Snow? Snow! Jon Snow.

Snow is coming everyone says. But it's 40 degrees outside and spring bulbs are poking up everywhere and a bearpaw hellebore is almost in flower. Jon Snow is just a cheap click bait trick that momentarily seemed funny. Although TPP keeps waiting for a GnOPe candidate to propose a great wall to keep whatever Canada has that's dangerous in the Great White North. This might include winter weather, but the approaching front is coming on a diagonal from the southwest, which is where our heavy snows come, but only in a narrow band. Presently some snow would be welcome but not because soil moisture is low but to protect some not well acclimated plants from a sudden cold snap. December was like November, now January is like December and if February turns out to be like March then winter is really getting short.  Maybe that zone 6 plant isn't such a waste of money?  Heck, the grass is still green as well as the Corydalis lutea, a plant that will be one of the 1st to flower in the spring and one of the last to stop in the fall (if we have one). For a plant that seeds itself in everywhere, it's still worth planting in tough places. It's easy to get rid of where unwanted. Notice that no matter what the topic it quickly turns to spring. Last TPP has read the books, so in a manner of speaking he knows about Jon Snow, a favorite character, but the idea that the series has moved beyond the author is a really strange adaptation of rather epic books. Unless (my theory) the author has actually been unable to figure out the ending of his own story so that the subsequent volumes will be books adapted from the TV show. Strangely TPP has to run an errand before a winter storm starts to get a mango, and the nearest ones are probably in southern Florida.  See you around, winter.

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.

Messing with gravity

There are things you'd like to count on, and gravity is one of them, yes, even when you're at the top of a ladder.  Here's the thing. Ice has mass; it's heavy because it's water, which is pretty heavy, just ice is just a tad less dense than water, which is one of the few substances whose solid form is less dense than it's liquid phase. Now what is happening is that a lot of ice is melting in Antarctica, so much that the loss of this mass is ever so slightly altering gravity; it's a tiny bit less down there now. When you start messing with gravity, people should start paying attention. Just think how much ice has to melt to affect gravity! It's that darned old global warming to blame. Oh yes, and the water that was ice, what about that?  Well, goodbye Florida, goodbye Louisiana. Will their governors go down with their states denying all the way? Sure.   

Goodbye Florida; so long NOLA

A warming global climate will result in a sea level rise, period.  How much of a rise depends upon lots of variables.  But in many areas even a fraction of the potential rise will endanger really stupid shore-line development, and people just don't want to hear about it.  Unfortunately, the USA seems to have fewer and fewer politicians who are willing and able to take a longer view of any topic. When you have politicians claiming that scientific reports of global warming and sea level rise are frauds, conspiracies, cooked up for some nefarious scheme, well, then your elected officials have lost touch with reality, which is never a good thing. Now it remains a perfectly reasonable thing to debate what and how much should be done in terms of actions, but to deny that global warming is happening, or that since "dinosaurs survived climate changes" maybe we shouldn't do anything, is dangerous stuff, the actions of politicians who really do not have people's best interests in mind.  For those of you with a much longer view, perhaps this map can help you figure out where to invest to cash in on that high-priced shore front property in the future. 

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?

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. 

Plan ahead - invest in coastal property

Here's an idea for you long-term investors.  Get a contour map and figure out where coastlines are going to be once the ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic have melted.  Buy cheapo property now, far inland, and then sell it off for beach front condos and resorts once the water gets there.  What could be simpler?  Heck, even global warming denial dummies like the Trumped-up may decide to invest like this.  He does believe in making money. The map shown portrays the estimated coast line of North America should the ice sheets totally melt.  A long time ago in the Carboniferous a great bay occupied a similar location in what is the Mississippi River drainage.  Coal swamp forests of clubmosses, horsetails, and ferns grew around its margins.  This is really exciting! Lincolnland will have some welcome access to fresh seafood!  If you own land in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Florida, sell now. 

Visit New Orleans while you can

The botanical meetings will be in New Orleans this summer.  Perhaps this will be timely because if global warming keeps melting Arctic sea ice, and the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica a lot of this city will disappear under water.  Depending upon the severity of the melting, it sounds like a 1 meter rise in sea level is almost certain, and the rise could be as much as 7-8 meters.   Even a 1 meter rise will inundate most of New Orleans, and parts of most of our coastal cities.   At 7 meters, say good bye to New Orleans and Miami, and goodly portions of other cities like Venice, and probably some low lying countries as well.  Will the shrewd moneyed global warming deniers nonetheless study those maps and locate the new coastal lands and invest?  Probably will never find out.  Glad my neighborhood is called Highland. 

What next? Now threat to cacao.

Only two days after reporting to you that climate change is threatening wild coffee in its native land, now cacao is threatened in western Africa, not its native land, but an area that provides a lot of the world's chocolate, because climate change is making the area too hot.  1st coffee, now chocolate.  What next you may well ask?  Who knows?  But here is an absolute promise; this is only the beginning.  When will politicians figure out what is begining to happen?  More and more crops in more and more places will no longer be able to grow where they have been growing.  Hard to predict exactly how bad things will get, but finding viable alternatives, new places to grow displaced crops, new crops for farmers who have lost their traditional crops, is not at all easy.  When coffee and chocolate are threatened, so is civilization! 

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."   

Global warming and hummingbird migrational timing

Our botanical geek tour scheduled earlier this year, but planned way back in February, almost came too late to see flowering displays of azaleas and rhododendrons.  This was no surprise by the time of the trip, but what are you going to do what with the airlines being so helpful about changing reservations.  Of course an earlier trip was out of the question because of semester demands, so little did it matter, and while annoying, it wasn't a tragedy and we got to see some magnificent yellow wood trees in full bloom.  However earlier flowering times as a result of global warming are a serious matter for some organisms.  Hummingbirds winter in the tropics and then fly north to breed in our temperate zone summers.  The advance on flowering dates is more pronounced at higher altitudes, and in places like the Rocky Mountains high meadows flowering begins on average 17 days earlier than 40 years ago.  This means that when hummingbirds show up more or less on schedule, some of the hummingbird's flowers have already come and gone.  And remember, this nectar is the food, the sustenance, for hummingbirds. How this will impact hummingbird breeding and migration is still not certain, but generally less food during your breeding season produces fewer offspring.  Although the study was about the birds, without their hummingbird pollinators, the plant reproduction was probably negatively affected too.  17 days is a long time at higher altitudes.  Could hummingbirds adjust?  Yes, for example, if those birds who migrate earliest have the most offspring, then natural selection could shift the instinctual behavior of when to migrate to an earlier time.  Other complications may exist like what is in flower and when along the migration route.  For example, this year our columbines were done before any hummingbirds showed up, so if this flower were a "filling station" to gas up their tanks, they would have been SOL.  Expect biologists to find many more examples as such trends continue.  

North Carolina takes new approach to global warming - make it illegal.

States and countries with significant coastlines should be quite concerned as Greenland's ice cap melts because low lying areas along their shore lines will be submerged, although NC is luckier than most because most of its significant cities are not coastal.  A meter rise in sea level is predicted within a century, but since the melting is probably not a steady rate, things may change significantly faster.  So what do concerned leaders do about a rising sea level?  It's so simple!  Make it illegal in North Carolina for the sea level to rise.  You hear that Atlantic Ocean?  You hear that Arctic ice?  And to really cap it off, they made it illegal to measure rising sea levels so that politicians who don't like what science tells them never, ever have to confront reality.  Wow!  Those NC politicians really know how to take care of things, in never-never land.  Good bye Wilmington; hello Asheville!  Actually the reason for posting this is that it's one way to feel good about your own state representatives.  HT to Scientific American blogs.

Something new - Balmy weather in March

It was quite a day here in the upper midwest.  The high was near 80 and while dinner was cooking the Phactor was sitting on his patio at 7:15 pm nursing a margarita in the dwindling twilight and mid-70s temperatures.  This was definitely something new, for March, with the exception of that one year March 14th was spent in Ft. Lauderdale Florida because the Phactors had friends whose car could dependably cover the distance to Florida, and because Uncle Jim the judge offered to let us sponge lodging off him.  While his political and career advice left much to be desired, this was many, many years ago, he is generous to relatives and very big hearted.  Lots of plants develop very quickly at this temperature.  Hate to see the apple buds swelling so quickly.  Bloodroot popped up and flowered overnight, new plantings, rescues from sprawling development.  Our Abeliophyllum has never looked better, a cloud of pink-white flowers.  If you don't have one in you garden, do think of getting one.  But it was a delightful evening, an attractive sunset, so no complaints, except maybe needing a sarong-clad young woman to deal with the empty margarita glass, a regular tropical fantasy.  The Phactor needs a pinch; this is still March!

Moving north at biological speed.

One of the important reasons to keep collections of organisms is that they document prior locations. Even as spotty as these records are, if you record enough of them a signal can emerge from the noise, and the signal if simple, species are moving north at the rate of 6.1 km per decade, or if you grow on a mountain, then you're moving up in altitude. Winter is getting shorter and spring coming earlier by 2.3 days per decade. What if a plant flowering earlier fails to coordinate things with a pollinator because of differences in how they react to environmental cues. And what if a heat sensitive woodland plant runs into a barrier, like a hundred miles of mostly agricultural fields, that prevents it's northward trek? Or if your particular mountain just isn't tall enough? Adios, amigos. Another species extinction. Conservation has long argued for preserving corridors and this is why. Of course, that won't help alpine species that just run out of room. Colleagues in Costa Rica have set up study sites in cloud forests on their tallest mountains for the rather depressing reason of recording their demise.

1984 revisited - Legislating what science knows

The GnOPe war on science continues unabated. In an effort to strip the EPA of any power to regulate air-borne pollutants, especially greenhouse gases, a bill has been introduced by those towering legislative intellects Upton & Imhof that would define greenhouse gases out of existence as pollutants. Of course the problem won't disappear, but any need to take action will have been removed, which is more than anyone can say about greenhouse gases.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) tried to use a sarcastic reponse that you just have to love for all the good it did.
"Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.
However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.
I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.
Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.
This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!
Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.
And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile."
The bill was approved just after. You might as well declare that the value of Pi is 3. Apparently to the likes of GnOPers you just don't know what the laws of physics will be like in the future. Legislators get away with this type of behavoir because there are no consequences; no one who matters (i.e., the voters back home) are calling them out on the carpet except those damn educational elites and they already know how to put them in their place. So folks, especially you who voted for them, you are to blame, and maybe, just maybe, everyone else out there who shares this planet should begin complaining about how stupid, easily misled 'Mercans are quickly making sure that our country will be a leader in degrading the only place we can call home. Sort of makes you proud, donit?

Deny, deny, deny, then deny you deny.

Have you heard that congress is having hearings on global warming? This if a good way for politicians to become informed, to learn from experts, to find out about different ideas for action. But it's become a way to justify you initial ideology rather than a way to learn anything, and this is granting a big assumption which is that some of these people can actually learn anything. This is the modern way, the neoconservative way, of dealing with anything any expert tells you that you don't like. You deny they know anything, you deny anyone knows anything, you deny any scientific concensus and you deny any data presented, and then of course you deny you deny. It's simple effective way to deal with anything. Rather than argue about policy, about the consequences of action or non-action, you deny there's a problem, you deny there's any way to change the situation, you deny anything needs to be changed at all, and then you deny you deny it. If you voted for any no-nothing jerk like that, then you get everything you deserve, and the rest of us, the rational part of the population, well, we get screwed. There's a GnOP war on science, but they'll deny it.

When you elect dumb legislators you get dumb legislation

It's axiomatic that if you elect dumb legislators you'll get dumb legislation, and considering the results of the last election, this is only the beginning. The only great thing about this is that it's not Lincolnland. Out west in big sky country, Joe Read, a Montana legislator, has proposed a "global warming" bill that cranks up the dumb.
Section 1. Public policy concerning global warming. (1) The legislature finds that to ensure economic development in Montana and the appropriate management of Montana’s natural resources it is necessary to adopt a public policy regarding global warming.
(2) The legislature finds:
(a) global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana;
(b) reasonable amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere have no verifiable impacts on the environment; and
(c) global warming is a natural occurrence and human activity has not accelerated it.
(3) (a) For the purposes of this section, “global warming” relates to an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s surface.
(b) It does not include a one-time, catastrophic release of carbon dioxide.
This seems to say: 1. global warming isn't happening, 2. if it is happening, then it's not our fault, 3. global warming is a good thing anyways, so why worry?, and 4. if global warming turns out to be a catastrophe, we couldn't have done anything about it anyways. It only left out a sneering na na nana. Here you have a legislator who wants a state to legally deny science probably to prempt any federal attempt to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. As Steve Allen would say, Dumbth, and to the nth degree. Good luck Montana.

No escaping upward

Talk about timely; no sooner does the Phactor mention that global warming will cause the extinction of alpine species who cannot migrate any higher to escape the increasing warmth and an article on that topic appears in the NYTimes. As the article highlights this will be particularly a problem in the tropics. My colleagues, the Clarks, have established new study plots in cloud forests atop some of Costa Rica's highest peaks for the very depressing purpose of recording their demise. And atop some of Thailand's highest peaks are very temperate looking "oak" forests, and again they got no where to go to. Sad.

Islands in the sky

Islands have many biological oddities because the organisms there are isolated from those on the mainland and this can have many consequences. Unless you are a biologist you probably don't think about mountains tops and the species living there as islands yet they are. One question of interest is determining how much gene flow exists between populations on different islands, and one of my colleagues, Andrea Kramer, has been examining this by looking at bumblebee (see image) and hummingbird pollinated penstemons, and she found that the bee-pollinated species were more distinct mountain to mountain. This means as you may suspect that birds are better at moving genes greater distances than bees. Genetic diversity on mountain top islands is a particularly critical thing to study because a warming climate pushes alpine species higher, and if the mountain isn't tall enough, that population become extinct, and the islands getter smaller, fewer, and farther apart. Islands in the sky may be one of the places where climate change results in the loss of a lot biological diversity especially those that are highest, the inhabitants of alpine tundra. As a change of pace, alpine tundra will be featured in a few upcoming blogs.