SPRING FORWARD: Plants in nature are responding to warming temperatures much faster than had been expected based on scientific experiments.
Image: flickr/tanakawho
Scientific experiments to measure the rate and effects of climate change on plants aren't matching up to what is happening in nature, a new study finds.
In fact, observations on the environment show that changes in nature is happening much faster than in the scientist's lab.
Researchers with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of California, San Diego, found that experiments may underestimate the true timing of flowering and leaf-making by between four and eight times.
"We were surprised at how big the difference actually was," said co-author and climate modeler Benjamin Cook, who works at Lamont Doherty and the Goddard Institute.
Phenology, the study of timing in the life of plants and animals, has been disrupted by climate change. An example is Washington, D.C.'s cherry blossoms, which now bloom about a week earlier than in the 1970s.
"This suggests that predicted ecosystem changes -- including continuing advances in the start of spring across much of the globe -- may be far greater than current estimates based on data from experiments," said Elizabeth Wolkovich, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study.
The study, released in Nature, included 1,643 species on four continents. For every 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature in an experiment, the rate of flowering and leafing would advance from 1 to 1.6 days. In nature, advances were four times faster for leafing and more than eight times faster for flowering.
Reasons for the differences in results could include genetic adaptations in plants to develop more quickly. It could also be tied to the methods researchers use to artificially warm a lab environment to mimic climate change.
The biggest relevance, Cook said, is for those working in species conservation.
"When you want to plan for climate change, what you want to know is which species will be sensitive to climate change and which won't," he said.
The researchers relied on observational data sets from citizen scientists, people without the qualifications to be a scientist who have chosen to observe and record patterns in nature. Observational sets range in duration from five to six years up to nearly 80 years.
In January, the Agriculture Department released a new plant hardiness map, the first major update since 1990. Growing zones in the United States have shifted northward, meaning many plants are now able to tolerate the climate in zones farther north than before (ClimateWire, Jan. 26).
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
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13 Comments
Add Comment"Over a period of decades the climate will change regardless of human activities."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgreed, but human activities are driving those changes in a single direction: hotter, longer droughts, more floods and rising sea levels.
"Humans will adapt and there is a need for sensible actions and now actions that cost a great deal and yield minimal benefits."
I don't really understand what you're saying here, but my best guess is that you think climate change mitigation efforts are an expensive distraction. (Man, every time you use my wording from now on, you have to give me some of the credit!)
Anyway, how do you know humans will adapt? Do you know what the temperature increases will be for each decade for hundreds of years? Do you know where storm tracks will shift and how far salt water will infiltrate inland? Do you know the melting profile of the world's glaciers and ice caps? Are you sure resource wars won't drag whole continents into perpetual warfare? We can barely come together to prevent the world's fisheries from collapsing, what makes you think a perpetual struggle against rising seas and changing growth patterns for crops will magically be easier? What makes you think this perpetual struggle will be cheaper than making dirty energy pay a little to clean up their own mess right now? I mean, since you're soooo sure that mankind will adapt, you must have a magic crystal ball that tells you this stuff...
Welcome back my friends, to the show that
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNever ends
We're so glad you could attend
Come inside, come inside
Next behind the glass, there's a real blade
Of grass
Be careful as you pass
Move along, move along
Come inside the show's about to start
Guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you'll get your money's worth
Greatest show in heaven, hell, or earth
You gotta see the show, it's a dynamo
You gotta see the show, it's rock and roll,
Oh!
Right before your eyes, we pull laughter
From the skies
And he laugh until he cries
Then he dies, then he dies
Come inside the show's about to start
Guaranteed to blow your head apart
You gotta see the show, it's a dynamo
You gotta see the show, it's rock and roll,
Oh!
--Karn Evil #9 Paul Gilbert
So, I guess by that logic if I drink a shot of vodka every day and I don't notice any problems then all the other people who DO see them are full of it, and it should be JUST FINE if I slug down 2 shots a day, right? This kind of reasoning (lets not even touch the factual errors) is simply worthless. It is at best abysmally ignorant and at worst self-servingly dumb.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Over a period of decades the climate will change regardless of human activities."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou want to try again? Climate change has never in the past happened in just a few decades. Try a few thousand years. The rate of change we are currently experiencing is no where near normal.
What happened to you argument that there is no proof that there is a change and in fact it is actually cooling now?
Mankind is what science calls a weed, if any form of life will survive a weed will. Some other kinds of weeds rats, roaches, various plants ect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience thinks they can with deep frozen ice, and the air and dust trapped inside of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisII wonder how much of this is real and how much of this climate change hype to sell the other stuff involved. Some of it depends on who presents it, this rag or another look at it's head lines. look at both.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120503142420.htm
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenland-glaciers-speed-up-swellin
PS Didn't the climate change people say it would be on the high end? Again it turns out wrong.
"...while CO2 went up by 20%- the climate has not changed to any degree we really care about."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho is 'we'? You got crabs? Look around, there is a lot more people that care then don't. The American right wing is a very small minority in today's world.
"You have no way of reliably determining that the climate has not changed rapidly in the past."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have no way of reliably determining that intelligent design vs.evolution created humans either. If you really want to get into a science career you need to first learn the meaning of the 'scientific method'.
People are still trying to disprove the theory of relativity, but physicists and astronomers are using it every day to accomplish incredible feats, in spite of the skeptics, by utilizing Einstein's theories.
With the exception of a catastrophic event like a meteorite or planetary collision, the speed of progression of the numerous cycles of ice ages can be estimated by ice cores, sedimentary clues, carbon dating, bio markers, mineral formation, and even the mathematical anomalies of the Milancovitch cycles. There are other markers like DNA and RNA, the study of thermohaline currents, ocean salinity records, and even tree rings in petrified wood that are just now giving up valuable clues to past climates.
Just because these are a subjects too deep for the average blogger with a high school education, or faith based religious zealots who believe in Adam and Eve, does not denigrate the scientific method to the rank of junk science.
You are confusing science with economics and politics. It is a common pitfall intended to confuse not elucidate science in the minds of the general public. Have you ever heard of the dark ages? It was a time in history when scientists were persecuted as heretics just for denying that the Earth was flat and the sun revolved around the Earth. Eventually proofs inherent in the scientific method did away with that murderous and ignorant clan of priests and popes. Without science we would still be burning people at the stake for the study of alchemy. Our precious fossil fuels and the explosives of war would still be be considered the work of the devil, not the deity they have been elevated to by modern man.
PP, you utterly missed the point of my analogy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou also need to get your facts straight. CO2 has gone up by 37.5% and is rising MUCH more rapidly now. If you go by IPCC scenarios and note that their most pessimistic scenarios from earlier iterations fall well short of the actual growth in CO2 output rates we'll be at 100% increase by 2050. You can call that trivial if you want but you'd be wrong.
As for changes that we have already seen, they are exactly as predicted overall. We have something around a 2-4C shift so far for a doubling, well within the range of both Arrhenius' original calculations over 100 years ago and the IPCC's 2-4.5C envelope.
What do you have to say about the advancing dates of last frost and changes in plant zones? How about large increases in average night time low temperatures which are only explained by CO2 and other GHGs?
Basically what your story amounts to here is we have a hypothetical correlation based on simple physics between CO2 and temperature. We have observed increase in both CO2 and temperature as predicted by that hypothesis. So you're claiming this doesn't validate the hypothesis? lol.
As for rate of climate change... Sorry, we have gone back over 300 million years in the climate record without finding anything approaching the current rate of change. Of course it is POSSIBLE there were such incidents, our knowledge of deep paleo-climate is pretty limited. I'd observe however that there have been many extinction events in the past as well. Many of them are considered likely to be related to large swings in climate. Pardon me if I consider it reasonable to hypothesize that something BAD might happen if we double CO2 and jack the temperature by 6C in under a century. You have not a shred of evidence against the validity of this hypothesis.
So yes, prudence dictates that we come up with non-polluting sources of renewable energy. IMHO anyone who can't grasp this is not in possession of the requisite amount of judgment to be qualified to be making these decisions.
Good job Singing flea and tharter, you really knocked that out of the park!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut alas Pokerplyer is probably picking up his paycheck for telling lies :(
Is it possible that wild plants respond faster to climate changes than expected, because the predecessors of today plants have gone thru climate changes before, (it seems climate change is a natural and cyclic phenomenon, there were several episodes of alternating global desertification-glaciations before, we may be today just speeding up a bit the natural process), and so these plants have the genetic information necessary to adapt to a changing environment as a result of adaptative selections in far away geological times?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCO2 has gone up much more than 30% in recent times but there is a 30 to 50 year lag in the system. SO we are only really seeing the effects of the additional CO2 that was in the atmosphere in the 70s. We already have a melting Arctic and retreating glaciers, more weather extremes, increasing number of heat related records being broken. Follow the trend lines for another 30 years or so and all the credible sources agree that expensive and humanitarian problems will increase.
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