Climate change accelerates maturing of grape in wine production

                             Johann Martínez-Lüscher , Nafarroako Unibertsitatea

The increase in temperatures and of CO2 levels – the consequences of climate change – accelerates the maturing of grapes in wine production, affecting colour and possibly aromas”. This was the conclusion of the PhD thesis defended by Johann Martínez-Lüscher, undertaken jointly by the University of Navarra and the University of Bordeaux.

The biologist explained that if the forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of a level of 700ppm of carbon dioxide and a temperature increase of 4ºC are proved correct, “the accumulation of sugars could be so rapid that the rest of these processes that depend on this will not be capable of keeping up. This will mean that, on comparing grapes with the same concentration of sugars or degree of alcohol, the crops under climate change conditions will have poorer colouration and this will be noticed in the wine”.

In fact, “it is increasingly more frequent to find wines with a higher alcoholic degree due to the over maturing of the grape”. Nonetheless, in the framework of climate change, the consequences can vary. “For example, the changes in levels of ultraviolet radiation or the decrease in rainfall may have antagonistic effects to those caused by an increase in temperature or CO2 levels. Thus, there are many unknowns about what the future holds”, he added.

Wine in a new scenario

In this way wine production will have to find solutions in order to confront environmental challenges. “The use of slower maturing ‘clones’ (sub-varieties) could be one of the possible strategies. It would also be very tempting to substitute the varieties planted in each location by others better adapted to warmer climates, but this would to a great extent mean giving up the typical characteristics of each variety of our wines – something unthinkable to date”.

Nevertheless, as this expert pointed out, climate change can provide new opportunities: for example, the production of a type of wine in cooler climes where it was not possible before. “This is the case of the incipient wine industry in the United Kingdom where I intend to continue working”, stated the researcher.

Mr. Martínez-Lüscher’s research has been financed by the University of Navarra, the Navarre-Aquitane Cross-Border Cooperation Programme, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the 7th European Union Framework Programme.

Source: Elhuyar Fundazioa

NCDC Releases 2014 U.S. Climate Report

The 2014 annual average contiguous U.S. temperature was 52.6°F, 0.5°F above the 20th century average. This ranked as the 34th warmest year in the 1895–2014 record. Very warm conditions dominated the West, while the Midwest and Mississippi Valley were cool.

The average contiguous U.S. precipitation was 30.76 inches, 0.82 inch above average, and ranked as the 40th wettest year in the 120-year period of record. The northern United States was wet, and the Southern Plains were dry; the national drought footprint shrank about 2 percent. 

In 2014, there were eight weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States. These eight events resulted in the deaths of 53 people. The events include: the western U.S. drought, the Michigan and Northeast flooding event, five severe storm events, and one winter storm event. 

This summary from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides to government, business, academia, and the public to support informed decision making.

Source: NOAA

NOAA joins with Princeton and other institutions in six-year study to help public better understand Southern Ocean

NOAA is one of 10 institutions working together on the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling program, or SOCCOM, a six-year, $21 million initiative to improve our understanding of the importance and health of the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica. (Image by Oscar Schofield, Rutgers University)

The Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica lends a considerable hand in keeping Earth's temperature hospitable by soaking up half of the human-made carbon in the atmosphere and a majority of the planet's excess heat. Yet, the inner workings — and global importance — of this ocean that accounts for 30 percent of the world's ocean area remains relatively unknown to scientists, as observations remain hindered by dangerous seas.

NOAA is one of 10 institutions working together on the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling program, or SOCCOM, a six-year, $21 million initiative to improve our understanding of the importance and health of the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica. (Image by Oscar Schofield, Rutgers University)

Princeton University, NOAA and eight other partner institutions now seek to make the Southern Ocean better known scientifically and publicly through a $21 million program that will create a biogeochemical and physical portrait of the ocean using hundreds of robotic floats deployed around Antarctica and an expanded computational capacity. The Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling program, or SOCCOM, is a six-year initiative headquartered at Princeton and funded by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Polar Programs, with additional support from the NOAA and NASA. The U.S. Argo program, led by CPO's Steven Piotrowicz, will play a major role in the project. 

"The scarcity of observations in the Southern Ocean and inadequacy of earlier models, combined with its importance to the Earth's carbon and climate systems, means there is tremendous potential for groundbreaking research in this region," Sarmiento said.
Central to the program are roughly 200 floats outfitted with biogeochemical sensors that will provide almost continuous information related to the ocean's carbon, nutrient (nitrate, in particular) and oxygen content, both at and deep beneath the surface. The floats are augmented biogeochemical versions of the nearly 4,000 Argo floats deployed worldwide to measure ocean salinity and temperature. SOCCOM marks the first large-scale deployment of these biogeochemical floats.

"These floats are revolutionary and this major new observational initiative will give us unprecedented year-round coverage of biogeochemistry in the Southern Ocean," Sarmiento said.

The Southern Ocean research will involve using Argo type floats equipped with new sensors that measure pH, nitrates in addition to temperature and salinity. (NOAA)

The floats will increase the monthly data currently coming out of the Southern Ocean by 10 to 30 times, Sarmiento said. That data will be used to improve recently developed high-resolution earth-system models, which will allow for a better understanding of the Southern Ocean and for better projections of Earth’s climate and biogeochemical trajectory. In keeping with SOCCOM's knowledge sharing, or "broader impacts," component, all the information collected will be freely available to the public, researchers and industry.

SOCCOM will provide direct observations to further understand the importance of the Southern Ocean as suggested by models and ocean studies. Aside from carbon and heat uptake, models have indicated that the Southern Ocean delivers nutrients to lower-latitude surface waters that are critical to ocean ecosystems around the world. In addition, the impacts of ocean acidification as levels of carbon dioxide in atmosphere increase are projected to be most severe in the Southern Ocean.

Other than administering the project, Sarmiento and other Princeton researchers will co-lead the modeling and broader impacts components, as well as coordinated data management. Researchers from NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory housed on Princeton's Forrestal Campus will carry out high-resolution earth-system simulations in support of the modeling effort, which is led by the University of Arizona and includes collaborators from the University of Miami.

The floats will be constructed at the University of Washington with sensors from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; NOAA’s Climate Program Office will provide half of the basic Argo floats. Float deployment, observation analysis and data assimilation will be led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. Climate Central, a non-profit science and journalism organization based in Princeton, will oversee the broader-impacts component. Researchers from Oregon State University and NOAA will develop the floats’ carbon algorithms.

“The SOCCOM effort is the first systematic expansion of the US Argo program into biogeochemistry. The unique subsurface ocean observations from SOCCOM will contribute towards our efforts to observe the global oceans,” said David Legler, director of NOAA’s Climate Observations Division.

In addition, NASA will support a complementary project involving researchers at the University of Maine and Rutgers University that will equip the floats with bio-optical sensors intended to gather data about biological processes in the water column.

This web story was written by Morgan Kelly, science writer for Princeton University, and includes an additional quote from NOAA's David Legler

Source: NOAA

New research shows ocean warming poses "immediate threat" to keystone reef-building coral in the Caribbean

New research published in The Proceeding of the Royal Society - Biological Sciences provides new insights on the threat  ocean warming poses on coral growth in Mesoamerican barrier reefs.  The research, partially funded by CPO's Climate Monitoring program, used laboratory experiments to examine the adverse effects of ocean warming and acidification, and showed that the warming predicted by the IPCC for the end of the 21st century produced a five-fold decrease in coral calcification - the process by which corals produce calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and build reefs.

“The reef-building coral Siderastrea siderea exhibits parabolic responses to ocean acidification and warming,” is part of on-going work of NOAA-funded researcher Dr. Justin Ries that is looking at various aspects of climate variability, change, and ocean acidification on coral growth.  Dr. Ries and colleagues have been examining long term coral reef growth patterns at one of the largest barrier reefs in the world, off the coast of southern Belize. The research aims to create100 year records of coral growth at this reef by examining growth rates and environmental factors. As part of this work, Dr. Ries and his team found substantially decreasing growth rates over the last several years, at the same time that ocean acidification and temperature have been increasing.

Massive Starlet Coral (Siderastrea siderea) Image courtesy: D. Gordon E. Robertson via Creative Commons

This new research, led by post-doctoral researcher Dr. Karl Castillo, was designed to isolate the effects increasing ocean acidification and temperature had on Siderastrea sidereal, an important keystone and reef building coral species at the reef. By extracting coral colonies and returning them to the lab, researchers were able to design separate experiments around increasing temperature and decreasing ocean pH, and measure the coral response. While the most adverse effects on corals may arise from both acidification and temperature warming, researchers wanted to better understand the specific responses to these individually, which could aid efforts to predict and potentially mitigate the impacts of changing ocean conditions on coral.

They found that both ocean acidification and ocean warming had a “parabolic effect” on this important coral species. This means that while moderate decreases in the pH of seawater and moderate rises in temperature led to increases in coral building, in both cases researchers found a “tipping point” at which the coral calcification rates started decreasing. For ocean acidification, researchers recreated seawater conditions that would occur from the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from pre-industrial up through the present, the predicted end-of-century value, and up to six times the present condition. They found the “tipping point” at which calcification started leveling off and finally decreasing was actually well past the acidifications that would be expected by the end of century. For this particular species, they concluded, ocean acidification expected over the next century alone may not have a significant adverse effect.

Figure 1: Rates of reef-building calcification observed during the experiment for (left panel) increasing levels of ocean acidification and (right panel) temperatures ranging from 25C to 32C.

For warming ocean temperatures, however, the results were very different.  For the temperature experiments, researchers grew the coral colonies in temperatures from 25C to 32C, which covers the range of annual minimum and maximum temperatures of ocean temperatures recorded near the reef over 2002-2014, as well as annual average seawater temperatures expected over the next century. Thus the researchers were hoping to capture how the coral responds to the year to year variability seen now as well as what general conditions are predicted to by like by the end of the century. They found that while reef-building calcification rates increased for corals at 28C relative to 32C, skeletal building dropped off dramatically – nearly 80% - in corals growing at 32C. This parabolic response indicates that for this important reef building species, ocean warming over the next few decades could be an immediate serious threat, as conditions pass what the research found to be a species tipping point. Researchers note that the actual reef will experience changes in both stressors – ocean acidification and ocean warming – together over the next century, and will continue to work to understand how this and other reefs may respond.

You can watch a YouTube video on this and other aspects of Dr. Ries coral reef research here:  



Source: CRO

Heat waves becoming more prominent in urban areas, research reveals

Prolonged periods of extreme heat increased significantly between 1973 and 2012 in almost half of the urban areas the researchers analyzed. Credit: Ucla

The frequency of heat waves has increased dramatically over the past 40 years, and the trend appears to be growing faster in urban areas than in less-populated areas around the world, a new study suggests.

“Our findings suggest that urban areas are experiencing a kind of double whammy — a combination of general climatic warming combined with the heat island effect, wherein human activities and the built environment trap heat, preventing cities from cooling down as fast as rural areas,” said Dennis Lettenmaier, a co-author of the study and a UCLA geography professor. “Everything’s warming up, but the effect is amplified in urban areas.”

Lettenmaier and his co-authors studied 217 urban areas across the globe and found that prolonged periods of extreme heat increased significantly in 48 percent of them between 1973 and 2012.

The results, which were published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, show that about only 2 percent of those urban areas experienced a significant decline in heat waves. And the change was more dramatic at night: Almost two-thirds of the urban areas showed significant increases in the frequency of extremely hot nights.

“The fact that the trend was so much stronger at night underscores the role of the heat island effect in urban areas,” Lettenmaier said. “You have heat being stored in buildings and in asphalt, concrete and other building materials, and they don’t cool down as quickly as they would outside of the urban area. This effect was likely exacerbated by decreasing wind in most of the urban areas.”

The study is one of the first to focus solely on the extent of extreme weather in urban areas globally and to examine disparities between densely populated and less-densely populated areas.

Lettenmaier collaborated with researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Northeastern University and the University of Washington. The team obtained daily observations for rain, air temperature and wind speed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The researchers identified about 650 urban areas with populations greater than 250,000 and then refined the list to the 217 locales based on the areas’ proximity to weather stations with complete weather records and NOAA data — most were located at airports close to urban areas. Although the researchers would have liked to have more data for urban areas in Africa, Lettenmaier said the report provides as close as possible to a representative sample of changing weather conditions in the world’s cities. 

For each of the locales in the study, the researchers identified extremes for temperature, precipitation and wind, calculated heat and cold waves, and pinpointed individual extremely hot days and nights.

The study defined heat waves as periods in which the daily maximum temperature was hotter than 99 percent of days for the four-decade period and in which those temperatures were sustained for a consecutive period of six or more days. (The median length of heat waves was eight days.) It found that the average number of heat waves per year increased by over 50 percent during the period.

Of the five years with the largest number of heat waves, four were the most recent years for which data was available: 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. Urban areas in South America experienced the greatest increase in frequency of heat waves, followed in order by those in Africa, Europe, India and North America.

Researchers also found other striking examples of climate change within urban settings. Sixty percent experienced a significant decline in extreme windy days, 17 percent experienced a significant increase in daily precipitation extremes, and 10 percent experienced a significant increase in maximum annual precipitation.

“Urban areas make up a relatively small part of the global land area, but over half the world’s populations now live in them, so the trend is troublesome,” said lead author Vimal Mishra, an assistant professor of civil engineering at IIT Gandhinagar. “The combination of higher temperatures and lower wind in particular is not a good combination for human health and well-being. This should concern everyone.”

The increase in precipitation could damage cities’ infrastructure, which could also mean large economic losses, Mishra said.

Using a separate data set of 142 pairs of urban and non-urban areas, the researchers found that the frequency of heat waves grew 56 percent more quickly in urban settings than in surrounding areas that were less populated. Urban areas experienced 60 percent fewer extremely windy days than non-urban areas.

“In urban areas, buildings are disrupting the air flow, which affects not only the immediate area of buildings, but apparently the larger regional wind fields,” Lettenmaier said. “The reduction in wind may well be exacerbating the heat island effect.” 

Source: UCLA

Using Technology to Help Wild Cats and People Coexist

In Central India, F&ES doctoral student Jennie Miller is helping develop strategies to limit the increasingly frequent interactions between humans and wild cats that have triggered massive declines in populations of tigers and leopards.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller

For centuries, populations of tigers and leopards in central India have plummeted in the face of habitat degradation, the loss of prey, and a rise in sport hunting. Over the last few decades, however, it has been the increases in poaching and “retaliation killings” by livestock owners that have become the greatest threats facing these big cats.

 

Jennie Miller, a doctoral student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, says the best strategy to stem these losses is to limit the interactions between these rare cats and livestock animals. And she’s developing strategies that use spatial technology to achieve this goal.

 

In an interview, Miller describes the relationship between wild cats and humans in this part of the world, how simple technologies can reduce conflicts, and the risks of working so close to these predators.

 

Can you describe the research you’re doing in India? 

In a nutshell, I’m creating geospatial tools to help people and big cats sustainably coexist. In many parts of Asia, people graze their livestock in landscapes shared with tigers and leopards. Big cats regularly kill domesticated livestock since they are easy prey, causing profound livelihood loses for livestock owners. For example, in the Kanha Tiger Reserve in central India where I work, more than 400 cattle, buffalo, goats, and pigs are killed each year. Though this is less than 0.5 percent of the 85,000 livestock in the area, even a small number of attacks can create a sense of insecurity and frustration for livestock owners. To reduce attacks, owners sometimes lace livestock carcasses with pesticides to poison the cats when they return to feed. Since only about 3,500 tigers remain in the wild, every cat counts for the survival of the species.

My research aims to help reduce this human-carnivore conflict by minimizing carnivore attacks on livestock. I’m building spatial models to understand where tigers and leopards are most likely to attack livestock. These models also generate “risk maps” to predict where future attacks may occur to assist the Forest Department and villagers when managing and grazing livestock. If livestock can be grazed in habitats where carnivores are less likely to attack — for example, away from dense forests where tigers hunt — then coexistence between people and tigers and leopards may be more feasible.

 

What are the threats facing these animals? And, for that matter, the people who live in these communities?

Over the past few centuries, habitat degradation, prey loss, and uncontrolled sport hunting have caused massive declines in tiger and leopard populations. However, in the past few decades, poaching and retaliation killing have emerged as the two greatest immediate threats for these big cats. Recent surges in the value of tiger and leopard body parts in international markets in southeast and east Asia — where they are sold for traditional medicine — are motivating a spree of illegal poaching, especially within India, which supports half the world’s wild tigers.

 

Retaliation killing — when villagers poison carnivores after losing livestock — also contributes to species declines, particularly since these incidences often kill young dispersing tigers and leopards as they move through agricultural fields to colonize or join other populations in nearby protected areas. And poaching and retaliation killing can be closely linked, since poachers may capitalize on a livestock owner’s desire to remove a troublesome tiger.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller Jennie Miller interviews a forest guard

Attacks on humans are rare — far less frequent than deaths due to car accidents or even snake bites. Perhaps due to their rarity and primal essence, the media often sensationalizes these “man-eater” attacks, which can further instigate anger, fear, and retaliations from people. Nonetheless, attacks do occasionally happen. People who share forests with tigers and leopards are very aware of these risks and take precautions to avoid chances of attack, such as staying indoors at night, traveling in groups and regularly protecting small children. There is a great amount of respect — driven by a mixture of fear, appreciation and reverence — for large cats in India.

 

What does the mapping technology you’re using reveal? 

We’re at an exciting point in time where spatial technology like GPS units and satellite data are enabling the development of simple tools for management and conservation. One example is “spatial risk mapping,” which I use for my research. Basically, I recorded the GPS coordinates of hundreds of dead livestock in my study site as well as random sites to measure variation across the landscape. I combine these with information about the location of other environmental and human features, such as roads, villages, forests, and shrubs. I then build statistical models to predict the probability of a tiger or leopard attack on livestock across the landscape.

 

The end result is a map that can help visually identify where attacks might occur in the future. These maps can serve as powerful tools because they transcend language and education barriers by visually representing risk and so could be useful to help villagers in remote areas protect their livestock.

 

What have you learned so far?

Since tigers and leopards both use stalking hunting tactics to attack prey, I expected them to show similar hunting patterns. However, I found that tigers and leopards differ greatly in where they tend to kill livestock: Tigers attack most often in dense forests away from human infrastructure like roads and villages, whereas leopards kill in more open vegetation and aren’t as deterred by human presence. In fact, on several occasions, leopards boldly strolled into villages at night and killed livestock in bamboo enclosures adjacent to people’s mud huts while they slept inside!

“People generally know how to avoid tiger attacks but could perhaps benefit from more conservation support for actively protecting livestock from leopard attacks.”— Jennie Miller

I also expected livestock owners to have a strong sense of where both tigers and leopards kill. Yet when I interviewed owners and compared their perceptions about where these two cats tend to kill, I found that owners have a very accurate sense of where tigers attack but a poorer understanding of where leopards attack. I suspect this disparity occurs because tigers are constrained to hunting in dense forests but leopards can kill in a broader diversity of habitats, making it generally harder to predict where a leopard will attack. This means that people generally know how to avoid tiger attacks but could perhaps benefit from more conservation support for actively protecting livestock from leopard attacks, such as by strengthening night enclosures or hiring livestock herders. 

 

What do you hope will come out of your research?

These results provide valuable insights into how big cats, livestock, and people interact which I hope will help strengthen animal husbandry and livestock management to better protect livestock and reduce human-carnivore conflict. I’m working with the Forest Department of Kanha Tiger Reserve to integrate these spatial risk models into management to help guide their conservation efforts. For example, risk maps can be used to understand carnivore hunting behavior and patterns, especially the distinction between tigers and leopards, for developing strategies for protecting livestock. In considering the risk of an attack alongside other grazing considerations — such as browse quality and access from villages — livestock owners may also be able to make grazing decisions in a more informed way.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller Miller inspects the remains of a cow killed by a wild cat.

What other skills have you had to develop to conduct this research? 

Learning Hindi has enabled me to more personally relate with villagers in India to understand the ramifications of livestock losses, as well as to understand the jokes made by my field assistants. Since I surveyed dead livestock and collected tiger and leopard scat for a year, I quickly developed a tolerance for bad smells, maggots, blood, and feces. I realized this a few months into fieldwork when I found myself elbow-deep in a bucket of water and tiger feces, separating the hair from particulate matter in order to identify prey contents. And to this day, I still reach for my GPS when I smell road kill. But more seriously, I also acquired a deep respect for the villagers and forest guards who literally risk their lives daily to live alongside tigers and leopards.

 

Have you ever felt unsafe doing this work, walking in places where these animals lurk?

Definitely! Though tigers and leopards rarely attack people, one or two people — usually solitary livestock herders or forest guards — are attacked in Kanha Tiger Reserve every year. These big cats don’t usually approach groups of people, so I always took a team of three to 10 people with me when surveying livestock carcasses. We also tried to avoid visiting fresh kills to reduce the chance that the cats would still be feeding when we approached. But sometimes this couldn’t be avoided and I can recall several cases when we knew a cat was lingering nearby.

 

Once, when my team and I were walking through a dense forest towards three cow carcasses killed the night before, the villagers in front of me said they could hear the tigress walking. When we reached the carcasses a few moments later, there was fresh blood on the carcass, indicating that she had been feeding a few minutes before we arrived. That day I truly began to understand the risks that villages take in living with these cats.

 

What made you want to focus your research in India? 

In January 2005 when I was a sophomore in college, I accompanied my father, a yoga and meditation teacher, on a visit to India to meet his guru. During our trip I saw first-hand the sudden tragedy of the tsunami in coastal Chennai and also heard stories while on safari about man-eating tigers in the dense jungles of Corbett Tiger Reserve. I was mesmerized by the people’s vibrancy and resiliency despite these unpredictable hardships, and greatly impressed by the extent to which Indians are economically and spiritually connected to nature. The trip helped inspire me to major in ecology and take classes in South Asian religion, art and language, and to later return to India as a Fulbright Scholar to study bird conservation in the western Himalayas. After a year of research in India I was hooked. I hope that I can continue working in India for the rest of my life.

Source: Yale University

Peru’s indigenous people call for protections against environmental threats

As delegates from around the world gather in Lima, Peru, to work on a framework on climate change, thousands of Peruvians flocked to the capital to demand better protection for their lands and cultures. As part of our Culture at Risk series, Jeffrey Brown reports from Lima on the struggle to balance the protection of remote indigenous communities with industry and growth.
Credit: Jeffrey Brown

GWEN IFILL: International delegates have gathered for climate change talks in Lima, Peru, this week, hoping to build the framework for a plan to cut the world’s heat-trapping gas emissions.

Secretary of State John Kerry arrived there today to help with that new accord. But, for many Peruvians, the focus is local, as mining and timber operations encroach into once pristine areas inhabited by indigenous tribes.

Jeffrey Brown is in Lima, and has this report, part of his series Culture at Risk.

JEFFREY BROWN: There were dancers and drummers, banners and chants, traditional clothing of all kinds, a march of thousands, many of them tribal people, that shut down part of downtown Lima for several hours, demanding better protection of their lands and their cultures. They came from near and far, some very far.

This group from the Ucayali region in Eastern Peru had traveled for several days, by boat, plane, and bus, to get here from their remote homes.

Grimaldo Villacorta heads the group.

GRIMALDO VILLACORTA (through interpreter): For us, as an indigenous population, it’s important to be here, because we want to stop climate change. We used to have regular seasons, summer and winter, during which we planted our seeds. But now, with the climate changing, we can work the land, but sometimes we cannot plant seeds. There is no production.

JEFFREY BROWN: This demonstration was set up as a kind of counterpoint to the official climate talks going on across town. The idea is to raise awareness about the increasing and increasingly violent encroachment on tribal lands in Peru and elsewhere around the globe.

Throughout the crowd, portraits of one of the martyrs of this movement, Edwin Chota, a Peruvian environmental activist from the Ashaninka Indian tribe who’d spent years fighting illegal logging on his community’s lands.

In September, Chota and three others from the village of Saweto were shot and killed near the Brazilian border, in the vast Amazon Basin that’s home to about half of Peru’s more than 1,500 indigenous communities, with some 300,000 people. Chota had spoken of threats he received as he fought to gain official title to his lands and keep loggers at bay.

EDWIN CHOTA, Environmental Activist (through interpreter): They are loggers. They have arms. They have everything. And they are never going to pay attention to us. So we need the support of government institutions to protect the region at the border.

JEFFREY BROWN: Chota’s remains were found by a river near his home. Two loggers have been charged with his murder.

That and other incidents led the advocacy group Global Witness to declare Peru one of the world’s most dangerous countries for environmental activists. And by all accounts, illegal logging, mining, and drug trafficking have been on the rise in this area. The World Bank estimates, for example, that some 80 percent of Peru’s timber exports were cut without a permit.

In Lima this week, Patricia Balbuena, the vice culture minister who overseas indigenous relations, said the government is working to resolve land ownership disputes, but that administrations past and present have struggled to ensure legal rights and safety in these distant communities.

PATRICIA BALBUENA, Vice Minister of Intercultural Affairs, Peru (through interpreter): These are remote areas with very little government presence because of geographical barriers. For example, from the capital of Pucallpa region to the community of Saweto, it takes six to eight days by boat.

That is why the most important issue is to assure the government’s presence, not only in terms of a military or police presence, but also in what a government should provide to its indigenous populations: health, education, social services, and security.

JEFFREY BROWN: Encroachment deep into Amazon forests may also be behind scenes like this, as previously isolated or uncontacted tribes come into the open.

Last year, more than 100 members of the Mashco-Piro tribe appeared at a river in Southeast Peru.

Anthropologist Beatriz Huertas studies groups like this who’ve chosen to live apart from civilization. She thinks she knows why more are now making contact.

BEATRIZ HUERTAS, Anthropologist (through interpreter): I think that, first of all, it’s owed to the great pressures on their lands and natural resources, and that those are forcing these isolated peoples to alter their ways and are leading to their displacement.

JEFFREY BROWN: There are more such tribes than you might think. The advocacy group Survival International estimates there are 15 in Peru alone, and at least 100 around the globe.

The highest concentration is here in the Amazon. Citing the threat of contagious disease and other problems that have decimated previously uncontacted tribes, Beatriz Huertas says the government needs to take immediate action.

BEATRIZ HUERTAS (through interpreter): To protect them, it’s necessary to officially recognize their lands and to establish a series of protection mechanisms to guarantee their lives, their health and the right of these populations to decide for themselves what lives they want to live.

JEFFREY BROWN: I asked Vice Minister Balbuena the overarching question, how Peru can foster investment and growth, while also protecting vulnerable people and cultures.

PATRICIA BALBUENA (through interpreter): I think we always feel we need to do more. I think the demands of the indigenous peoples require us to act faster. And we can’t advance a peaceful society if we don’t find a balancing point between growth on the one hand and respect and protection of rights on the other.

JEFFREY BROWN: Achieving a balance has also, of course, been on the minds of attendees at the climate change summit this week in Lima. After years of setbacks and sidesteps, the goal here is for nations to commit, or at least commit to committing, to specific domestic emissions cuts.

The grand hope, a new global treaty to be signed at next year’s meeting in Paris. The effort got a boost last month with an agreement between China and the U.S., the world’s largest economies and polluters, to limit their greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades.

In pavilions open to the public, Peruvians of all ages took in exhibitions that explained the tangible effects of climate change. There, conference attendee Chris Field told me he felt encouraged by what he’d heard so far at the meetings, but that huge challenges remained.

CHRIS FIELD, Carnegie Institution: The big challenge is ambition of mitigation, how much we decrease the emissions of heat-trapping gases, ambition of adaption, how much we invest in helping people cope with the climate changes that can’t be avoided, and how tightly those two things should be connected.

JEFFREY BROWN: And getting — and getting individual countries to actually make commitments.

CHRIS FIELD: Well, what you find is that, kind of constitutionally, there’s a difference between the perspective that the developed countries take, which is really focused on mitigation aspects, and the developing countries, who want to see much more of a interlinkage between investments in decreasing amounts of heat-trapping gases and increasing investments in helping people cope.

JEFFREY BROWN: Case in point, of course, is the host country itself, which faces many long-term environmental threats and, as tribal demonstrators shouted in the streets, immediate, urgent ones that demand answers and actions.

I’m Jeffrey Brown reporting from Lima for the “PBS NewsHour.”

WATCH VIDEO


Source: PBS

Female frogs modify offspring development depending on reproduction date

Breeding male of Rana arvalis from the study area. Credit: Germán Orizaola

Global warming is altering the reproduction of plants and animals, notably accelerating the date when reproduction and other life processes occur. A study by the University of Uppsala (Sweden), including the participation of Spanish researcher Germán Orizaola, has discovered that some amphibians are capable of making their offspring grow at a faster rate if they have been born later due to the climate.

Over recent decades many organisms, both plants and animals, have experienced a notable advance in the date when many of their life processes (like reproduction, migration or flowering) occur, attributed to the impact of climate change. An article published in the journal Ecology examines the effects that these changes in the reproduction date have on the life cycles of the amphibians.

"We specifically examined whether changes in the reproduction date of a common amphibian species in the north of Europe, Rana arvalis, can condition the growth and development of their offspring," the Spanish researcher Germán Orizaola, from the University of Uppsala (Sweden) and co-author of the study, said.

Results revealed that female frogs have the ability to influence both the growth rate and the development of their offspring, and they adjust it depending on the date of reproduction.

According to Orizaola, "the mechanism by which the female frogs can condition the growth of their larvae could be due to the genes associated with the maintenance of their biological clock being transferred to the embryos and becoming active even before fertilisation. This would provide the larvae with the exact information regarding the progression of the growing season."

The later the birth, the faster the growth

One of the characteristics associated with climate change is an increase in the interannual variability of climatic conditions, so organisms are also exposed to greater uncertainty when it comes to determining the right time to reproduce. This explains why the existence of mechanisms adjusting growth and development rates depending on the variation in the start of breeding is highly advantageous for many species.

In particular, as part of this study they observed that by delaying the date of reproduction (which simulated a time of environmental instability), the result was an equivalent reduction in the growth period for the larvae. "That means the later this species of frog breeds, the faster the larvae develop," explains the scientist.

An interesting aspect of the study is that the acceleration in growth is produced under constant lab conditions. "The larvae were not exposed to any outside sign that would indicate the progression of the growing season," adds Orizaola.

"This result is very novel and demonstrates that the acceleration in the development of the larvae is conditioned by the breeding females, which reveals the existence of a 'transgenerational effect' in which the breeding adults are capable of altering key aspects of the life cycle for the following generations, to better prepare them to survive the environmental conditions that they are going to experience," concludes the expert.

Source: Plataforma SINC.

Tornado strength, frequency, linked to climate change

Tornado (stock image). New research by a Florida State University geography professor shows that climate change may be playing a key role in the strength and frequency of tornadoes hitting the United States. Credit: © fotola70 / Fotolia

New research by a Florida State University geography professor shows that climate change may be playing a key role in the strength and frequency of tornadoes hitting the United States.

Published Wednesday in the journal Climate Dynamics, Professor James Elsner writes that though tornadoes are forming fewer days per year, they are forming at a greater density and strength than ever before. So, for example, instead of one or two forming on a given day in an area, there might be three or four occurring.

"We may be less threatened by tornadoes on a day-to-day basis, but when they do come, they come like there's no tomorrow," Elsner said.

Elsner, an expert in climate and weather trends, said in the past, many researchers dismissed the impact of climate change on tornadoes because there was no distinct pattern in the number of tornado days per year. In 1971, there were 187 tornado days, but in 2013 there were only 79 days with tornadoes.

But a deeper dive into the data showed more severity in the types of storms and that more were happening on a given day than in previous years.

"I think it's important for forecasters and the public to know this," Elsner said. "It's a matter of making sure the public is aware that if there is a higher risk of a storm, there may actually be multiple storms in a day."

The United States experiences more tornadoes than any other country, and despite advances in technology and warning systems, they still remain a hazard to residents in storm-prone areas. The 2011 tornado season, for example, had nearly 1,700 storms and killed more than 550 people.

So far, in 2014, there have been 189 storms with a death toll of 43, according to the NOAA/National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center.

One bright spot of news in the research, Elsner added, was that the geographic areas impacted most regularly by tornadoes do not appear to be growing.

Elsner was joined on the paper by independent researcher Thomas H. Jagger, formerly a research associate at Florida State University, and meteorologist Svetoslava Elsner.

Source: Florida State University

Global warming skeptics unmoved by extreme weather

What will it take to convince skeptics of global warming that the phenomenon is real? Surely, many scientists believe, enough droughts, floods and heat waves will begin to change minds. Credit: © lightmemorystock / Fotolia

What will it take to convince skeptics of global warming that the phenomenon is real? Surely, many scientists believe, enough droughts, floods and heat waves will begin to change minds.

But a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar throws cold water on that theory.
Only 35 percent of U.S. citizens believe global warming was the main cause of the abnormally high temperatures during the winter of 2012, Aaron M. McCright and colleagues report in a paper published online today in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Many people already had their minds made up about global warming and this extreme weather was not going to change that," said McCright, associate professor in MSU's Lyman Briggs College and Department of Sociology.

Winter 2012 was the fourth warmest winter in the United States dating back to at least 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some 80 percent of U.S. citizens reported winter temperatures in their local area were warmer than usual.

The researchers analyzed March 2012 Gallup Poll data of more than 1,000 people and examined how individuals' responses related to actual temperatures in their home states. Perceptions of warmer winter temperatures seemed to track with observed temperatures.

"Those results are promising because we do hope that people accurately perceive the reality that's around them so they can adapt accordingly to the weather," McCright said.

But when it came to attributing the abnormally warm weather to global warming, respondents largely held fast to their existing beliefs and were not influenced by actual temperatures.

As this study and McCright's past research shows, political party identification plays a significant role in determining global warming beliefs. People who identify as Republican tend to doubt the existence of global warming, while Democrats generally believe in it.

The abnormally warm winter was just one in an ongoing series of severe weather events -- including the 2010 Russian heat wave, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines -- that many believed would help start convincing global warming skeptics.

"There's been a lot of talk among climate scientists, politicians and journalists that warmer winters like this would change people's minds," McCright said. "That the more people are exposed to climate change, the more they'll be convinced. This study suggests this is not the case."

Source: Michigan State University

Climate change not responsible for altering forest tree composition, experts say

Eastern US forest canopy. Credit: Mary Ann Fajvan, West Virginia University, Bugwood.org

Change in disturbance regimes -- rather than a change in climate -- is largely responsible for altering the composition of Eastern forests, according to a researcher in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Forests in the Eastern United States remain in a state of "disequilibrium" stemming from the clear-cutting and large-scale burning that occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s, contends Marc Abrams, professor of forest ecology and physiology.

Moreover, Abrams noted, since about 1930 -- during the Smokey Bear era -- aggressive forest-fire suppression has had a far greater influence on shifts in dominant tree species than minor differences in temperature.

"Looking at the historical development of Eastern forests, the results of the change in types of disturbances -- both natural and man-caused -- are much more significant than any change in climate," said Abrams, who is the Steimer Professor of Agriculture in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management.

"Over the last 50 years, most environmental science has focused on the impact of climate change. In some systems, however, climate change impacts have not been as profound as in others. This includes the forest composition of the eastern U.S."

To determine how forest tree species have responded to changes in disturbance regimes, temperature and precipitation over long periods of time, Abrams collaborated with Gregory Nowacki, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service office in Milwaukee, on a study of the tolerance and sensitivity of trees to various factors.

"Many ecological phenomena combine to direct vegetation trends over time, with climate and disturbance playing prominent roles," said Nowacki, who received his Ph.D under Abrams. "To help decipher their relative importance during Euro-American times, we employed a unique approach whereby tree species/genera were partitioned into temperature, shade tolerance and pyrogenicity classes and applied to comparative tree-census data."

The researchers compared presettlement -- original land survey data -- and current vegetation conditions in the eastern United States. Early tree surveys chronicle the westward progression of European land acquisition, with some dating back to the 1600s along the East Coast.

In the research, published online in Global Change Biology, researchers analyzed 190 datasets to determine the relative impacts of climate versus altered disturbance regimes for various biomes across the eastern United States. Because the Euro-American period from 1500 to today spans two major climatic periods -- from the Little Ice Age to the current Anthropocene -- the researchers expected vegetation changes consistent with warming.

"In most cases, however, European disturbance overrode regional climate change," Abrams said. "To the north, intensive and expansive early European disturbance resulted in the ubiquitous loss of conifers and large increases of Acer (maple), Populus (poplar) and Quercus (oak) in northern hardwoods, whereas to the south, these disturbances perpetuated the dominance of oak in central hardwoods."

Maple increases and associated mesophication -- the forest growing increasingly dense, cool, shady and moist in the absence of regular fire -- in oak-pine systems were delayed until mid-20th century fire suppression. This led to significant warm-to-cool shifts in temperature in which cool-adapted sugar maple increased and caused temperature-neutral changes in which warm-adapted red maple increased.

"In both cases, these shifts were attributed to fire suppression rather than climate change," Abrams said. "Because mesophication is ongoing, eastern U.S. forests formed during the catastrophic disturbance era followed by fire suppression will remain in climate disequilibrium into the foreseeable future."

Overall, he concluded, the results of the study suggest that altered disturbance regimes rather than climate had the greatest influence on vegetation composition and dynamics in the eastern United States over multiple centuries.

"Land-use change often trumped or negated the impacts of warming climate, and this needs greater recognition in climate change discussions, scenarios and model interpretations," he said.

Source: Penn State

Logging destabilizes forest soil carbon over time

Chelsea Petrenko, a doctoral candidate at Dartmouth College, is lead author of a study showing that logging triggers the gradual release of the carbon stored in a forest's mineral soils. Credit: Dartmouth College

Logging doesn't immediately jettison carbon stored in a forest's mineral soils into the atmosphere but triggers a gradual release that may contribute to climate change over decades, a Dartmouth College study finds.

The results are the first evidence of a regional trend of lower carbon pools in soils of harvested hardwood forests compared to mature or pristine hardwood forests. The findings appear in the journal Global Change Biology Bioenergy. A PDF of the study is available on request.

Despite scientists' growing appreciation for soil's role in the global carbon cycle, mineral soil carbon pools are largely understudied and previous studies have produced differing results about logging's impact. For example, the U.S. Forest Service assumes that all soil carbon pools do not change after timber harvesting.

The Dartmouth researchers looked at how timber harvesting affects mineral soil carbon over 100 years following harvest in the northeastern United States, where soils account for at least 50 percent of total ecosystem carbon storage. Mineral soils, which underlie the carbon-rich organic layer of the soil, make up the majority of that storage, but are sometimes not included in carbon studies due to the difficulty in collecting samples from the rocky, difficult terrain. The researchers hypothesized that the mineral soil carbon would be lower in forests that had been harvested in the last century than in forests that were more than 100 years old. They collected mineral soil cores from 20 forests in seven areas across the northeastern United States and compared the relative amounts of carbon in the soil from forests that were logged five years ago, 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 75 years ago and 100 years ago.

The results showed no significant differences between mineral soil carbon in the older versus harvested forests. But there was a significant relationship between the time since forest harvest and the size of the carbon pools, which suggested a gradual decline in carbon across the region that may last for decades after harvesting and result in increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

"Our study suggests that forest harvest does cause biogeochemical changes in mineral soil, but that a small change in a carbon pool may be difficult to detect when comparing large, variable carbon pools," says lead author Chelsea Petrenko) (formerly Vario), a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a trainee in Dartmouth's IGERT program for Polar Environmental Change. "Our results are consistent with previous studies that found that soil carbon pools have a gradual and slow response to \disturbance, which may last for several decades following harvest."

A previous Dartmouth study found that clear-cutting releases detectible amounts of carbon stored in deep forest soils, challenging the notion that burning woody biomass for energy is more carbon-neutral than fossil fuels. "Mineral soil, which is the most significant ecosystem carbon pool in temperate forests, should be studied more closely before the carbon neutrality of bioenergy from local wood in temperate forests is asserted," says Petrenko, whose research focuses on the biogeochemistry of warming ecosystems and the impact on climate change.

Source:  Dartmouth College

The Composite plane life cycle assessment shows lighter planes are the future

Boeing Dreamliner 787. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Sheffield

A global fleet of composite planes could reduce carbon emissions by up to 15 per cent, but the lighter planes alone will not enable the aviation industry to meet its emissions targets, according to new research.

The study, by the Universities of Sheffield, Cambridge and University College London, is the first to carry out a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) of a composite plane, such as the Boeing Dreamliner 787 or Airbus 350, and extrapolate the results to the global fleet.
The LCA covers manufacture, use and disposal, using publicly available information on the Boeing Dreamliner 787 fuselage and from the supply chain -- such as the energy usage of the robots that construct the planes. The study compares the results to the traditional -- and heavier -- aluminium planes.

Emissions during the manufacture of composite planes are over double those of aluminium planes. But because the lighter aircraft use significantly less fuel, these increased emissions are offset after just a few international flights. Over its lifetime, a composite plane creates up to 20 per cent fewer CO2 emissions than its aluminium equivalent.

Professor in Advanced Materials Technologies at the University of Sheffield, Alma Hodzic, said: "This study shows that the fuel consumption savings with composites far outweigh the increased environmental impact from their manufacture. Despite ongoing debates within the industry, the environmental and financial savings from composites mean that these materials offer a much better solution."

The researchers fed the data from the LCA into a wider transport model to gauge the impact on CO2 emissions as composite planes are introduced into the global fleet over the next 25 years, taking into account other factors including population, economic prosperity, oil prices and speed of adoption of the new technology.

The study -- published in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment -- estimated that by 2050, composite planes could reduce emissions from the global fleet by 14-15 per cent relative to a fleet that maintains its existing aluminium-based configuration.

Professor in Energy and Transport at UCL, Andreas Schäfer, explains: "The overall emissions reduction for the global fleet is lower than the reduction for an individual plane, partly, because by 2050, not all the fleet will be of composite construction. New planes entering the fleet before 2020 could still be in use by 2050, but the faster the uptake of this technology, the greater the environmental benefits will be."

Dr Lynette Dray from the University of Cambridge added: "Given that global air traffic is projected to increase four-fold between now and 2050, changing the materials used could avoid 500 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2050 alone, a value that roughly corresponds to current emission levels."

Professor Hodzic commented: "The industry target is to halve CO2 emissions for all aircrafts by 2020 and while composites will contribute to this, it cannot be achieved by the introduction of lighter composite planes alone. However, our findings show that composites -- alongside other technology and efficiency measures -- should be part of the picture."

Source: University of Sheffield