The Discovery Channel has an interesting series of videos about the effects of global warming on: polar bears; the Antarctic Ice Sheets; the Amazon rainforest; and the Great Barrier Reef. They also have a nice bit on what goes into the average American carbon footprint.
Tag: climate change
Natural Selection and Polar vs. Grizzly Bears
What I end up seeing, in this quintessentially 21st century creature, is a glimpse of the future.
— Gamble (2012): One, two, three, er…many. in The Last Word on Nothing.
The effect of rapid Arctic warming on polar bears has been a theme this year in Environmental Science, so this article on the hybridization of polar bears and grizzly bears caught my eye.
As caribou migration routes have moved North, grizzlies have followed and started mating with polar bears. Not only have they produced hybrid young, but those young are fertile. Polar bears and grizzlies only diverged about 150,000 years ago and haven’t developed many genetic differences, despite quite dramatic visual dissimilarities. Second-generation hybrids have now been confirmed in the wild.
This article is also of note to my Middle School science class because we’ve talked about speciation — the divergent evolution of two populations into separate species — before when we looked at the phylogenetic tree and bison evolution in particular. This seems to be a re-convergence after separation. As the climate warms the grizzly bears are able to range further north, while the polar bears are more restricted to the shores by the melted sea ice, so the two populations encounter each other more and more. Thus polar bears, may eventually disappear as they are re-incorporated into the grizzly population.
The author, Jessa Gamble, thinks this is a glimpse of things to come.
Warming of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
… a breakup of the ice sheet, … could raise global sea levels by 10 feet, possibly more.
— Gillis (2012): Scientists Report Faster Warming in Antarctica in The New York Times.
In an excellent article, Justin Gillis highlights a new paper that shows the West Antarctic Ice sheet to be one of the fastest warming places on Earth.
Note to math students: The scientists use linear regression to get the rate of temperature increase.
The record reveals a linear increase in annual temperature between 1958 and 2010 by 2.4±1.2 °C, establishing central West Antarctica as one of the fastest-warming regions globally.
— Bromwich et al., (2012): Central West Antarctica among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth in Nature.
Drought on the Mississippi
Last summer’s drought, and more weather extremes probably due to large-scale global climate change, is having dire effects on shipping on the Mississippi River. Suzanne Goldenberg has an excellent article in the Guardian.
Shipping companies say the economic consequences of a shutdown on the Mississippi would be devastating. About $7bn (£4.3bn) in vital commodities – typically grain, coal, heating oil, and cement – moves on the river at this time of year. Cutting off the transport route would have an impact across the mid-west and beyond.
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Farmers in the area lost up to three-quarters of their corn and soya bean crops to this year’s drought. … Now, however, [they] are facing the prospect of not being able to sell their grain at all because they can’t get it to market. The farmers may also struggle to find other bulk items, such as fertiliser, that are typically shipped by barge.
— Goldenberg (2012): Mississippi river faces shipping freeze as water levels drop in The Guardian.
The proposed solution is to release more water from the Missouri, however there would be a steep price to pay.
The shipping industry in St Louis wants the White House to order the release of more water from the Missouri river, which flows into the Mississippi, to keep waters high enough for the long barges to float down the river to New Orleans.
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Sending out more water from the Missouri would doom states upstream, such as Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota, which depend on water from the Missouri and are also caught in the drought.
“There are farmers and ranchers up there with livestock that don’t have water to stay alive. They don’t have enough fodder. They don’t have enough irrigation water,” said Robert Criss, a hydrologist at Washington University in St Louis, who has spent his career studying the Mississippi. “What a dumb way to use water during a drought.”
$10.09 per ton of Carbon Dioxide
… one metric ton of carbon dioxide is what’s produced by an average month of electricity use in a U.S. home.
— Troeh (2012): California’s first carbon auction launches pollution market on Marketplace.
California recently auctioned off a set of carbon emission permits as the start of an effort to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses with an emissions trading system.
The first 23.1 million permits sold out at $10.09 per ton.
Eve Troeh discusses:
Reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.A.
Scott Tong has an interesting article in Marketplace about how the U.S. is reducing its carbon dioxide emissions through things like regulation of car fuel efficiency and light bulbs.
Cranberries and Climate Change
The problem with global climate change and agriculture not only that it will probably make it harder to grow crops as the continents dry, but also that where you can grow thing will also change as ecological regions shift. Places where there are long traditions of crops such as sugar maples and cranberries will have to adapt, and often, adapting isn’t easy. This article from Marketplace looks at cranberries in Massachusetts.
New York Mayor on Climate
Just a few days after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg considered the role of climate change:
… The floods and fires that swept through our city left a path of destruction that will require years of recovery and rebuilding work. And in the short term, our subway system remains partially shut down, and many city residents and businesses still have no power. In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighborhoods – something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable.
Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week’s devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.
Here in New York, our comprehensive sustainability plan – PlaNYC – has helped allow us to cut our carbon footprint by 16 percent in just five years, which is the equivalent of eliminating the carbon footprint of a city twice the size of Seattle. Through the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group – a partnership among many of the world’s largest cities – local governments are taking action where national governments are not.
But we can’t do it alone. We need leadership from the White House – and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.
Mitt Romney, too, has a history of tackling climate change. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed on to a regional cap- and-trade plan designed to reduce carbon emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels. “The benefits (of that plan) will be long- lasting and enormous – benefits to our health, our economy, our quality of life, our very landscape. These are actions we can and must take now, if we are to have ‘no regrets’ when we transfer our temporary stewardship of this Earth to the next generation,” he wrote at the time.
— Michael R. Bloomberg, 2012: A Vote for a President to Lead on Climate Change in Bloomberg.com.
While NPR has an article on a proposed, multi-billion dollar, offshore barrier to prevent the storm surge.
Since we’re talking about environmental economics at the moment, I played the interview, had my students read the Bloomberg excerpt, and then provoked a discussion of the value of human life with the question, “If the proposed $10 billion project could save 50 lives, would it be worth it?”
To keep the discussion focused I asked them to ignore all the other possible benefits of the barrier.
It’s a really tricky issue to deal with, but we ended up talking about how the U.S. government estimates the monetary value of human life. According to a recent New York Times article, values range from $6.1 million (Dept. of Transportation) to $9.1 million (EPA).
The business community historically has pushed for regulators to put a dollar value on life, part of a broader campaign to make agencies prove that the benefits of proposed regulations exceed the costs.
But some business groups are reconsidering the effectiveness of cost-benefit analysis as a check on regulations. The United States Chamber of Commerce is now campaigning for Congress to assert greater control over the rule-making process, reflecting a judgment that formulas may offer less reliable protection than politicians.
Some consumer groups, meanwhile, find themselves cheering the government’s results but reluctant to embrace the method. Advocates for increased regulation have long argued that cost-benefit analysis understates both the value of life and the benefits of government oversight.
— Appelbaum (2011): As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret in the New York Times.