Climate change plays havoc with sophisticated gardening

What!  No tequila?  How could this happen? Well, summer's warm weather has lasted up to and past the first day of fall, so the need for a margarita after gardening has continued for much longer than normal, and as a result the usually well-stocked survivalist liquor cabinet and wine cellar were caught short, so no margaritas!  How can you garden without margaritas?  You can but why bother?  It was quite disconcerting to have things so out of sync, and it's all because of climate change?  How will civilization survive? Of course, limes may become a backyard fruit tree for us and blue agave may become a cash crop in Oklahoma, so things may even out, but you begin to understand how climate change begins to affect everything.

Too much bad news for a Monday

Today is Tuesday.  Mondays are hard enough to handle without bad news to process, but today is a Tuesday. You can cope.  Here's a link to a nice little video about how the melting of the Greenland ice cap may upset the large scale ocean currents that carry warm water to the North Atlantic.  A cheerful and uplifting slow down. Oh, those are clips from a disaster movie, but of course the reaction of military and governmental officials was quite realistic.

First flower of winter

December 25th, Christmas Day, 2015.  After a morning of exchanging gifts and eating breakfast, the Phactors took a 6000+ stride walk, according to Mrs. Phactor's new fitness accessory, basically TPP's round trip to campus, a lovely walk during which a friend photographed a black squirrel.  TPP knows about melanistic squirrels but had never seen one around here. Checked out the surrounding neighborhood to see where things were going well and where things need some work. But upon our return home and while picking up all the downed limbs from a recent windy night, you have perhaps heard of our oak tree that hates rhododendrons (an anti-rabbit fence made a save), well that limb had many companions around the property. But there it was defiantly yellow in the middle of our ecologically diverse lawn, the first flower of winter, and here it was only the 4th official day of winter, i.e., since the solstice.  Technically it's an inflorescence, so dozens of flowers, but  you know what TPP means. 
What an unexpected splash of color totally emphasizing the unusual nature of our weather of late. US weather services report so many temperature records and other stuff that December 2015 will go down as one of the most anomalous months in weather history.  So no wonder plants are confused, and in the long haul, confused plants are not a good thing. Now our lawn flora is nothing to worry about, but when fruit trees flower too early, you lose your crop to the cold snap that follows.  Highly unpredictable weather will have an impact on our food supply.  So yes, you may look upon the 1st flower of winter as a harbinger of things to come that will not be good. Welcome to the weather of climate change. 

Climate change on Cruise control - annotated

Here's a link to a science blog that annotates the whole NPR interview.  Cruise control is very consistent in that virtually every statement made about climate change was wrong! A very presidential performance!!

Climate change - Ignore the man behind the curtain

TPP is a scientist, but a botanist not a climate scientist. Still it seems that some people want assurance from someone who speaks and reads science about scientific conclusions about climate change. What bothers this scientist the most about climate change is what is not being talked about, and that what is human population growth. In many places the rate of growth has slowed but in other places, mainly African & Middle East, the growth rate is unabated.  It's a simple equation, more people means more energy, more food, more water, more waste, more contributions to the things causing global warming. Even with our reduced rate of reproduction, the population of the USA will grow by 50% in the next 80 years. There are countries on Earth where that growth may be as high as 400%!!  This tends to make for a pessimistic attitude, where the potential movers and shakers act as if population growth were no matter at all.  A few people are daring to broach this topic, so whether this gets any traction or not will be seen. There have been so few people willing to act on population, willing to even acknowledge this if a problem, that should you bring it up legions of denialists will arise. It's as if all of human culture has been constructed as a huge population Ponzi scheme, such that without a constantly expanding base the whole pyramid would come tumbling down.  Sorry to bring this up what with so much cheerful news of late to buoy your spirits and optimism.  So to end with something positive alternative energy technologies are increasing in importance and getting more economically feasible and at a faster pace than anyone could have guessed. And it's a Monday.

The thought crime of global warming

"Florida Minitrue is taking doubleplusuncold for crimethinking words "climate change,” "global warming”, "sea-level rise" or "sutainability." The Governor, Rick Scott, says he "was not a scientist" which is plustrue. Is a doubleplusgood example of Doublethink, described in 1984 by Winston Smith." Who can argue with that?  How else should policy be constructed? How else do you decide on appropriate action? The GOP strategy for dealing with climate change is to define it out of existence. Goodbye Florida, glug, glug.

Climate Change Reconsidered - again

TPP is honored to have selected to receive a copy of a Summary for Policymakers, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts (2014), a publication from NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel of Climate Change), not to be confused by the UN’s IPCC and their recent report on climate change.  The publication is a gift to TPP from Joseph L. Bast, President of the Heartland Institute (cost $8.95).  According to Joseph’s accompanying letter, “These findings disagree sharply with the alarmist findings of IPCC. As a trustee charged with safeguarding the finances of your institution and ensuring the integrity of its educational offerings [TPP’s alter ego served on his university’s foundation board for a decade], you should be well-informed on this controversial issue.  If your faculty is telling students “the science is settled” on climate change, and if your institution is spending millions of dollars on “sustainability” projects in the name of battling global warming, you should be crying foul.”

Wow!  Well, TPP will take a few minutes to examine this report and discuss it with colleagues and friends, and faithful blog readers too. 

This is a classic of denialism (others aren't so slick), and no one does it better than the Heartland Institute.  Without a bit of skepticism, without the experience to be able to spot the differences between science and phony science, without knowing enough science, you could be easily fooled. 

First, the Heartland Institute exists to obfuscate, confuse, and counter science, and they are good at it, the best corporate money can buy.  They figured out their basic tactic denying that smoking caused any health problems. Now Heartland is funded by ExxonMobil, American Petroleum Institute, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, all of whom are concerned that efforts to limit greenhouse gases might cut into their bottom line. 

Second, how can you know this publication is denial BS?  A good part of this document’s message is that carbon dioxide is good for the environment and makes plants grow better.  If you look at the references, and bear in mind this is just a summary and probably not the full set of reference (they say thousands), you see something curious.  The four sources about CO₂ and plants were published in 1902-1904, 1918, 1978, and 1983, and because they are included in the summary they must be really important ones.  Absolutely no studies are referenced that were done since scientists started to wonder and worry about climate change and carbon dioxide. That tells you a lot right there. One of the best, and only, long term studies of carbon dioxide and tropical tree growth was published in 2003 in the USA’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Clark, D.A., S.C. Piper, C.D. Keeling, and D.B. Clark. 2003. Tropical rain forest tree growth and atmospheric carbon dynamics linked to interannual temperature variation during 1984-2000. PNAS 100(10):5852-5857.), and if this study isn’t cited (or any of the 28 papers published by the principle authors (the Clarks) since 2003 then the publication is not an honest survey of  the biological impacts of carbon dioxide. 

Third, Heartland is very good at telling half a story. Increased carbon dioxide does increase photosynthesis and plants grow faster. But the other half of the story is that as the temperature goes up, so does photorespiration, and plants lose more fixed carbon, and at the same time, the rate of photosynthesis slows down such that the might be a tipping point.  Another recent report shows that enhanced carbon dioxide reduces the nutritional value of vegetation, so in light of that, the NIPCC’s conclusion that “The evidence is overwhelming that it [increased carbon dioxide concentration] has and will continue to help plants thrive, leading to …more food for a growing human population”, seems a bit over optimistic, and TPP remains under whelmed by the evidence presented.

So, that’s the short version, but without question this publication will fool lots of people and make for lots of press by those (and the politicians they've bought) whose fiscal interests are threatened by possible actions to slow global warming. 

Feeling less depressed about that article - retraction has been issued!

Well, TPP was feeling down when be blogged about a depressing news article on climate change based on a published study, which has now been retracted because the journal was worried about legal problems the article might generate. That actually cheers TPP up considerably, although no academic problems were at the root of the retraction. However, when the title of the article is "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation" the ideation is that it can be ignored. TPP's regard for Frontiers of Psychology has fallen to an all time low among psychology journals that he regularly reads, which is none.  HT to Stoat over at Science Blogs for calling my attention to Retraction Watch blog.

The Heartland Institute - helping teachers get climate change "right"!

A nice booklet was mailed to TPP; it's titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science.  As a member of a number of conservation and scientific groups with major outreach functions, the booklet did not seem out of place until a careful look revealed that this was a publication from the Heartland Institute, a bought-and-paid-for science denial factory.  Teachers are urged to read this document and use it's facts and conclusions in their teaching.  The report was conducted by the “Nongovernmental International Panel of Climate Change” (NIPCC). Both the appearance of the report, it's title, and it's source acronym are intended to look and sound just like the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and it's report on climate change Climate Change 2013: The physical science basis. This is a typical Heartland ruse to fool the unwary. Spoiler alert: the NIPCC doesn't find any evidence to suggest human activities have anything to do with climate change. And there's no evidence that smoking harms you or negatively affects your health either.  Yes, it's that Heartland Institute.  And the NIPCC report is replete with sciency citations and references, and authors with impressive sounding titles, foremost this and that.  A few years ago TPP let a graduate seminar dissect one of these type of reports, and they are all done the same way.  Data, facts, and conclusions are taken out of context, or cited selectively, i.e., only counting the ones that support their position, and ignoring those that don't agree with your position. Some of the original reports actually reached diametrically opposite conclusions to what they were cited to support.  The authors, rather than being real academics, were hired guns.  In other words, it was scientifically dishonest, from front to back. It's hard to argue policy; it's easier to pretend the science supporting climate change is uncertain, iffy, or politically motivated and this is the Heartland Institutes stock and trade.  And here's the biggest laugh; the NIPCC report starts by stating it was conducted under no political pressure.  That's actually true because the report was paid for by corporations that think science, real science, might result in policies that they won't like, like cleaning up their CO2 pollution. A recent study found that the majority of all the CO2 of human origins could be traced to just 90 corporations, and if they really were people they might have a conscience or a worry about what they are doing to all of us. And you can bet the money that paid for the NIPCC report came from among those 90. If you want to read more here's a link to the National Center for Science Education and their article on this report.  So maybe TPP will use their report for teaching, but he bets his students will figure out the ruse, again.

Sounds of fall? Feels like fall? Something is crazy.

Yesterday evening, after a long day, TPP was sitting out on his patio sipping a margarita while checking email on his laptop.  It was quite pleasant outside in the dwindling twilight.  A stroll around the gardens found a nice pale yellow water lily in bloom.  The gardens are still quite green especially having gotten a decent watering.  And how pleasant to be listening to the cicadas singing.  And then you stop an think, it's the 11th of October.  Waterlilies and cicadas should have come and gone.  That waterlily first bloomed on May 30th, and now it still has an open flower on October 12th.  That's some flowering season.  The only other perennial to come close was the Missouri evening primrose, but it stopped flowering about 2 weeks ago.  Now TPP asks you in what world are you able to sit on your patio drinking a margarita, listening to cicadas, and looking at waterlilies in mid-October?  Well, the answer is a world experiencing a warming climate and where the seasons of warm-loving things like margaritas are expanding. So this is more like mid-September than mid-October, and what with April being more like May, you are getting the idea. It just doesn't seem like fall, yet.

A little drought relief

A band of mild-mannered thunderstorms rolled through the are about 3 am and we became aware of this when a nervous cat clambered onto the bed to tell us about it.  She doesn't like the noise and needs some reassurance.  Things were so very dry that watering required making tough decisions about what to water next, and it was not actually possible to keep up.  It had been so long since the last rain that a spider had built a web down inside the rain gauge, and this sort of webbed up the works, but the storms provided somewhere near 3/4s of an inch of rain giving us just a bit of breathing room.  Hardly know what to do today without watering.  If this type of late summer hot weather drought becomes a regular pattern then some plants may become untenable in this area, e.g., red maple is already iffy.  Plant more oaks people.  A long dry spell also gives you an opportunity to see a lot of poor watering, just wetting the surface and doing no real good at all.  Watering must be long and slow; it takes patience and depending upon the sprinkler and area, one to several hours.  A nozzle on a hose is for washing your car; it's not for watering plants.   

How-to lesson on climate denialism - USA Senate version

One of the big worries in science is interpreting the facts correctly, and if you don't you look stupid, so most scientists are really, really careful about making very solid interpretations.  Now the key thing here is that you start with facts.  If someone has a different interpretation, they still had to deal with all the same facts, and if they don't, well, then their explanation usually just doesn't cut it.  But in the through the looking-glass world of science denialism, facts are simply things to be ignored or made up.  Here's a good example: Huckahofe in action where these two characters simply waltz along carefree with a total lack of knowledge and seemingly not even the least bit worried about ever being brought to task for it.  Too often the media is complicit acting as if everything is just an opinion, you have an opinion, they have an opinion, we just report both; you have facts, they have facts, you're both entitled to them. So how nice to see an article with nice links to what is known to show you what these two don't know. And, yeah, you sound stupid.  Thank you, thank you. 

Botanical garden refugee camps for plants

Please understand that every botanist TPP knows would like to take measures to stop or reduce global warming.  However, botanists are a pragmatic bunch and here is a news article about an endangered plant rescue plan that uses botanical gardens as refugee camps and way stations.  Let's consider the two closest big botanical gardens: the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Chicago Botanical Garden.  It takes about 5 hours to drive between them on a largely north-south vector.  But there is a good one and a half to two climate zones between them.  If things keep going the way they seem to be going in another 40 years the climate at the Chicago Botanic Garden will be like it is now in Missouri.  Of course then Missouri will be even hotter and drier (?) maybe something like the Texas panhandle.  So the idea is to shift endangered species from one refugee camp to another as way stations because there is no way they could migrate on their own, and they are setting up a network for this purpose now.  How grimly pragmatic is that?

Baobabs in trouble

Baobabs are remarkable trees, so weirdly strange as to seem other worldly, and they mostly live in Madagascar, a hot bed of extinction.  Here's a news report from Scientific American about how development and climate change are a threat to their very existence.  HT to AoB Blog.
 

Global warming - one bright note

My colleagues are not very optimistic about global warming.  In fact they seldom talk about it because it's such a depressing conversation.  But every now and then, something positive emerges, which in no way suggests we're all OK with climate change.

From an IPCC document …

Wine and recent warming

Wine-grapes are known to be highly sensitive to climatic conditions, especially temperature (e.g., viticulture was thriving in England during the last medieval warm period). They have been used as an indicator of observed changes in agriculture related to warming trends, particularly in Europe and in some areas of North America. In Alsace, France, the number of days with a mean daily temperature above 10°C (favourable for vine activity) has increased

from 170 around 1970 to 210 at the end of the 20th century (Duchêne and Schneider, 2005). An increase associated with a lower year-to-year variability in the last 15 years of the heliothermal index of Huglin (Seguin et al., 2004) has been observed for all the wine-producing areas of France, documenting favourable conditions for wine, in terms of both quality and stability. Similar trends in the average growing-season temperatures (April-October for the Northern Hemisphere) have been observed at the main sites of viticultural production in Europe (Jones, 2005). The same tendencies have also been found in the

California, Oregon and Washington vineyards of the USA (Nemani et al., 2001; Jones, 2005).

The consequences of warming are already detectable in wine quality, as shown by Duchêne and Schneider (2005), with a gradual increase in the potential alcohol levels at harvest for Riesling in Alsace of nearly 2% volume in the last 30 years. On a worldwide scale, for 25 of the 30 analysed regions, increasing trends of vintage ratings (average rise of 13.3 points on a 100-point scale for every 1°C warmer during the growing season), with lower vintage-to-vintage variation, has been established (Jones, 2005).

 

Let's have a special toast to all of the human folly that has given us global warming.  It wasn't all totally bad. 

Fiddling while Rome burns - climate edition

"So why are we behaving like this?" asks Martin Wolfe of the Financial Times.
"A second reason is opposition to any interventions in the free market. Some of this, no doubt, is driven by narrowly economic interests. But do not underestimate the power of ideas. To admit that a free economy generates a vast global external cost is to admit that the large-scale government regulation so often proposed by hated environmentalists is justified. For many libertarians or classical liberals, the very idea is unsupportable. It is far easier to deny the relevance of the science."
It will be interesting to see the reaction to a commentary that really hits the nail on the head.
HT to Gravity's Rainbow.

Sad news; glad news

Naked, hungry, and miserable.  That's what we'd be without plants, or at the very least fur-clad carnivores.  Dreadful thought!  Nothing contributes more to our "happiness" than caffeine, facing the start of our day with a cuppa coffee (or tea, or exchanging a CH3 for a H), hot chocolate).  A study by the famous Kew Gardens warns that wild populations of Caffea arabica, a native of Ethiopia, may go extinct in the wild, a victim of global warming and climate change.  Now of course coffee is raised in many places now so what is the problem?  All of the coffee being grown on plantations comes from a very few initial sources so it possesses very little genetic diversity, and this is why wild coffee is so important; it's our only reservoir of genetic diversity.  Low diversity crops are at risk of diseases and pests.  Such things happen slowly, so no, TPP isn't worried about his coffee tomorrow, or next year, or next decade, but by the end of the century this could be a done deal. The idea of doing without something so pleasantly comforting is profoundly sad.  Sounds like time to begin trying to save some of this diversity before it's too late.
TPP, a long time Mets and Jets fan, sort of likes supporting underdogs and takes perverse delight when the high and mighty get taken down a peg.  In this case, acording to CBS News, the Sunlight Foundation reports that only 1.29% of the $104 million mostly in dark money spent to defeat Bronco Bama and other Hemicrats had the desired result.  Most of this money came from a relatively few extremely wealthy people (e.g., Joe Ricketts, Bob Perry, Sheldon Adelson, the Kochs, Harold Simmons), people who like The Donald were clearly dumbfounded and outraged that they were unable to get their way by throwing their money at the situation.  This is not something they are used to and political con-men like Karl Rove got some splainin to do.  Even here in Lincolnland, a ton of money was spent on electing T-party favorite Joe Walsh who lost, and to add to the outrage, to a woman!  The thought of these good fellows spending so much money on a losing effort cheers TPP greatly, almost as much as a cuppa coffee.

The Great Barrier Reef - Going, going, ....

The Phactor has been pretty lucky that his pursuit of botanical scholarship has taken him to a lot of really neat places.  If remembered correctly, TPP has visited the Great Barrier Reef five times over the past 25 years.  Coral looks pretty tough, but actually it's pretty sensitive to things like silt, too many nutrients from agricultural runoff and increases in water temperature.  When that happens corals expell their algal symbionts, and the result is "bleaching", which makes corals very sensitive and often leads to their death.  Episodes of bleaching have been recorded on reefs around the world periodically, but now a new analysis indicates that roughly half the coral cover of theGreat Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia has bleached and died, and it did so in less than 30 years.
In comment w00dview captures what a lot of us are thinking:  "You know, I honestly wished the deniers were right. I wish climate change was a big hoax and the evil doers were arrested and everything was just hunky dory. I wished they fiddled with the data. The pictures of the melting sea ice were just meticulously photoshopped and polar bears were doing great. I wished the deniers were actual sceptics who had a convincing, coherent alternative hypothesis as to what is happening out in our atmosphere. I wished there was a great cabal of immoral scientists blocking dissent and even controlling the media to show us all these images and news of the damage that is already taken place. I wished Climategate actually showed up irrefutable evidence that we were being taken for fools. I wish that the seas were not being threatened by ocean acidification. I wished that some of the most beautiful, complex awe inspiring and vital ecosystems were not under threat from the fossils fuels we burn.   I’m sure climate scientists wish they were wrong too."   

Climate change - Something to beef about

Many people who deny climate change don't want to pay the cost of doing anything about it, but there will be other costs.  My colleague over at the Wild Plants Post explains the ecology of grasslands at elevated temperatures and the consequences for large grazers.  It's a pretty simple equation: heat causes grasslands to lose nitrogen, the food quality of the grassland vegetation drops, so grazers get less nutrition and grow smaller.  This may not mean much to a natural ecosystem, but if the grazers happen to be beef cattle and they take longer to gain weight or just simply grow to a smaller size, well, now you got something to beef about.  The cost to the beef industry will be huge.

What a gas! Dinosaurs breaking wind produced climate change?

When a giant sauropod broke gas, it was probably amazing, as were the size of  its “cow pies”.  And of course the gas, actually gases, were CO2 and methane.  These are some pretty interesting calculations, and similar ones have been done for nutritional values of plants, but enough dinosaur farting to change the climate and lead to their demise?  Ah, no, is the Phactor’s first skeptical reaction.  A great deal would hinge upon the size of dinosaur populations, i.e., the amount of animal biomass, and those numbers must be a huge extrapolation based upon quite a bit of intelligent guess work.  Such studies are fun, and they make you think, but so many factors are so hard to nail down that you guess this news article is a bit of hype to draw attention to the research.   And why would PHLOX news publish a news article on this study?  Well, probably because they like anything, anything at all, that  suggests that climate change is not due to humans but cattle, and the like.   HT to Zingularity.