Tag: Climate Change
Quick Study: How Will Climate Change Affect Irrigation of Farm Lands in U.S.?
Quick Study is just what it says — a rapid-fire look at a new conservation science study that might turn some heads.
The Study: McDonald, R. and E. Girvetz. 2013. Two challenges for U.S. irrigation due to climate change: increasing irrigated area in wet states and increasing irrigation rates in dry states. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65589. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065589.
The Questions: Climate change models forecast higher average temperatures that will cause crop-growing seasons in the United States to become hotter and drier. How will this impact the irrigation needs of agriculture in the United States? And how will farmers respond to drier conditions?
The Future of Energy in a World of 400ppm and Rising
When you think of the future of energy, do you think of hillsides blanketed with wind turbines, cars powered by batteries instead of gas, and solar-powered office buildings?
If none of that sounds futuristic enough for you — where are the flying cars, bioengineered “living” cities fed by the sun and algae-powered lights? — that’s because it really isn’t.
The future of clean energy technology is already here, according to Dan Kammen, Jigar Shah and Joe Fargione — panelists at The Nature Conservancy’s “Future of Nature” forum on energy held Monday, May 13 in Boston. These experts — representing academia, business and conservation — agreed: The world has all the technology we need for a clean energy future. The challenge is implementing it at scales that can make a difference for controlling the global greenhouse gas emissions caused by energy production.
And we need this now more than ever. Last week, scientists measured 400ppm of CO2 in Earth’s air — a level that hasn’t existed in millions of years, before humans were around. With the global population expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050 and no uniformed effort to control emissions in sight, CO2 measures will likely surpass the 400ppm marker very soon.
Moderator Anthony Brooks of Boston radio station WBUR — a co-sponsor of the event — asked the panelists: Can renewable energies help make a dent in climate change while still meeting our energy needs? Here’s what they had to say.
Adapting the Science of Adaptation – The Importance of Seeing Through Others’ Eyes
Helping people and nature adapt to climate change is a hot topic in conservation.
But the science behind planning such adaptation — particularly for human communities — isn’t as clean as the rhetoric, and you can’t do it simply in a lab or on paper. Whether we’re talking about major developed world cities or small coastal villages, we have to run our theories by what we call the “test of people” — so they lead to strategies that work. That test often involves understanding how the world looks through the eyes of the people we are trying to help. Nothing like a good reality check.
Case in point: My recent trip to the Grenadines, where I was attending an “action planning meeting” with community members, my colleagues from The Nature Conservancy’s ‘At The Water’s Edge’ project team, and our local partners. Our aim: to identify specific actions that can be taken to help reduce the communities’ vulnerability to coastal hazards (i.e., flooding from sea level rise and storm surge). As conservationists, we hope nature might be a part of the equation — what we call “nature-based adaptation.”
Debate: What Good Are Planetary Boundaries?
Commissariat Point, South Australia, Australia. Image credit: Georgie Sharp/Flicker through a Creative Commons license.
Bob Lalasz is director of science communications for The Nature Conservancy.
Does Earth have limits — limits to how far we can push its natural systems and deplete its resources, beyond which we will incur major blowback?
Almost every environmentalist would answer “yes” — and have pugnaciously strong opinions about what we should do (or stop doing) to avoid crossing them. But what does science tell us about those limits? Which are really science-based? Can innovation can stretch any of them? Are they useful for motivating policymaking and behavior change?
A world-class panel of scientists grappled with these questions last Thursday’s during “The Limits of the Planet: A Debate” — the final forum in this year’s “Nature and Our Future” discussion series, sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and held at The New York Academy of Sciences headquarters in lower Manhattan.
The major disagreements of the evening came over whether outlining global limits for the stable functioning of nature (as opposed to tipping points for individual ecosystems) is good science — and whether “limits” are the correct approach to achieving environmental goals. On this point, not everyone was in the Bill McKibben/350.org camp.
“The evidence is incontrovertible that there are local tipping points — for coral reefs, for instance– but not so for global ones,” said Erle Ellis, a panelist and associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Baltimore, Maryland County. “It’s not a runaway train. Ecosystems change, but it’s not a domino effect. You can change all the systems on the planet. But does that constitute a global tipping point?”
Keep It Cool: What Desert Plants Can Teach Us About Climate Change
Climate change isn’t new. The earth’s organisms have faced the “cope, adapt, or die” paradigm presented by changing climatic conditions since the inception of life on earth more than 3 billion years ago.
Some species already live in extreme conditions (a topic I covered in my last blog post) – at the earth’s freezing poles in the dead of winter, at the apex of tropical mountain peaks that receive tens of meters of rainfall a year, and deep in the dry deserts that comprise a third of the earth’s land area.
The plants and animals able to survive these extreme conditions may have something to teach us about climate change adaptation—especially when the organisms are incapable of crawling up to a cooler elevation or slithering into a deeper riverine pool to escape a heat wave.
As a general rule, plants spend their lives rooted to a single spot on the earth. So they need to be able to withstand 365 days per year of whatever nature can dish out in terms of weather.
Plants from hot deserts—such as the prickly cholla cactus—are no exception, and they have evolved a broad range of impressive strategies for coping with the hottest, driest climate in North America, where a years’ worth of rainfall may come in a single extreme event.
These desert denizens provide us with valuable insight into biological and physical adaptations that allow for survival on a hotter, drier planet that is subject to extreme events (as climate change experts are currently forecasting).
Sanjayan: There’s a Better Way to Communicate about Climate Change
The Orion Magazine blog put up this week an excellent post by Conservancy lead scientist Sanjayan on how his recent trip to Santiago — and the recent, two-day disappearance of that city’s otherwise plentiful water supply — has catalyzed his thinking about how scientists can better communicate the effects of climate change.
While global warming was almost certainly a cause of Santiago’s taps suddenly running dry, Sanjayan writes for Orion that he was surprised there to find that “no one has asked me specifically about climate change — about parts-per-billion, about carbon markets, about a carbon tax, about pipelines, or Kyoto, Copehhagen, or Doha — all the ways U.S. environmentalists and journalists often talk about it.”
Instead, Santiago’s residents wanted to talk about…water supply. So he quickly pivoted to focus on the water issue itself — on a local concern — and conservation measures for the watershed, while avoiding lectures about necessary behavior changes related to emissions. And through this approach, he found people receptive to hearing about climate change.
It’s a fresh and flexible look at why audience-sensitive science communications actually works. Anyone tired of the counterproductive rhetoric and approaches that have dominated climate comms for the last two decades will welcome the model Sanjayan puts forward here.
Why Everything You Know About Science Communications is Wrong, and More Science is the Answer
Recovery begins by admitting you have a problem. But the real problem with communicating science — particularly around climate change and other issues involving risk — is that we’re often focused on the wrong problem. And, as a must-read new paper by Harvard risk communications scholar Dan Kahan argues, only getting truly serious about the science of science communications can keep us from digging the hole even deeper.
Think back to the last conversation you had about climate change with someone who wants global action on the issue. Chances are, the conversation quickly devolved into a cycle of finger pointing that went something like this:
* Blame scientists, because they don’t communicate the risks of climate change clearly and simply enough. Or emotionally enough. Or starkly enough. (Or maybe they shouldn’t be communicating at all, because they’re just no good at it.)
* Blame the media, because they’re not covering climate change enough (or prominently enough, or in a way that connects with people, or with the right mix of local and global relevance, or because they airwaves have been flooded with anti-climate-change rhetoric fueled by big money interests).
* And blame the public, because it’s not scientifically literate enough to understand the risks of climate change, or it’s too distracted by media-fueled triviality to care.
The assumption underlying all this blame? The public isn’t getting the gravity of the problem — because if they did, how could they fail to act? (This is what Kahan and other social scientists call the “public irrationality thesis.”) Ergo: If we could just transfer our scientific knowledge to enough people (and make enough people receptive enough to understand it), those people would of course change their minds to agree with us, change their voting patterns and behavior in the ways we desire…and the world would be saved.
Communications scholars call this chain of reasoning the “injection” or “empty bucket” or “science deficit” model of communications. The real problem: About two decades of science on the science deficit model have shown that it’s not true.
Connect: Helping Animals Move in a Changing Climate
Imagine you’re on a long hike, and you are trying to get to a valley on the other side of a mountain. Do you take a gentle trail that leads you easily around it? Or do you hike straight up the mountain, braving waist-deep snow, frigid wind, slick rocks and risk of death?
It really isn’t much of a decision, is it?
Animals take similar routes when they migrate and roam. A mule deer or a lynx won’t waste calories or risk its life by taking a precarious route. To survive and thrive, they need relatively easy paths to move to feeding, breeding and resting areas.
Now animals face a new reason to move: climate change. As vegetation and climactic conditions change, many species will need to move to new ranges.
But how do they get to these new habitats? Will they find an easy route, or will they have to risk roads, inhospitable terrain, housing developments and other dangerous paths?
Questions like these are at the heart of what ecologists call connectivity: the degree to which a landscape allows wildlife to move from one place to the next. A well-connected landscape is one where animals can move easily. In a disconnected landscape, populations and habitats become isolated from each other.
A new paper published in Conservation Biology by Tristan Nuñez and colleagues from the Washington Wildlife Habitat Connectivity Working Group provides a simple and straightforward method for land managers to account for species shifting their ranges in response to climate change, and to protect and restore land accordingly.
Oceans and Climate Change: Protecting the “Invisible”
Coral bleaching, increasing storms, the loss of polar bears: many impacts of climate change are already vivid in our minds. We naturally worry about the things we can see. Huge waves and the loss of big fish and colorful corals get our attention.
But what about things we can’t see, like the tiny creatures called plankton? They are also poised for dramatic changes.
A recent dive in the sapphire waters of the Caribbean offers a close encounter with plankton. While most of my dive buddies hurry to reach the bottom, I linger as I usually do, pondering the “blue” and looking out for the visible and the invisible.
Suddenly, clouds of tiny filaments come sharply into focus. It’s blue-green algae–Trichodesmium–a type of phytoplankton that plays an important role in these nutrient-poor waters. They essentially break gaseous nitrogen’s tough triple bond and convert it into a form other phytoplankton can feed on.
What would these waters look like without them?
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Editors’ Choice
Danya Gross: Science Illustration: More Than Pretty Pictures
Great illustrations often communicate conservation science when photos, text and CAD sketches fail -- and they can make all the difference in winning community support for a restoration project.
Tim Boucher: The Best Apps for Novice and Serious Birders
Tim reviews offerings from Audubon, iBird, Nat Geo, Peterson and Sibley and tells you which works best in the field.
Criag Groves: Genetic Engineers and Conservation Biologists: Scenes from a First Date
Synthetic biology is way more than "de-extinction" -- and its findings and their consequences could be profound for conservation practice.
Matt Miller: Big Fish: Return of the Alligator gar
Alligator gars were persecuted and eliminated for crimes they didn't commit. A new conservation effort is bringing them back.
Spotlight: Marine Restoration Science
The Future of Coral Reef Restoration Science
Conservancy coral scientist James Byrne says it's discovering how to plant corals in a way that optimizes genetic diversity--but without crossing a very thin line.
The Future of Sea Grass and Shellfish Restoration
Conservancy Marine Steward Bo Lusk argues that letting barrier island breaches remain open is the best thing for bay and sound ecosystems and the shellfish and fish they support.
Restoring Blue Forests--Opportunities for Mangroves
Mangroves grow like weeds -- which makes restoring them easy...unless you put them in the wrong places, says Nature Conservancy senior marine scientist Mark Spalding.
Tales from the Cab -- Risk & Restoration in SE Louisiana
Conservancy Marine Lead Scientist Mike Beck finds passionate support for coastal marsh restoration from a New Orleans cab driver who's lived through Hurricanes Katrina and Isaac.
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