A collection of climate change headlines from this month…

Earlier this month our planet hit a milestone number: 400 parts per million. That’s the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. From the Elements blog in the New Yorker:

…the number should shake us, if not shock us. We’ve got more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any point since the Pliocene, when there were jungles in northern Canada.

What this means for life on Earth is measured, modeled and forecasted by scientists every day. But there’s no doubt that the rise in CO2 is causing global warming. Long gone is the argument that scientists disagree on the matter. A paper published two weeks ago in Environmental Research Letters, determines once again that 97% of researchers agree that current climate change is human-caused.

Melting Ice and Rising Seas

We’ve mentioned the effect of melting Arctic sea ice to sea level rise around the world. A study this month demonstrates that continental glaciers (such as the Greenland one, pictured above) will do even more damage. In fact, another study notes that as glaciers melt in Greenland, the locations of Earth’s poles are changing.

Plants and Animals Feel the Effects

Other recent studies examine the effect of climate change on plants and animals around the globe. Traditional wine-growing locations could be too warm to support vines in the near future. Living in the Arctic, polar bears’ immune systems aren’t as robust as organisms living in warmer climes. With the region warming, researchers are concerned that the iconic white bears could be more vulnerable to disease. Another recent paper reveals that fish and other ocean life are moving toward the poles to escape warming seas. Finally, another paper this month explains (once again) that more than half of common plants and one third of animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change.

Extreme Weather

Can we use Australia as a model of the extreme weather we may see as global warming continues? Time will tell. But even though scientists determined that climate change wasn’t a factor for the recent devastating tornado that hit Oklahoma, scientists believe that future tornados could be more damaging thanks to a warming Earth. Deaths due to heat waves in New York will also increase with climate change, according to a paper last week in Nature Climate Change.

Warming Slowdown?

Another paper last week purports that the world is warming slower than expected and that perhaps we will have a second chance. Will we use the time wisely and reduce our CO2 emissions? What do you think?

Image: Michael Studinger/NASA

Oops!

Last winter we attended the AAAS Meeting in Vancouver, BC and listened to the University of Texas’ Charles Groat downplay the effects of fracking. We posted a bit of that news in an article about increased fracking regulations in April.

This week, Science Insider reports that Groat neglected to mention that he serves on the board of (and receives quite a bit of funding from) an oil and gas company that conducts fracking. Sounds like a bit of a conflict of interest, doesn’t it?

Really Old Polar Bears

In April we also ran a story about polar bear evolution. Researchers, studying nuclear DNA, put polar bears’ origin to 600,000 years ago.

But a new study, published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that polar bears evolved into a distinct species as many as 4-5 million years ago and did not recently descend from brown bears, despite shared genetic material.

The authors conclude that brown bears and polar bears interbred intermittently over the years. The New York Times compares this to humans in a funny, relatable way:

The progress of species formation, at least in this case, is a bit like a long, ambivalent divorce in which the two parties separate but occasionally fall back into bed even after the official decree.

Drought

Last week, we wrote about the devastating drought engulfing our country. This week Brandon Keim, writing in Wired, describes how this tragedy could reach beyond our borders and create global unrest.

Reporting on a recent study by the New England Complex Systems Institute, Keim says that commodity speculation (that food prices will rise due to the drought) may drive conflict in developing countries. The study reports that recent history demonstrates this trend:

During the last six years, high and fluctuating food prices have lead to widespread hunger and social unrest.

An article in Nature also explores this global impact.

Rain, rain…

Finally, earlier this summer, before drought was a harsh reality, we described mosquitoes amazing ability to fly through the rain. Now, a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrates that hummingbirds are equally as adept in heavy downpours.

According to the abstract, UC Berkeley’s Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley found that:

…birds hovering in heavy rain adopted more horizontal body and tail positions, and also increased wingbeat frequency substantially, while reducing stroke amplitude when compared with control conditions.

These dynamics can be applied to robots, say the authors. No surprise, given both scientists are part of Berkeley’s Integrative Biology department—where many bio-inspired robotic ideas come from.

Image: User:Mdf/Wikipedia

While elephants and tigers may have won for now, an initiative to put an end to international trophy hunting and commercial trade in polar bear parts was defeated. CITES also voted down a proposal to ban the hunting of Atlantic bluefin tuna and opted for no protection of four vulnerable species of sharks.

The proposal to protect polar bears was put forward by National Resources Defense Council (or NRDC) lawyers, who asserted the bears are hunted at unsustainably high rates for trophies, pelts, paws and teeth.

“There has been a lot of positive momentum in polar bear conservation recently, this is a real setback,” said Andrew Wetzler, the Director of NRDC’s Endangered Species Project.

A study of the total polar bear population done by the U.S. Geological Survey “conservatively” predicted a decline of over 70% in the next 45 years as global warming literally melts their habitat.

Commerce also trumped science as CITES refused to protect Atlantic bluefin tuna, in spite of receiving reports that defended the research. Bluefin qualifies for the highest level of protection for protected species given its population has declined by 80% since 1970, and continues to plummet due to overfishing and international trade.

The U.S., Norway and Kenya offered outright support for the ban, while the European Union asked that any actions be delayed until May 2011 to provide more time to respond to claims of overfishing.

Japan, which imports 80% of Atlantic bluefin conceded that stocks were in trouble. However, one bluefin can go for $175,000 on the Tokyo fish market, making it a highly desirable commodity. Japan echoed a growing theme that CITES should have no role regulating marine species, and trade quotas should come from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.

Four species of shark — the scalloped hammerhead, oceanic white tip, porbeagle and spiny dogfish — also remain unprotected. “Despite fast declining populations of the ocean’s apex predators, CITES government delegates turned a blind eye to science,” said Matt Rand, director of global shark conservation for the Pew Environment Group.  “Four threatened species of sharks were refused protections even though the evidence of international trade’s harmful effects was plentiful. Inaction can and will set these sharks on a course toward total population collapse.” The shark trade kills an estimated 73 million sharks annually.

As the BBC article summarizes, “There is a feeling among many conservationists that Doha may have been our last chance to give real, meaningful protection for some species — and that we missed it.

“However, for all its faults, CITES is the one international convention specifically targeted at controlling trade in endangered species, so it is the international legal framework with which we have to work.”

Creative Commons image by Johan Lantz