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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Another fire season is underway in the hot, dry western U.S. Wildfires are wreaking havoc in New Mexico and Colorado, where more than 32,000 people have been evacuated. And who knows where other fires will break out before summer ends.
This is exactly the kind of intense wildfire season we can expect as the climate changes thanks to our continuing emissions of greenhouse gases. Global warming is anticipated to make wet regions wetter and dry regions drier.
To some extent that is already happening; a dry winter set the stage for an early fire season. Worse, warmer winters have allowed pests like the mountain pine beetle to thrive. The insect has munched its way through mountain forests from British Columbia down through Colorado, leaving plenty of dead timber to fuel fires, also a consequence of the fire suppression policies of past decades.
Ultimately, global warming may eliminate the iconic ponderosa pine forests. Blazing fires could burn down existing stands, opening room for colonization by faster-growing prairie grasses or other plants. And a changing climate may prove more amenable to grassland than forest.
But we may gain forests in other parts of the world. That might happen to Africa's savannahs, where the species causing these transitions first evolved.
—David Biello
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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33 Comments
Add CommentThere are beautiful forests out west. It would surely be sad to see them go. Although I may want to direct my anger at their loss to those too stubborn and selfish to admit we might be responsible, I am as responsible as they. I've enjoyed driving a car for 44 years, flying a plane for 18 years, and right now air conditioning sure feels good. But I do wish the climate change denialists would just go away and let us figure out how to make the inevitable, slow, and painful switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs there anything that is NOT attributable to man-made global warming?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, scarface, there is!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are having unprecedented fires and storm damage - and can expect far worse - because vegetation is dying off from exposure to air pollution. Many people believe air pollution isn't a problem anymore because the visible component of smog - SOx - has been reduced. However, the background level of invisible tropospheric ozone is inexorably rising, even in rural areas, and it happens to be quite toxic to vegetation, including annual agricultural crops. Trees that have cumulative injury are more vulnerable to insects, disease and fungus.
In addition to the insane weather thanks to climate change, you may want to consider that there have been many controlled fumigation experiments in the US and Europe that have proved over and again: plants exposed to elevated (over natural) ozone - which is a pollutant derived from reactive nitrogen whether from burning fuel or artificial fertilizer - become significantly damaged. The first effect is that root systems shrink because the plant has to repair injury to leaves or needles. This makes vegetation less tolerant of drought. Another major effect is that plants lose their immunity to insects, disease and fungus.
Thus, the now-ubiquitous persistent background level of tropospheric ozone is THE ultimate reason that trees all around the world are dying off, even though foresters and scientists are wont to blame whatever localized pest is most apparently attacking them. For some reason, they don't want to recognize that we have a catastrophic, global decline of vegetation.
Plants are damaged internally before visible injury appears, but it's just about ubiquitous now that you can see symptoms on leaves even of plants being watered in pots - tropical plants used to heat. I encourage you and anyone interested in this issue to go outside and look at leaves and needles. Ozone interferes with photosynthesis so they lose their normal color and eventually turn brown and shrivel up.
According to a UNEP report referenced at Climate Progress, ozone is responsible for the loss of 30 million tons of crop yields annually (an underestimate because it only includes major annuals like grains, corn and soy - not fruits and nuts from trees, or perennials), which begs the question, how much wild vegetation is being lost?
Link here:
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2012/06/inferno-ignites.html
A free book on this topic can be downloaded here:
http://www.deadtrees-dyingforests.com/pillage-plunder-pollute-llc/
Your lack of analytical ability?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGlobal warming affects every bit of weather.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo even though the USFS has admitted their own policy of fire suppression is largely to blame, and there a clear benefits to forest clearing in areas where thinning has occurred, we are sticking with man made global warming as the sole culprit? Those idiots at the USFS, I guess we can tell them to quit wasting money thinning those silly forests as it appears over growth has NOTHING to do with these fires (and AZ, and CA, oh yea, Texas too, Oh, and MOntana, wyoming, and northern california). Sorry, but your memory of the dryness of the last 20 years hardly is a blip on the meteorological time scale of earth and natural fires always burned through our forests.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjbairddo (what's your real name?), you are correct that fire suppression is a major culprit in these fires. No one suggested otherwise, merely that climate change is likely an important factor, and not only in the fires, but in the potential regrowth of these forests as well. Climate change does not have to be the sole culprit to merit attention and action. Few things in the natural world have just one cause.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf people in '1st' world nations would simply use less energy.... for crying out loud, tens of millions os street lights and signage lights and porch lights....none which need to be on. Security = infrared cameras. Use less air conditioning by building better houses; use thermal mass to maintain comfortable temperature. There are innumerable ways to change our habits for the better, it really is up to each of us to just DO it... yes having better standards legislated would be optimal, but who can agree on anything?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am Common Sentences and I approve of this article's writer. Enough pulling punches for politics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is the most ridiculous headline on Scientific American in a month and there are some doozies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHint, when trees are killed by pine beetle (a very small percent of western forests) or fire they are replaced by TREES.
My wildfire fighting invention is described in Wildfire Magazine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbit.ly/Nknk6U
A special spray hose can be used to contain
Prescribed Fires by remote control.
The spray hose can also be used to protect neighborhoods.
bit.ly/Ni0s99
My contact info is in magazine article if anyone would like to discuss.
geojellyroll (by the way, what is your real name?),
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, in certain situations, when trees are killed by something in a certain place, they are NOT replaced by trees. That is the danger we're talking about both in the west, and perhaps in some parts of the tropics that are being deforested. These ecosystems may not be able to recover from these intense fires, or the deforestation followed by pastures or farming in the tropics. Grasslands may replace these forests, a very different ecosystem with very much less carbon storage capacity, bad for climate change.
Nowadays global warming is the biggest problem for the earth. I don't know exactly what I can suggest to solve this problem and problems like fire season but I know if we do nothing our planet is in danger and lot's of trees and animals will be died and even life is going to be difficult for humans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNowadays global warming is the biggest problem for the earth. I don't know exactly what I can suggest to solve this problem and problems like fire season but I know if we do nothing our planet is in danger and lot's of trees and animals will be died and even life is going to be difficult for humans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNowadays global warming is the biggest problem for the earth. I don't know exactly what I can suggest to solve this problem and problems like fire season but I know if we do nothing our planet is in danger and lot's of trees and animals will be died and even life is going to be difficult for humans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the name of God.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfirst thanks David Biello for this new news.
greenhouse gases are increasing and result is the climate is increasing too .After that the ice mountain in the north and south will melt,then what will happen?what do you think?yes right.Something that keep the earth cold is the ice mountain and of course The ozone layer.
By these gases climate goes up and up and Greenhouse Effect will appear.
Co2,No2,and CFC will destroy the ozone layer and as i said those ice will melt,UV of the sun can enter easily than before,by the UV plants will destroy and at least the trees go on the fire.This is the the bad result of these gas friends.like Mexico .people must leave there.
After not a long time there will be certainly a big desert.Earth completely goes on the fire and ... .
But here i just used (will). Dear friends look out.ِdanger is near .All of this will happen if you DON NOT care.This is really easy,lots of ways to keep our house safe.
From here to person who read this:hot and the fire season is coming or simply put it came.use Public transport,like buses trains and... if you do these you did it for your self .It seems really funny but do it for long life .
thanks M.H.M
dear a0teiwolog(M.H.M)....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI read your long comment and I have nothing to say just thanks for the soloutions you,ve commeted.
"E.Fa.N"
Beetle-kill and burn-off pines are both replaced by aspen if the altitude is high enough. They are replaced by grass and shrub if too low. geojellyroll proves again that he lives in the city, buys his food at the supermarket, just turns on the tap for water and watches Fox news for his information. YOU ARE A MORON. Your sarcastic, thoughtless comments don't belong here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, the pine beetle increase has been going on for decades. It is caused by warming. As the temperature increases, more forest becomes habitable for the beetles. New Aspen grow and spread from the existing root system following fire. This is not possible for pines.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAspen is only good for viewing in the Fall and quick-burning firewood. It is one of the softest hardwoods. You can't build or make anything with it. It also provides great fuel for fires because there are always standing-dead trees.
This is a year that I will donate my elk and deer meat to charity. There is no good food for them to eat and the meat won't taste very good thanks to the drought. My state is burning down and geojellyroll makes sarcastic comments, thanks to the safety of the internet. You wouldn't last a day out here.
Do care enough to go out and campaign today for 100 new nuclear power plants in this country? or is the situation not really THAT serious?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbsolutely. Much gnashing of teeth by the AGW believers but they reject the only technology that could reduce the CO2 emissions they (mistakenly) blame for the .8C increase in temperature that may have occurred over the past 150 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey Carlyle!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThought you had retired! Nice to have you back!
>>They reject the only technology that could reduce the CO2 emissions << (meaning nuclear)
Let us not forget conservationists reject uranium fission nuclear power because it is highly hazardous and used by all nations basically to stockpile plutonium, with which a high school student can build a bomb. Thorium reactors, on the other hand, are non-pollutant and reasonably safe, and are supported by many conservationists.
Let me point out low-tech options, simpler and safer, that are ready to use and already cheaper than coal:
- Volcanic (exposed magma), Hawaii being a good lab for this, and traditional (geyser) geothermal
- Solar thermal, not to cook or heat bath water, but coupled to a steam turbine
And a few that will require a little research:
- multi-band photovoltaic (using all colors, ultraviolet and infrared not thermally as a hybrid but photovoltaically)
- flywheels as angular momentum secondary batteries (thrust boosters) for electric cars
And wind and sea energy have a long, long path to develop, but develop they will.
>> the CO2 emissions they (mistakenly) blame for the .8C increase in temperature that may have occurred over the past 150 years<<
Well, the .8C would be 1.2C by my count, but that is splitting hairs. The common mistake here is to blame all the CO2 increase on industralization and energy usage, when only 65% comes from energy - and 35% from agriculture and land use, and still would if we were all medieval peasants, however in the endless droves we abound in today.
It is, I agree, wrong to say increased anthropogenic emissions are caused solely by industrial activity and energy use; it would be rather more precise to say that it is really caused by overpopulation, which in turn causes widespread activity. Perhaps we should stop behaving like locusts or bacteria.
It is generally a mistake to lump groups of like-minded people together and assume they all agree on everything. Many conservationists agree nuclear power is an important stop-gap source of energy to help us get off the fossil fuel habit while we develop wind and solar to their full potential. The nuclear industry remains a relatively safe one in this country (notice I didn't mention Japan's choice to build nuclear plants on a coastline known to be subject to frequent earthquakes and tsunamis).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this22. Mark656515 (Whats with null's, I clicked on your reply?)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust got tired of the same SA articles followed by the same comments, including my own. For example, not a single radiation death following the Japanese disaster yet so many want them to reject nuclear power & regress to dirty proven killer technology. Crazy.
Hey Carlyle,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI got the ‘null’ thing too, but then it came out right, as did yours. Things are much better, though. Until a few months ago I couldn’t even use any punctuation other than dots and commas that weird stuff came out, no dashes or question marks, let alone ampersands.
Look, if you’d like, we could partner up to start a business to develop and market propriety tech to enable oil majors to shift to thermal power with minimal disruption and maximum usage of their native tech. Drilling for magma like today we drill for oil. The magma stays down there. We could call David Russel too, if he’s up to it. I know I am definitely taking a shot. Moments of technological change are goldmines. Relay an e-mail, if you’re curious!
Hey Dubay Denis,
Right you are! And if the people in question are slightly leftist, consensus is even more downright impossible, because everyone’s an intellectual. That is why it is so fun!
Nevertheless, nuclear advocates will still agree that theirs is an approach of seeking the lesser evil, rather than the ideal staple…
I stand by my earlier suggestion:
http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_reactor/thorium_reactor_1.php/
Mark I am not commenting from a position lacking in experience. Very expensive experience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was famous for developments in the solar field back in the '80s with stories about my developments in Popular Mechanics, Newsweek & newspapers around the world. Gold medals from The International Exposition of Inventions in Geneva & medals from WHO.
I had a factory producing various solar devices from solar domestic & commercial hot water , tracking photovoltaic platforms, solar refrigeration using the absorption principle & many other products such as solar powered Stirling & steam engines.
After seven years & over a million dollars invested I lost everything including my private assets. I had demonstrated a solar hot water system on the lawns of the UN building, Geneva, in the snow, boiling water at 10 AM.
More recently I concluded that geothermal energy was the only alternative energy offering the prospect of base load power. I had rebuilt my asset base & invested heavily in a company called Geodynamics. It has been a disaster. Supposedly simple technology turns out to be very difficult. Now in my seventies, I have concluded that only nuclear is viable as a long term solution to the worlds energy problems.
My patents have long since lapsed & my inventions being before the internet age, have been forgotten. One day I will put the details of my inventions on the net. Not until all the hype about alternatives is over however. Otherwise my systems would be used to justify the waste of further millions & bankrupt more small investors.
Knowing how y'all like tree ring proxies... here is the latest:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this09.07.2012
'Climate in northern Europe reconstructed for the past 2,000 years: Cooling trend calculated precisely for the first time'
An international team including scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings. Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Esper. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods." The new study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
This is the result:
http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/bilder_presse/09_geo_tree_ring_northern_europe_climate.jpg
'Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.'
Perhaps this will chill current panic. GK
Important to remember that a temperature record derived from "trees originating from Finnish Lapland" does not provide a global climate trend. The world is quite a bit bigger than Finland. You would need similar records from around the world to establish a global cooling trend.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this- "trees originating from Finnish Lapland" does not provide a global climate trend."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for stating the obvious.
Since the basis of recent catastrophic anthropogenic global warming CAGW was Mann's hockey stick within Gore's "inconvienent truth" relying on a single tree, your argument is selective at best.
At least this paper doesn't cherry pick it's trees.
Another case of screening is the annual version (Law Dome) for two millennia was provided to Gergis (who screened it out.) delD and O18 are closely related.
This plot can be viewed here:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/ld2_1kyr11.png
At least it reinforces the view that there is nothing unusual regarding current temperatures. As to drought the 1932 drought was much more extensive and severe. GK
Sorry, 1932 drought should read 1934 drought. GK
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere is June 2012 drought:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/drought/historical-palmers/201206-pdsi.gif
Here is the June 1934 drought:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/drought/historical-palmers/193406-pdsi.gif
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow, you always sounded like an oil executive. So you went skeptic how?
One thing that surely contributes to small green investor frustration is this david-and-goliath cottage mentality, this slighshots-and-arrows-vs-supertanks-and-stealth-bombers thing that the small green industry has.
Divide and conquer? Workers unite? Scale does matter, after all.
In particular, research must be a massively systematic effort on such proportions that no small investor has the pockets for. Every variable must be painstakingly tweaked, every cost minimized, every tree barked up to. Every brilliant invention is no more than a good start. Frequently what determines the success of a product is less what it is, than how it is made. Another grosser but also important advantage small and medium businesses do not have is systematic PR, press management and lobbying.
It is high time that a Green Industry World Association or similar (with local and industry sector chapters) that would foster and enable JIP – Joint Industry Projects, which is how big industry solves their technical problems and the small green investors urgently need to solve all those technical issues that makes, as you say, ‘simple’ so difficult - and lobbying, so the green industry can go mainstream. Strength in numbers. Fire with fire. The Green Industry World Association would enable JIPs by uniting many buinessess witgh the same type of problem. As competitors, thay work out a map division beforehand – such region is yours and such is mine, etc, and also recruit from the academy, where I suspect many scientists, or at least a million grad students, will be eager to help. You know what ‘simple’ technical problems need? More engineering physicists.
“This is exactly the kind of intense wildfire season we can expect as the climate changes” but it is not due to our continuing emissions of greenhouse gases. I anticipate global cooling to make wet regions drier (not wetter) and dry regions drier.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“To some extent that is already happening; a dry winter set the stage for an early fire season. Worse, warmer winters have allowed pests like the mountain pine beetle to thrive. The insect has munched its way through mountain forests from British Columbia down through Colorado, leaving plenty of dead timber to fuel fires, also a consequence of the fire suppression policies of past decades.”
Ultimately, global cooling not “warming may eliminate the iconic ponderosa pine forests. Blazing fires could burn down existing stands, opening room for colonization by faster-growing prairie grasses or other plants. And a changing climate may prove more amenable to grassland than forest.” But we will plant different trees that survive beetle attacks.
Proof that humans can change climate can be seen from space. We have replaced forests with grain crops that are more profitable.
I've heard something about weird drafts being created after wide spread commercial <a href="http://www.amivegas.com/services.html">air conditioning repair in Las Vegas</a> that's actually helping to move what few seeds there are around. I don't think any forests are in immediate danger.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this