I’m among the 800,000 people in Connecticut without power thanks to Irene, so I won’t be blogging much for the foreseeable future. But before I get to other matters like dragging branches around, let me point you to my latest piece for Yale Enivronment 360. I take a look at a new concept called the climate relict. Around the world, there are pockets of plants and animals living hundreds of miles away from their main species ranges. They were left behind in refuges at the end of the last Ice Age, as others moved towards the poles in response to the warming climate. As the climate now warms even more, climate relicts have a lot to teach us about how to manage biodiversity. Check it out.

[Update: bad link to Yale e360 fixed]

We like to think about risks with simple arrows. If A, then B. If wildfires break out, some people may lose their homes. If an oil pipeline leaks, it can pollute the soil. But if you put a wildfire and an oil pipeline leak together in the same place at the same time, the whole becomes a lot nastier than sum of its parts.

The world’s oceans face three different major risks from the carbon that we put in the air. That extra carbon (9.2 billion tons in 2009 alone) is acidifying the ocean, warming it, and possibly even stripping it of oxygen. I’ve written about all three of carbon’s impacts in recent years, but I’ve chosen to write about them independently. That’s standard practice in journalism: you select one narrowly defined topic and explore it as deeply as you can in the space you’ve got. But these three impacts are all hitting the same ocean all at once, and they’re interacting with each other as they do. In a new paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the environmental scientist Nicolas Gruber warns that this “triple whammy” could prove to be more than the sum of its parts–especially in parts of the world where all three may hit particularly hard, such as the waters off the coast of California.

Over the past 250 years, the ocean has soaked up about 30 percent of all the carbon dioxide we’ve released. When carbon dioxide dissolves into sea water, it lowers the ocean’s pH. This process is known as ocean acidification, which is a bit of misnomer. After all, the ocean’s pH, which has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 over the past two centuries, is still officially alkaline (acids have a pH below 7). But arguing over a label for this transformation is a pointless distraction from the magnitude of what we’ve done. The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning that sea water with a pH of 8 contains ten times more positively charged atoms than sea water with a pH of 9. We’ve raised the total number of hydrogen ions in the ocean by thirty percent. That’s a lot of ions.

If the rate of carbon emissions continues to rise, we will add even more. Under the most optimistic scenarios, the pH will drop to 7.9 or 7.8. All those extra ions will alter the lives of marine organisms. It will be harder for some animals to form calcium carbonate skeletons, for example. A lower ocean pH will alter photosynthesis as well, along with the growth of some fishes and other animals. While scientists have a clear understanding of the chemistry of ocean acidification, they’re only beginning to learn about the possible biological impacts. But the National Research Council warned last year that ocean acidification could have a big impact on people as well, as it slams the fisheries and aquaculture on which we increasingly depend.

The oceans can only sop up a fraction of the carbon dioxide we put in the air. As a result, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has steadily risen. And that CO2 has been trapping some of the sun’s energy, and thus warming the atmosphere. The oceans have warmed up as a result; the surface of the sea has warmed .7 degrees C over the past century. As the oceans continue to warm, the extra heat will have its own impact on life. It will allow some species to thrive in some places; it will shift the ranges where others can survive. And it will put stress on the species–such as corals–that are pretty much stuck in one place.

Global warming may also strip oxygen from the oceans. Warm water holds less dissolved oxygen, and as the ocean heats up, scientists expect that the circulation of water from its top to its bottom will slow down. As oxygen gets used up in the deep ocean, there will be less coming down to replace it. (Fertilizer run-off and other pollution on land is also producing low-oxygen dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.)

Scientists are only starting to come to terms with how we’re altering the oxygen in the ocean, so the details are still fuzzy. They have yet to measure the world-wide trend of ocean oxygen, for instance. But they have managed to measure declines in some regions of the sea. There’s also an oddly high level of oxygen in the atmosphere, which may be coming from the ocean.

In his new paper, Gruber surveyed the projections over the next century for all three factors–temperature, pH, and oxygen–around the world. These projections spread across a wide range, in part because there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the science, and in part because the future of carbon depends on what our species chooses to do in the next few decades. But some patterns do look pretty clear, as illustrated in two figures I adapted from Gruber’s paper:

The warming of the oceans will not be uniform, for example. The biggest warming will come in the Arctic, as the sea ice disappears and can no longer bounce much of the incoming radiation away. It’s possible that the rise in termpature will cause a boom in photosynthetic plankton, which will support a bigger ecosystem. But the warmer temperature may speed up the chemistry of all life in the Arctic ocean, and much of the carbon drawn down by a booming Arctic ecosystem may quickly end up back in the atmosphere. What’s more, the surface of the Arctic ocean may mix even less with the deep ocean. If that happens, then less carbon dioxide will be stored in the deep ocean. Both changes could speed up the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere.

Acidification will also hit some parts of the world harder than others, thanks to the temperature and chemistry of each region. Gruber warns that it will become seriously difficult for animals to form calcium carbonate skeletons in the Arctic Ocean surface waters in a decade. The ocean around Antarctica may cross this threshold in the second half of this century. By the end of the century, this acidified zone will spread into the North Atlantic and North Pacific as well. Corals, shellfish, and other organisms that depend on calcium carbonate for their skeletons could all be affected in these regions.

Projecting changes in oxygen is a much rougher science, Gruber warns, but all the models foresee a worldwide drop of somewhere between 1 and 7 percent of the ocean’s oxygen in the next century. Again, however, the real story is in the regional differences. In much of the world’s oceans, the oxygen levels may barely drop at all. But in some places, oxygen may drop far enough that it will threaten the well-being of animals that depend on high levels of the gas, such as fish and crustaceans. The impact in each part of the world will depend on how high oxygen levels are right now, and how rapidly new oxygen is delivered from other parts of the sea.

Each of these changes poses risks to the health of the ocean. But combined, each risk may be able to make the others bigger. Low oxygen speeds up ocean acidification, for example, while ocean acidification can speed up the loss of oxygen. As organic matter breaks down, it reacts more with oxygen that’s rich in carbon. Some studies also suggest that in a CO2-rich ocean, it’s harder to get energy from food. Animals under this stress will need more oxygen to survive–precisely when oxygen levels may be dropping. Making matters worse, the warmer water will speed up metabolism, increasing the demand for oxygen even more.

These synergies will be stronger in some parts of the world than others, because changes in temperature, pH, and oxygen are different in different parts of the world. Gruber put together this map shown below.

The circles mark hotspots where carbon’s triple whammy may hit hardest of all.  Along the coast of California, for example, marine life depends on nutrients that well up from the deep ocean, and a warming ocean will slow down that delivery. It’s also naturally at a low pH and has relatively few carbonate ions, making it especially vulnerable to acidification. Making matters even worse, the waters off of California are low in oxygen, so a further drop could have a big effect on them.

Gruber points out that up till now, scientists have focused on just one kind of impact carbon is having on the oceans. They’ve barely begun to explore how each impact mingles with the others. I see this mingling as a challenge in my own work as a writer. A tangled web of risks is hard to explain, let alone pitch in a lede. But nature doesn’t much care about a simple story.

Reference: Nicolas Gruber, “Warming up, turning sour, losing breath: ocean biogeochemistry under global change.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2011) 369, 1980–1996 doi:10.1098/rsta.2011.0003

Photo: Cocoa Dream at Flickr

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I take a look into nature’s crystal ball. Scientists have long been warning that we may be headed into Earth’s sixth mass extinction. But most projections just carry forward the causes of recent extinctions and population plunges (overfishing, hunting, and the like). Global warming is already starting to have an effect on many species–but it’s a minor one compared with the full brunt that we may experience in the next century.

I’ve written in the past about studies scientists have carried out to project what that impact will be like. I decided to revisit the subject after reading a spate of provocative papers and books recently. While the scientists I talked to all agree that global warming could wreak serious havoc on biodiversity in coming decades, they’re debating the best way to measure that potential harm, and the best way to work against it. We all crave precision in our forecasts, but biology is so complex that in this case we may well have to live without it. Check it out.

[Image: Photo by DJ-Dwayne/Flickr]

It’s becoming increasingly clear that global warming may trigger many changes beyond the obvious change in temperature. Earlier this year I wrote about how rising carbon dioxide is driving down the pH of the oceans, with some potentially devastating consequences. Today in Yale Environment 360 I look at a potential change that’s also starting to get scientists very worried: a drop in the oxygen dissolved in the world’s oceans. Check it out.

[Image: Christopher Sebela on Flickr]

Bacteria and other microbes suck up and blast out vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Over at Yale Environment 360, I take a look at how they will behave in a world warming up as we inject carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Will they draw down some of the extra CO2, or will the heat spur them to spew out more? Or both? The answer isn’t clear yet, but it’s important. After all, it’s a microbial planet, and we just live on it. Check it out.

[Image]

Elizabeth Kolbert writes this morning about the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch marked by the dominance of our species. It may be hard to precisely mark its beginning, but here’s why I think it will be easy for geologists 10 million years in the future to pinpoint layers of Anthropocene rocks.

South Dakota, are you kidding me? Astrology in the classroom?

In the fine tradition of creationist legislation that claims that evolution is “just” a theory and that requires the teaching of alternatives, the South Dakota legislature has passed a resolution on the teaching of climate change. Here’s how it starts.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following: (1) That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;
(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative…

That red color is mine. This resolution was not just offered, folks. It was approved by a majority of the legislature. Astrology and all.

At least I know what astrological means. Someone’s going to have to help me with thermological, though. It’s not even in the dictionary. (Whoops–I found it in the Oxford English Dictionary. Having to do with heat. Still, though–what about cosmological? Is global warming from the Big Bang?)

Wow. That is all.

Update: Thanks to Loree for pointing out that this original language was amended before the vote. Here‘s what it ended up as:

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for a balanced approach for instruction in the public schools relating to global climatic change.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that all instruction in the public schools relating to global climatic change be presented in a balanced and objective manner and be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.”.

Thankfully, those who don’t know the difference between astrology and astronomy didn’t get their way. But the “balanced” rhetoric that remains is straight out of the creationist playbook. For more, see Science Progress.

[via Think Progress]

The warming climate may earn carbon dioxide all the headlines (including ones about senators who can’t tell the difference between a couple blizzards and a 130-year climate record), but the gas is having another effect that’s less familiar but no less devastating. Some of the carbon dioxide we pump into the air gets sucked into the ocean, where it lowers the pH of seawater. We’ve already dropped the pH of the ocean measurably, and as we burn more fossil fuels we will drop it more. Ocean acidification has the potential to wreak world-wide havoc on marine life.

Today in Yale Environment 360, I write about scientists comparing today’s ocean acidification to the last time something comparable happened–55 million years ago. Short answer: today’s is big. Really, really big. Check it out.

Did the new Post op-ed by Sarah Palin on global warming get the same multi-layered fact-checking as George Will? Sigh. Deltoid has the details.

Long-time readers of this blog will be aware of my Ahab-like obsession with George Will’s global warming errors in the Washington Post–and the Post’s hollow claims to have carefully fact-checked him. I confess that I’ve let a couple of his more recent columns slip by. But I had to stop to blog about his latest take on global warming, in which he jumps on the recently stolen emails among climate scientists. He does a remarkable job of making no sense at all.

In case you haven’t followed it, somebody stole thousands of private emails from the University of East Anglia, where the Climate Research Unit gathers and analyzes climate data. Suspicions are turning to Russian hackers, but there’s been no official word about who did it. The emails ended up on the Internet, and have become a big deal. The University of East Anglia, for example, is investigating both the theft itself and the accusations that have been leveled against UAE scientists as a result.

There’s been a huge amount of stuff published in newspapers and on blogs in the two weeks since the theft. I recommend a piece in Popular Mechanics by a geochemist at Columbia named Peter Keleman. Keleman carefully distinguishes between the possible ethical issues raised in the emails and where this controversy leaves the science of climate change.

Unfortunately, pieces like Keleman’s are not stopping the spread of myths that promote the notion that global warming is a fiction generated by a global (and centuries-old!) conspiracy. For example, US congressmen are claiming that the emails reveal a campaign of suppression that included the firing of the editor of a journal called Climate Research after the publication of a “skeptical” paper. Actually, the editor-in-chief resigned in protest over the paper, which he considered flawed, as well as the publisher’s unwillingness to let him write an editorial about that. (Three other editors resigned at the same time.)

George Will gets on the bandwagon, too, in his latest piece. He tries to fold the news about the email theft into his favorite errors, like the one about how global warming actually “stopped” in 1998, because 1998 was warmer than any other year since. He seizes on one email for his opportunity.

A CRU e-mail says: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment” — this “moment” is in its second decade — “and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Will has put himself in a bind. He loves to tell us that it’s been over ten years that there has been no global warming. In an earlier column, he invoked the World Meteorological Organization as his source, linking to this document (pdf). But the climate record they show (on page 4) is the handiwork of none other than the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the epicenter of those wretched climate scientists who, Will assures us, “compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes.” If you look at analyses produced by other groups, 1998 does not appear as the warmest year on record–instead, it is much more recent. In NASA’s analysis, it’s 2006. The difference lies, in part, in the weather stations included in the analyses.

Will cannot have it both ways. He cannot pretend to speak with authority about the history of climate, but rely on people he considers cranks as authorities on that history.

None other than the Secretary General of Will’s beloved World Meteorological Organization himself wrote to the Post in March to explain why Will’s fixation on 1998 was misleading:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record — as was done in a recent Post column ["Dark Green Doomsayers," George F. Will, op-ed, Feb. 15] — and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit.

Evidence of global warming has been documented in widespread decreases in snow cover, sea ice and glaciers. The 11 warmest years on record occurred in the past 13 years.

The difference between long-term and short-term patterns was actually at the heart of the email Will quotes. Kevin Trenberth of National Center for Atmospheric Research was writing in reference to a paper (pdf) he recently published in which he wrote that, while the long-term trend in global warming is clear, scientists ought to try to monitor short-term variability more closely to understand its sources. In other words, Trenberth was not  part of a conspiracy to hide some embarrassing facts about the climate history. He was writing about it in public, and proposing ways to move the science forward.

I have no idea if Will was even aware that Trenberth wrote the email, let alone bothered to read the paper to get some context. But a fact-checker definitely should have, and should have raised a host of red flags.

I smell an anthology here: a collection of the all-time greatest take-downs, in which scientists expose lazy thinking. How about, The Best Pwnage of 2009?

My own latest nomination:

In the new book Superfreakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner make lots of provocative claims about global warming. For example, they say that solar panels would absorb so much heat they’d be useless for bringing the planet’s temperature down by cutting down carbon emissions.

Raymond Pierrehumbert, who, like Levitt, is a professor at the  University of Chicago, shows why that’s wrong–not with calculus or some other fancy-schmancy mathematics, but with some embarrassingly simple arithmetic.

Be sure to check out the map at the end. Ouch.

Today a team of scientists offer a new way of thinking about the environmental fix we’re in. In the words of one of the scientists, we’re driving around on a mesa in the dark with the lights off and without a map. We may fall off the edge of the mesa before we realize where the edge was.

The scientists argue for a safe operating space for the planet, which they propose should be bounded by limits on the carbon dioxide in the air and other factors. That way, we’ll stay away from dangerous thresholds and be able to pass on a healthy planet to our children.

I write about this concept today in Yale Environment 360. Nature, which is publishing the concept today, has posted it and a number of commentaries here.

Working on this story got me thinking (again) about the state of journalism. Because I’m teaching a class on writing and I’m a visiting scholar at NYU’s journalism school, I’m getting a bit meta . And there’s certainly plenty of food for metathought these days.

For example, last week a new site called Futurity was launched by a network of universities. The site publishes a selection of science-related press releases from the universities. As you can see, the site is well-organized and designed. As newspapers close science sections, you can’t help but look at Futurity and wonder if this is the future. And, in fact, Curtis Brainerd wondered just that in a piece he wrote last week for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Futurity justifies their existence as follows:

The way people share information is changing quickly and daily. Blogs and social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are just a taste of what’s to come. It will be easier than ever to share content instantly with people around the globe, allowing universities to reach new audiences and engage a new generation in discovery.

Equally significant has been the recent decline in science and research coverage by traditional news outlets. For decades, universities have partnered with journalists to communicate their work to the public, but that relationship is evolving. At the same time, research universities are among the most credible and trusted institutions in society, and now have the ability to deliver their news and information directly to readers without barriers or gatekeepers.

In an increasingly complex world, the public needs access to clear, reliable research news. Futurity does the work of gathering that news. Think of it as a snapshot of where the world is today and where it’s headed tomorrow. Discover the future. [Emphasis mine]

I don’t need to tell you that you should read everything I say about Futurity with the proviso that I am a reporter, and that I make my living in large part writing for magazines and newspapers. I do not write press releases. But, that being said, I would submit to you that for a university seeking to get out the message about its research, this argument about a decline of science coverage is not really an argument at all.

People who read pieces on Futurity will not come to it by watching television or by listening to the radio. They will come to it on the Internet, either as regular Futurity readers, as curious Googlers, or as readers of other sites following links. And on the web, arguments about declining coverage lose their traction because the same article that appears in a single publication can be read by millions and millions of people who do not actually subscribe to that publication.

What Futurity does do, however, is allow universities and research institutions to go straight to the reader. Originally, press information officers at these places wrote press releases, which, as the name implies, were things intended to get the attention of the press in the hopes that they’d cover something you’re doing. Futurity calls what it publishes “news,” but it’s still being written by employees of the organizations that are the subject of that news.

I have great respect for some public information officers; the stuff they write is, in some cases, wonderfully clear and informative. There’s good information to be had on Futurity. But I always treat press releases as a starting point. I do not, for example, assume that a piece of research is actually important just because a press release says it is. Imagine a press release with the headline, “Minor study published that is really not all it claims to be.” Such things just don’t exist.

As a result, press releases and university-penned news items have a serious shortcoming as “news.” Consider this story I just wrote. You can read the press release from the University of Minnesota (the home institution of a co-author) here. There are lots of quotes from people. All those people are co-authors. The press release quotes nobody who is not a co-author.

When I wrote my article, I interviewed several co-authors at length, and I also got in touch with a number of outside experts. Some liked it. Some didn’t. I mean, they really didn’t. They thought the whole idea of a safe operating space for civilization was meaningless from the start. Thus, my article was about a debate engendered by a new idea. These sorts of debates–with plenty of sharp elbows–are at the heart of the scientific process. But I don’t see how Futurity can reflect it.

I’m sure Futurity is here to stay, and so it will be up to readers to decide what kind of writing they want. Here, dear reader, is my sales pitch.