon sequestration plans are more industrial, and involve installing mechanical “scrubbers” on the smoke stacks of power plants, pulling the carbon dioxide out of the exhaust and piping it away to be sequestered under ground into rock formations. Lastly related to this is the plan to create what are essentially artificial plants, machines that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, and put it into the same system of underground sequestration as used for power plants.

The other and far more controversial strategy is to inject sulfates into the upper atmosphere in an attempt to increase the reflectivity of the atmosphere. If more light is reflected, less comes to Earth, and it is light that gets absorbed by the atmosphere and Earth surface that turns into the heat that gets trapped by green house gasses. Less light equals less heat in this scenario. This is exactly what happens with certain types of large volcanic eruptions, which have resulted in things like the infamous year “1800 and froze to death” other wise known as 1816 when world wide temperatures dropped as a result of the explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Cloud generating technology goes for a similar effect. Increasing reflectivity doesn’t do anything to mitigate the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or more significantly the oceans however.

Google geoengineering and you will find a plethora of information, advocates and critics. A recent National Academy of Sciences report went so far as to strongly endorse carbon capture efforts, and while at the same time raise significant concerns about reflectivity schemes. I think what is clear is that carbon capture programs may at this point in the game need to play a part in climate change mitigation, but we should not, and can not rely on them entirely. Other mitigation efforts are needed as well, we’ll talk about those next week.

References:

 New York Times article about a recent National Academy of Sciences report on geoengineering: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/science/panel-urges-more-research-on-geoengineering-as-a-tool-against-climate-change.html

National Geographic’s take on the same report: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150210-national-academy-geoengineering-report-climate-change-environment/

A few more specific proposals outlined by TreeHugger: http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/7-geoengineering-solutions-that-promise-to-save-humans-from-climate-change.html

Iron fertilization and impact on salmon (instead of climate) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean-with-iron-to-save-salmon-and-earn-money/ More on this, with lots of references: http://geoengineeringourclimate.com/2014/01/14/village-science-meets-global-discourse-case-study/

Where do we put all this captured carbon? http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ccs/

Wikipedia, actually a good overview of the different carbon sequestration ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

DIY Geoengineering:

Here’s a guy in Peru trying to keep alpine glaciers from melting by increasing the albedo of the Andes: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-06/peruvian-inventor-whitewashes-andes-hoping-slow-glacier-melt

Russ George dumps iron into the ocean: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-10/rogue-geoengineer-dumps-100-tons-iron-canadas-west-coast

Climate Change Part 18: Climate is a Social Justice Issue

Note: This program first aired on March 7, 2014. 

This is a science and nature show and we’ve spent nearly 20 weeks looking at the science around climate change, but the dirty secret about climate change is that it is ultimately a social problem. And it’s a problem that doesn’t affect us all equally. Climate change has become as much a social justice issue as it is an issue for scientific research. We’ve said before on this program that life isn’t fair; we all have to die, and suffering is universal. Is it fair to the frog that the snake has to eat?

I don’t know the answer to that question but I do know this: Climate change isn’t fair, and here’s why. The people it will impact the most are the poorest people on earth. The people with the least ability to change their circumstances, and in many cases, the people least responsible for the mechanics of changing the climate in the first place. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unequivocal: we suffer from “uneven risk distribution”, which is a fancy way of saying that wealthy nations will be able to insulate their citizens, for a time at least, against some of the extreme weather events, food shortages and security threats that climate change poses, poor nations will not. The intersection of uneven economic development and climate change exposure makes the world’s poor vulnerable to changing conditions in a way that most of us in the industrial world are not. And while we are all at eventual risk of social unrest and even violence if conditions get desperate enough, we already see the unrest and violence that has occurred in regions and nations that are environmentally on the brink.

In the near term, extreme weather events are the way in which most of us will experience climate change directly, in the form of more intense storms, colossally heavy rain fall, coastal flooding and heat waves that exacerbate drought and wild fire conditions. Droughts and floods, too much water coupled with not enough, these are what is on the agenda. Those two problems alone set in motion a cascade of human impacts; decreases in crop production and increases in food insecurity, decreasing freshwater resources for agriculture, industry and direct human consumption, and flooding in coastal zones and marginal recently urbanized land. These problems then compound themselves, as subsistence agriculture becomes more and more difficult in drought prone regions, human populations migrate increasingly to urban areas, colonizing marginal territory on the outskirts of cities, territory with little to no services. These people, driven from their homes by the inability to grow their own food and provide for their families and communities, then confront the other faces of climate change, namely the food insecurity that comes from rising food prices due to decreases in crop productivity, and the domestic insecurity that comes from moving into a rapidly expanding urban shanty town on marginal swampy land or steep hillside. Extreme precipitation events, monsoon rains, and typhoon storms easily flood these areas.

And we haven’t even considered sea level rise in this scenario. As the sea encroaches into coastal human landscapes the consequences are clear. Some low lying areas will be swamped all together, like the Pacific island nations or the Ganges River delta in Bangladesh, home to millions. Sea level rise is an existential threat to the people who live there. Large storm systems cause storm surges to threaten otherwise stable coastlines; low pressure and high winds, when coinciding with high tides can cause the ocean to rise much higher than its normal high water mark, as the people of the Philippines, New Orleans, lower Manhattan  now know. And as freshwater aquifers are rapidly depleted and sea levels continue to rise, in coastal areas seawater seeps into these aquifers, filling the void created as freshwater is drawn out. Wealthy communities can for a time afford to purchase fresh water, poor communities cannot. Humans can survive only a matter of days with out fresh water, and salt water intrusion joins food insecurity and social unrest as yet another driver of human displacement and suffering with significant ties to climate change.

For most listeners of this show, the near future impacts of climate change may be uncomfortable, or economically challenging, but are unlikely to destroy our communities or fundamental way of life. The same cannot be said for the world’s truly poor. As the conversation around climate change pivots increasingly away from mitigation towards adaptation, we need to keep this in mind: it is in our local communities that we focus on adaptation, but it is for the global community that we must continue efforts to mitigate climate impact. We’ll look at how we do that in the coming weeks.

 

References:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/the-inequality-of-climate-change/

I don’t always agree with the World Bank, but they released a big report on this issue a couple of years ago: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/06/19/what-climate-change-means-africa-asia-coastal-poor

https://www.nwf.org/pdf/Global-Warming/NWF_ExtremeWeather_pages_sm.pdf

http://cargocollective.com/climatechangestoriesforsocialjustice/Disappearing-Islands-Maldives

Climate Change Part 17: Impacts on the Ocean

Note: This program first aired on February 28, 2014.

We’ve come to the part of the climate change story that really matters. What is going to happen? What will the world look like for your kids and grand kids? How will it be different than it is today?

When we look at the ocean, the impacts of climate change are vast and many. The ocean covers 70% of the surface of the planet, and its’ medium, water has all the unique properties that make this planet hospitable to life. So you should expect anything that affects climate will affect the ocean in a big way, and it does.

Sea level rise is one of the first things people think of when they ponder the impacts of climate change. Some 44% of people world wide live within 150 km of the coastline, here in the US, that number is over 50%. The coastline though is an arbitrary location, relatively stable in the past few hundred years, our time frame for the modern world. The location of the coast is the result of a combination of factors; the amount of water in the ocean, the volume of the water in the ocean,  and the level of the land, and it turns out all of these factors are dynamic. The current climate event is increasing both the mass and volume of the ocean. By melting land based fresh water ice caps (both large and small) the total amount of liquid water in the ocean is increasing, and as we all know, when you over fill a glass, it spills out. A second issue is at play, thermal expansion. As water warms the molecules spread out more, so the same mass of water will take up more space. Not only are we putting more water into the ocean, that water is getting bigger because it is warming up, increasing the volume of the ocean. How high will it go? The IPCC’s last projection was for approximately 0.4 and 0.7 meters of average sea level rise between now and 2100. Currently sea levels are rising at a rate of 3mm a year.

Things in the ocean are responding to changing water temperatures the same way things on land are to changing terrestrial climatic conditions, those that can move to keep up with their water temperature of choice are doing so. This is one of the main reasons we haven’t had a winter shrimp fishery here in the Gulf of Maine for the past couple of years. The commercially harvested Northern Shrimp (Pandalus borealis) are at the southern edge of their range here in Maine. Warming Gulf of Maine water is interfering with their reproduction, and populations have collapsed here as a result.

As ocean waters warm, ocean circulation is affected, particularly the vertical circulation that brings nutrients to the surface, and oxygen rich water to the bottom of the ocean. Increased warming at the surface creates a warm surface layer, effectively putting a cap on top of the ocean that prevents these vertical mixing currents (this is what happens on a small scale on the west coast of South America during an El Nino event). With no nutrients at the surface primary productivity drops dramatically. With no oxygen replenishment at the bottom, the bottom goes hypoxic. There is evidence from the fossil record that this kind of situation has happened before, and let’s just say, it wasn’t good.

The final elephant in the room is of course ocean acidification. This is a chemical phenomenon directly related to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. As levels rise in the atmosphere, they correspondingly rise (by diffusion) in the ocean as well. When carbon dioxide mixes with sea water it forms carbonic acid, and uses up carbonate ions in the process. Carbonate ions are what calcium carbonate are made of, and animals that use calcium carbonate in their shells are very negatively impacted. Unfortunately those organisms happen to be important in the food chain, provide significant ecosystem services and are a significant part of many fishing dependent economies.

So you see, the impacts of climate change on the ocean are numerous and diverse and what happens on land also happens in the sea. There’s no place to hide. We’ll see what this really means for us next week.

References:

UN Coastal Atlas:

http://www.oceansatlas.org/servlet/CDSServlet?status=ND0xODc3JjY9ZW4mMzM9KiYzNz1rb3M~

Sea Level Rise: http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-sea-level-rise/

Storm surge: http://toolkit.climate.gov/topics/coastal-flood-risk/storm-surge

IPCC 2013 report on Sea Level Rise: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/unfccc/cop19/3_gregory13sbsta.pdf

Island nations in threat: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/09/06/environment/pacific-islands-fighting-for-survival-as-sea-levels-rise/#.VOzFv8bhJJM

Northern Shrimp in Maine: http://www.pressherald.com/2014/11/07/shrimp-depletion-in-gulf-of-maine-part-of-a-pattern-across-globe/

Under a Green Sky author Peter Ward (outlines the evidence that ocean stratification was related to mass extinction), on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/64407973

Gulf of Maine Research Institute on ocean acidification: http://www.gmri.org/news/waypoints/ocean-acidification-growing-concern-gulf-maine

NOAA on Gulf of Maine ocean acidification: http://oceanacidification.noaa.gov/WhatsNew/OANews/CurrentNews/TabId/552/ArtMID/1344/ArticleID/9991/Study-shows-Gulf-of-Maine-likely-to-be-more-sensitive-to-ocean-acidification-.aspx

Climate Change Part 16: Future (and present) Impacts

Note: This program first aired on February 2, 2014.

Over the past weeks and months our climate change series has told us quite a tale about Earth’s climate system and how it is changing. We’ve looked at how the green house effect works and what gasses enhance it, what the parts of the climate system are and how they interact in very basic terms, and where the carbon comes from and where it goes. We’ve laid the ground work and now we’re coming to the final chapter of this story, the one in which we find out what happens next. 

And what happens next is a story of degrees. If you have a chance, read through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 Summary for Policy Makers-it’s available freely online. In it scientists clearly lay out the risks of various impacts on natural ecosystems and human societies. The devil is in the details, if global average temperatures increase only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, the impacts are “considerable”. If temperatures increase 4 degrees or more, the risk become high or very high. The different in temperature increases reflect different emissions scenarios. Two things remain important to understand, first that under all assessed future scenarios some risk of adverse impact remains, and second, risks are substantially reduced under low emissions scenarios. Simply put, no matter what, change is coming, but we still have some say in just how much change it is.

And what can we anticipate in the coming century (and indeed it is a hundred year horizon that these predictions mainly look towards)? Where to start? Risks from climate change are extensions of much of what we see taking place already. As temperatures increase, so do the risks, significantly.  If we look at the pure ecosystem impacts, we can anticipate a continued decline in biodiversity and an increased in extinctions for organisms that can’t adapt and or migrate to follow shifting favorable climate regions fast enough. Weakened ecosystems then become vulnerable to additional problems like diseases vectors and invasive species. These kinds of impacts are what many of us think of when we worry about climate change, as well we should, but we also need to remember that intact ecosystems provide vital services like cleaning water and air, and thus, negative impacts to natural ecosystems also have a negative impact on us. All of the other risks the IPCC report outlines are ones that directly impact the functioning of human society. Fresh water resources are projected to decline due to increased drought, especially in already semi arid areas. At the same time increased precipitation events are expected, which sounds like a good thing, except for when the additional inches of rain all fall at once. Then we have catastrophic flooding, and waste water systems that get overwhelmed, leading to increased pollution of surface water. High latitude areas may see increased freshwater resources, which brings up an important point—there can be effects that have a positive impact. Though, so far the projected negatives have outweighed the projected positives in virtually all areas of assessment.

Food security is another area where climate change is expected to negatively impact the human condition. Wheat, corn, rice and soy are the 4 most widely grown crops world wide, and increasing temperatures are projected in negatively impact the production of three of them (all but possibly soy). Decreased crop yields due to heat and water stress are likely to be the biggest issue, but problems arise with access and distribution as critical infrastructure is weakened by severe weather events. As annual crops, intensive breeding may be able to effect adaptation in a relatively short period of time, and had already yielded some more heat ready, drought tolerant varieties. The question remains, just how hot will it get? How much heat tolerance do we need to breed into these staple crops? These are just a couple of examples of what is coming between now and the end of the 21rst century. We’ll look at others in the coming weeks.

What we find as we dive increasingly deeper into the thought exercise that is “preparing for climate change”, is that while science has identified many negative ecosystem impacts, the things human society needs to pay attention to are the things that enable our “normal” day to day lives, the things that are easy to take for granted. Climate change seems very far away when you hear about a frog in the central American rain forest that has gone extinct, it’s much closer to home when you go to the sink for a glass of water and nothing comes out of the tap, just ask the folks in California. We’ve looked at the science, in this final chapter we’ll be looking at the human part of this story. 

References: 

The Summary for Policy Makers (Summary being code for a document that is still 34 pages long) of the 5^th IPCC report on climate change (2014): http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf

This document is highly recommended, if still a bit dense. It contains many excellent graphics that accompany the assessment of risk.

http://time.com/3672276/climate-change-oceans/

Portland Press Herald (from the Washington Post) on the new NOAA NASA study: http://www.pressherald.com/2015/01/16/climate-change-milestone-outside-of-maine-2014-sizzled/

From Truthout and Bill Moyers, a shit ton of bad news,: http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/06/climate-disruption-advances-26-percent-mammals-face-extinction/

U S Navy predicts an ice free Arctic in ths summer by next year +/-3 years…

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/dec/09/us-navy-arctic-sea-ice-2016-melt