Yosemite Visitor Center and Yosemite Falls
Image: Alex Pearson, courtesy Flickr
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - On any given summer evening about 60 tourists gather in campground amphitheatres here for park ranger presentations. Astronomy, geology, human history, fire ecology are on the regular schedule of program topics. Wilderness safety and Yosemite's notoriously aggressive black bears are also popular.
But one July evening Yosemite ranger Matt Holly popped something different onto his projector screen: "Yosemite's climate: Past…and Future?"
What followed was a rare and relatively new occurrence in Yosemite Valley - a ranger program focused exclusively on how one of the jewels of America's national parks system is responding to a changing climate.
During the hour-long slide show, Holly summarized the effects of climate change in Yosemite – including shrinking waterfalls, intensifying wildfires, and vanishing species. He didn't flinch from controversy, presenting evidence for human influence on global temperature and debunking common "natural causes" myths.
"In pretty much every scientific organization, every government - you're going to be hard pressed to find someone who says climate change isn't happening," Holly told his audience. "There really isn't a whole lot of debate about it."
After the presentation, a few visitors approached Holly with general questions about Yosemite's trails and wildlife. An older couple, longtime volunteers in the Park, thanked him for inserting a new topic into the nightly rotation.
Talks like Holly's, while rare today, represent the future for the National Park Service, said agency director Jonathan Jarvis.
Two years ago Jarvis launched a system-wide Climate Change Response Program. Communication, research, adaptation, and mitigation are the four main components. The Park Service has a legion of scientists, biologists, geologists and other experts working on the latter three. But communication and education, Jarvis said, may ultimately prove to be the agency's biggest contributions to the field.
"We host 280 million visitors a year," he said. "The public come to the national parks not necessarily with an intent to learn something. But it is our intent that they learn something."
In national parks across the country, the impacts of climate change are sobering. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey report that global warming could eliminate most glaciers from Glacier National Park within 20 years. Warmer temperatures and increased fire frequency over the next century could eliminate the Joshua tree from 90 percent of its current range within Joshua Tree National Park, according to another USGS study. In Yosemite, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley have documented many species, particularly small heat-sensitive mammals such as the American pika, moving to higher ground.
Those changes - some of which are readily apparent to park visitors – make communication easier, Jarvis said. "We're seeing climate change on the ground now in parks," he said. "That's an opportunity to demonstrate to the public that climate change is happening, in their lifetime, in real time, on the ground in front of them."
The threat to these popular recreation sites also gives the public a reason to care. Stanford University education professor Nicole Ardoin says that national parks have a personal and cultural significance that could inspire visitors to act on problems like climate change. "Talking about a very direct threat to those places brings up something very emotional related to climate change," she said. "It's a great time to reach people, when they're emotionally raw and ready to do something."
Jarvis agrees. It's hard for the public to relate personally to climate change, he said. But people "do relate personally to the national parks."
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10 Comments
Add CommentI am thrilled, on one hand, to learn of this change in the U.S. Park Service: long past due that public education become integral to Park Service programs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand: I'm immediately alarmed because, anyone who knows about science of any kind also knows how one particular political party is promoting anti-science attitudes among the public (i.e. voters). If they haven't started attacking the "tax payer's Park Service" yet - they will as soon as they discover the Park Service is actually trying to educate Americans about this vital scientific knowledge.
We have all encountered the anti-science trolls, even on SciAm forums.
This article happens to come just after my own first visit to Yosemite. Just to emphasize, I had my daughter plan our visit because she has a degree in Environmental Science and had once been a part of the Yosemite Institute staff. Her expertise "heightened the peak experience" considerably. So, yeah, I know that having Park Service personnel become educators is a big, much needed thing.
I am not an anti-science troll. I'm just concerned by Al Gore's attempt to impose dirty commie indoctrination as part of a global conspiracy by the agents of secretly-reptilian aliens from the planet Nibiru to gain dominion over Earth, its resources and our precious bodily fluids.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this/mockery
"In pretty much every scientific organization, every government - you're going to be hard pressed to find someone who says climate change isn't happening," Holly told his audience. "There really isn't a whole lot of debate about it."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is the clever language of the movement. Climate change happens every day, every year. No debate there. But human-caused climate change?
I found this opposing view (i.e. debate) from an MIT professor of meteorology in about 12 seconds using google:
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2006/08/30/mits_inconvenient_scientist/
Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming -- but they also might not.
``We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change" is one of Lindzen's many heresies, along with such zingers as ``the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940," ``the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average," and ``Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why."
This article is from 2006. Later work by Prof Lindzen proved, using real climate data gathered over a period of 15 years, that there is a negative feedback loop in our atmosphere with regard to warming. In other words, higher temps cause less of the blanket effect, not more and more. All of the models used by the UN panel on climate change assume a positive feedback loop, i.e. that higher temps begat higher temps (their theory being that more water vapor in the air would cause a blanket effect to trap more heat at ground level), regardless of the observation that positive feedback loops generally don't exist in physics or nature (lest our universe would tend toward chaos rather than order).
So all we know is that temps are about 1 degree warmer over the past 100 years, that this type of variation in temperature (and much more) has been common over the ages, and that we don't know why temps are up. All other statements about the cause of this temperature increase, how long it will continue, how mucher higher it will go, if at all, and the effect of CO2 and methane from man's emissions on these temps are all speculative statements with no scientific data support and in some cases there are data that support contrary conclusions.
Wonder if Mr. Holly mentioned any of this?
I am a earth systems and global change researcher incorporating species-level response to landscape and regional-level environmental change. I am also a fifth generation farmer. As both a scientist and a practitioner of ecosystem management, I am well aware of the "debate" concerning whether or not climate change is influenced by human activity. A twelve second google search is not how to conduct meaningful research about the topic, and one should critically examine the source of information (in this case Dr. Lindzen of MIT). Though the research stated above is valid, it is also selective, and as an example of "sound" science (providing the answer the funder or sponsor wants to hear) this is classic. Lindzen will doggedly defend his position, because his client pays him to do it. With all due respect to Google and Sci American, scientific literacy of our citizenry is appalling. I support the NPS (I served for six years as a law enforcement officer for DOI)and am thankful that for now, we can at least have these important conversations in our parks. Full disclosure - I also teach at a certain New England university (ES/GCC)and have first hand experience with political wrangling of scientific research. It's shameful and a doing nothing to help the American public understand and take appropriate action.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I found this opposing view (i.e. debate) from an MIT professor of meteorology in about 12 seconds using google..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell yes, if you google climate change doubt or whatever, Lindzen will pop up as the most credible source. Too bad he's been proven wrong on every occasion:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Lindzen_Illusions.htm
Too bad he's a Meteorology professor and not a real climate scientist. I know most so-called skeptics can't tell the difference between weather vs climate, but at LEAST try to keep up with ACTUAL climate science if you want to be informed. If you search google for "NASA Faked the Moon Landing", I'm sure you'll find a few reputable-sounding scientists among the bunch of crazies that might pop up.
"...and the effect of CO2 and methane from man's emissions on these temps are all speculative statements with no scientific data support and in some cases there are data that support contrary conclusions."
ARE...YOU...KIDDING? Ok, you crossed from denier-in-skeptic's clothing to full-on ignoramus with that statement. So how come temperatures just so happen to start increasing a little after we start dumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an industrial scale? How come we've OBSERVED changes in the spectral intensity of the Earth's outgoing radiation (it's lower than 30 years ago) and the downward IR from overhead (it's higher than 30 years ago), and the only frequencies that have changed are EXACTLY the same frequencies that CO2 and CH4 absorb? How can we change the concentration of CO2 by 40% in a century, thousands of times faster than it has changed since at least the Cretaceous, and NOT expect warming to happen? Do you even THINK about these things before you go looking through google to satisfy your biased beliefs?
Richard Lindzen: PhD in Applied Mathematics (not meteorology), associated with the discredited Oregon Petition, linked to the Heartland Institute, the Western Fuels Association and other right-wing/industry interests. See: http://www.desmogblog.com/richard-lindzen
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@brads didn't mention any of this.
I was at Crater Lake early this year and noticed when our ranger guide gave a brief info-talk about how climate change was impacting the local species. In this case, there is a species of birds that caches food overwinter for feeding their young in the early spring. The problem is that the spring onset has become earlier than the hatching of the eggs, and, rather than staying frozen until being eaten, their food caches are rotting before the chicks are ready to eat them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI thought it was an effective way of educating people about how small changes in temperature can destabilize bioms.
Well, it's not like we're missing out on anything useful or factual, no are we...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbrads says: "All of the models used by the UN panel on climate change assume a positive feedback loop, i.e. that higher temps begat higher temps (their theory being that more water vapor in the air would cause a blanket effect to trap more heat at ground level), regardless of the observation that positive feedback loops generally don't exist in physics or nature (lest our universe would tend toward chaos rather than order)."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course there are negative feedback loops in the atmosphere. Complex systems are likely to have both positive and negative feedback loops. For example, higher temperatures probably cause more cloud cover, which reflects more sunlight. But to say that "positive feedback loops generally don't exist in physics or nature" is downright ridiculous. Fire is a positive feedback loop. I'd like to see you light a match without a positive feedback loop to magnify the temperature of friction into combustion. Campfires, forest fires, firestorms, solar fusion, and atomic fission all require positive feedback loops. And then we have epidemics, any kind of explosion, transmission of neural signals, mob psychology, political movements, expansion of buoyant materials under water, growth of forests, and kicking someone when they're down. All examples of positive feedback loops.
So is it hard to believe that increasing temperature in the tundra will cause the release of additional methane, which will trap more solar energy, which raises the temperature even more? And then if the temperature increases too much it will cause clathrates to melt in the Arctic Ocean causing even more methane to be released. Positive feedback.
Sure, all these systems also have negative feedback loops too, or they would continue forever. But remember that humans are part of the system. If temperatures go too high, humans MIGHT notice and MIGHT change the activities that caused the temperature rise to begin with. That way we can be the most effective negative feedback loop on the planet, tending to preserve the current environment. Unfortunately you are part of the positive feedback loop, undermining the negative feedback loop.
Humans haven't always caused negative feedback loops. Witness the Fertile Crescent that agriculture turned into a desert, and the Sahara Desert that used to be savannah until agriculture pushed it past its tipping point.
brads says: "Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming -- but they also might not."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven supposing Lindzen had not been debunked, he still "acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming."
I wouldn't object if it was just your own future you were risking on this, but you seem to be willing to bet the future of humanity on the idea that carbon emissions "might not" be causing the warming. Do you have a gambling problem? Or are you being paid to repeat the same old debunked arguments in every SciAm article related to global warming?