The Loom » Global Warming

Climate Relicts: My new story for Yale Environment 360

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:54:57 +0000

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]

Warming up, turning sour, losing breath

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:49:57 +0000

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 ...

Outlook: Warm, Grim, Cloudy: My story on global warming and extinctions in tomorrow’s NY Times

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:30:43 +0000

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]

Gasp! My new article on global warming and oxygen

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:22:43 +0000

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 in the Greenhouse

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:36:40 +0000

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]

How To Recognize the Anthropocene

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:14:48 +0000

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.

This Is The Dawning of Aquarius–In South Dakota

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:24:17 +0000

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 ...

Leaving Our Geological Mark

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:58:06 +0000

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.

Multi-Layered Fact-Checking Process, Activate!

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:30:41 +0000

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.

George Will: Uncheckable?

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:45:35 +0000

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 ...

Pwnage Made Easy

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:30:16 +0000

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.

Apocalypse Via Press Release

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:56:49 +0000

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 ...

Far Away, But Not Out of Radio’s Reach

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:37:26 +0000

We arrived on Appledore Island this afternoon, which is drenched in sunshine and heat. The gulls are screaming and the students are busy reading up on tidal pools (or, as I was informed at dinner, the intertidal) in advance of our journey tomorrow. But despite the fact that New Hampshire is just a strip on the horizon, the email and the cell phones work here, and this evening I was asked to talk on the radio tomorrow about my recent article on global warming and evolution. I’ll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC in New York some time between 12:30 and 1 pm EST on Tuesday. You can listen live here, or wait for the archived podcast.

Listen right here!

For Your Reading Pleasure: Global Warming Evolution and the Origin of Eukaryotes

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:10:29 +0000

Two of my stories came out this week–one on the near future, and one on the distant past.

1. Global warming is beginning to drive evolution of plants and animals. And soon it will be shifting to high gear. Read more at Yale Environment 360.

2. You, me, and the mushroom over there are all eukaryotes. So are slime molds and Giardia. We all share a number of features that set us apart from prokaryotes like E. coli. The split between eukaryotes and other living things is arguably the deepest in all life. In this week’s issue of Science, I have an essay that looks at how the basic eukaryote cell, complete with nucleus, mitochondria, and all its other bells and whistles came to be. Check it out (here or here). And you can also listen to me talk about the question on this week’s Science podcast here.

Just Keep Calling It Fact-Checking And Someday They’ll Believe You

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:14:58 +0000

Zachary Smith at Talking Points Memo, among others, notes that the Washington Post editorial page editor is still claiming that George Will’s many misrepresentations about global warming were subject to “careful fact-checking,” some two months after many people showed they were anything but–including some who explained the errors in the Washington Post itself. It’s a sad coda to a long tale of op-ed woe.

More on Global Warming and Habitat Destruction

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:32:35 +0000

Last week I wrote about a piece in Slate in which Brendan Borrell argued that concerns over the threat to biodiversity from global warming is overshadowing the bigger threat from habitat destruction. Brendan is back from a trip to South Africa and has left a lengthy–and well-considered–comment below. Definitely check it out. I still have some problems with his argument, but it’s so much more satisfying to discuss these issues with somebody who takes the scientific research seriously than someone who just wants to quote-mine.

Choose Your Top Poison

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:46:19 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about how conservation biologists are debating the value of moving species to protect them from climate-change-driven extinction. As a follow-up (or an antidote), check out “Blood for no oil: Our obsession with climate change is killing off animals left and right.” in Slate.

Brendan Borrell, biologist turned journalist, argues that climate change poses a genuine threat to biodiversity, but “it does not come close to the immediate, irreparable damage caused by the destruction of habitat.” Good old chainsaws are still the big danger, he argues, because two-thirds of the world’s biodiversity is in the tropics, where deforestation is happening fast and the effects of climate change may not be as dramatic as they’ll be closer to the poles.

I wrote about similar skepticism in 2007 in an article for Science. Some critics point out that we have yet to discover some of the important factors in how species respond to shifting climates. Borrell also points out that one of the most famous examples of an extinction caused by climate change–the golden toad of Costa Rica–looks now as if it may have had other manmade causes (see this study, for example). ...

Nature’s Travel Agents?

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:41:03 +0000

Two years ago I learned about an idea for saving species from climate-triggered extinction: move them some place nice. Here’s a piece about the concept that I wrote at the time for the New York Times. Over the past two years, more evidence of climate-induced changes to diversity has accrued. And now some scientists have actually moved some animals to test the possibility that assisted migration could help. But the idea has also now triggered some intense opposition from critics who call it a game of ecological roulette.

I’ve revisited assisted migration (now known as managed relocation) for a new piece for Yale Environment 360. Check it out.

Correction

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:13:14 +0000

In several posts in my series on George Will’s misleading claims about global warming in the Washington Post, I have referred to the “Arctic Climate Research Center” at the University of Illinois. It has been brought to my attention that no such center actually exists. Instead, there is a group of scientists at the University of Illinois who conduct research on climate in the Arctic (one of whom, Bill Chapman, I interviewed as part of my research).

The phrase “Arctic Climate Research Center” is apparently the concoction of Michael Asher in a January 1 Daily Tech post. George Will has stated that he based his (erroneous) claims about global sea ice on Asher’s post. I can only assume he also got the fictional center from the same source. In writing my own posts on this controversy, I conducted a Google search on the name and ended up on a page with the banner “Arctic Climate Research at the University of Illinois.”

As with any error, I regret this oversight. I am now adding clarifications to all the erroneous posts.

Brad Johnson, who noticed this error, sums the situation up nicely:

Despite publishing criticism ...

George Will, Now With Misleading Links!

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:39:57 +0000

There’s a lot of dismally wrong coverage of global warming these days (see some recent examples chronicled by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, for example). But the way global warming gets treated on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post–particularly by George Will and his enabling editors–is particularly exquisite. For my little Ahab-like obsession with the editorial process there, check out this string of posts. Many other observers have made similar points, so you’d think that somebody over at the Post might have learned something from the experience.

Today, we see that they haven’t.

One of the more egregious lines from George Will’s recent columns on global warming is the claim that real data shows that warnings about a rise in the average global temperature are wrong. He writes: “According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.”

The secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization himself, Michael Jarraud, decided he had to write to the Washington Post to tell them George Will is wrong.

Here’s the nut of Jarraud’s letter from March 21:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific ...

Ice Never Sleeps: George Will, Jr.

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:50:17 +0000

I’ve been writing from time to time recently about the poor job that op-ed sections do with science. As my prime example, I’ve focused on a column George Will wrote poo-poohing global warming for the Washington Post. But I’ve never meant to imply that that particular column was some isolated fluke. I think similar problems can be found in the editorial pages of many newspapers, and many branches of science are affected.

I don’t have the luxury (not to mention the masochism) to become a fact-checker on every opinion piece that appears in every major US newspaper. But I do want to point out a new column by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe today, “Where’s Global Warming?” Sounding like a George Will, Jr., Jacoby presents what he claims is evidence suggesting that there is no global warming.

Considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might ...

Checking George Will: The Perils of Time Travel

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:48:46 +0000

While I was blogging over the past few weeks about fact-checking George Will’s dismissal of global warming (collected here), I got comments. A lot of them.

A fair number of commenters claimed George Will was right, and presented evidence that they claimed supported him. Some tried to back their claims with news that came out after Will’s column was published. For example, a few days after his column came out, there were reports that the a satellite that measure ice cover had some trouble and was fixed. But George Will could not jump forward in time, check out the satellites, and then leap back to write his column. There’s no way that it could have any bearing on fact-checking his piece. What’s more, even if Will did know about them, he’d still be wrong, as I explained here.

Today brought more time-travel. Trey writes:

Just FYI to the AGW crown [sic] and to support George Will and Lou Dobbs (CNN) there appears to be a shift to global cooling now. MSNBC and Discovery.com are reporting no warming since 2001 and that we’re looking at no warming or even cooling for the next several decades.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/02/global-warming-pause-02.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469287/

My response is much the same as ...

Ice, Ice Baby: When Fact-Checking Is Not Fact-Checking

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:09:03 +0000

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been blogging about the problems newspaper opinion pages have with science. The example I’ve focused on is two columns on global warming by George Will in the Washington Post (and syndicated to 300 newspapers). Will claims that scientists who point to evidence that global warming is having an effect on the planet and reporters who describe their research are all hysterical doomsayers. To make his point, Will offers a range of evidence, from accounts in the 1970s about global cooling to statistics about the area of global ice cover recorded by satellites.

I have argued that George Will’s claims would have not have passed the standard fact-checking carried out by many magazines. He even manages to add extra errors in his second column, which is just a defense of his first. A number of other bloggers have also criticized the Post on similar grounds. The Washington Post editorial staff has responded on three occasions, most recently and at the greatest length this morning. As I’ll explain below, it’s not much of a response.

The first reaction was reported last week in Talking Points Memo. Andrew Alexander, the new Washington Post ombudsman, checked with the ...

Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:49:34 +0000

[Correction appended]

I guess I don’t understand editorial pages. The laws of physics must be different there.

Chapter 1: A Correction

On February 15, George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post, in which he scoffed at dire warnings about the effects of global warming. He claimed that environmental pessimists are always warning about catastrophes that never come. And he offered a series of claims about the climate that added up to a larger claim about the lack of evidence of global warming. For example:

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

These are statements about facts–both the grainy little facts of data, and the larger facts they add up to about how the world works. Are these facts correct?

As I wrote on Monday, that question would have been answered if Will was writing for a science magazine like Discover (or the New ...

George Will: Locked In Ice!

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:27:05 +0000

Last week I dedicated a few posts (1, 2, 3, 4) to a column by George Will on global warming as an example of why fact-checking is important. The whole thing flared up a lot more than I had expected, with the Washington Post editorial page folks actually claiming they had fact checked Will through a “multi-layered” fact-checking process. (Unfortunately, no one bothered to pick up a phone to call a research center cited in the piece.) Etc., etc.

I’ve been too busy with many deadlines on other projects to keep close track of this any longer, but I just had to pass on this bit of news from Talking Points Memo: George Will is back, baby!

We thought we were done with the topic of George Will and climate change. But now we’ve gotten an advanced look at Will’s latest column, set to run tomorrow in the Washington Post and in syndication. And it amounts to a stubborn defense of the amazing global warming denialist column he published earlier this month, that was ripped apart by just about everyone and their mother — including us….

Will stands by the substance of the February 15 column, ...