Happy hour: Obama orders climate planning just in time for the weekend

By Amelia Urry

President Obama signed an executive order on Friday morning designed to prepare the country for climate-related disasters. (Didn’t anyone tell him we were busy recovering from the unnatural disaster that Halloween wreaks on our nation’s glycemic response?) The order comes on the dragging heels of Obama’s Climate Action Plan unveiled in June, at a time when Congress has mastered the Zen art of shooting down any sane climate-related proposal — even when it was their idea in the first place. Obama, impatient with the Flat Earthers, serves us up a chilling dish of executive truth:

The impacts of climate change — including an increase in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, an increase in wildfires, more severe droughts, permafrost thawing, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise — are already affecting communities, natural resources, ecosystems, economies, and public health across the Nation. These impacts are often most significant for communities that already face economic or health-related challenges, and for species and habitats that are already facing other pressures.

According to the administration, natural disasters cost the U.S. more than $100 billion in 2012. That includes damage from Superstorm Sandy, severe drought impacts on farmers, and the priciest fire season in recent memory. For the sake of our bank statements, if nothing else, it is time to invest in some real solutions.

The order calls on federal agencies to consider natural infrastructure that can serve the double-purposes of sequestering carbon and buffering communities from storms and heat waves. There is also an emphasis on collecting “authoritative, easily accessible, usable, and timely data, information, and decision-support tools on climate preparedness and resilience,” which will be available for public browsing on the ever-popular data.gov website.

But perhaps the biggest thing to come out of the order is a bipartisan (though largely Democratic — hello, token Republican, Gov. Eddie Calvo of Guam!) task force that will spend the next year hunting up ideas to improve resilience in U.S. communities — as well as a huge inter-agency Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, filled out by the senior officials of more than 30 departments of the federal government.

Over the coming year, the task force will develop a list of recommendations for ways that Uncle Sam can help encourage responsible, resilient development in communities around the country, which it will in turn pass off to the council, which will in turn collate and enact changes throughout the rank and file of the federal agencies.

Whew. Sounds like a big job — but luckily it’s Friday, so we can all take a breather, enjoy some unseasonably warm weather, and get to work preparing for a better future on Monday.

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern.

Leaked IPCC report: Humans are adapting — but hunger, homelessness, and violence lie ahead

By John Upton

If you are anything like us, you’re waiting for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to publish the next installment of its epically important assessment report with bated breath. Rejoice: The waiting is over, thanks to an intrepid sneak who leaked the doc ahead of schedule.

The latest leak gives us a peek at the second quarter of the most recent assessment (it’s the fifth assessment report since 1990 by the world’s leading climate change authority). The document, scheduled to be unveiled in March, deals with the severity of climate impacts and worldwide efforts to adapt to it.

Now, technically we’re supposed to wait until the final draft is officially published before sharing its contents with you climate-news-hungry readers. But we just can’t resist: Here is our summary of some of the upcoming report’s key findings, accompanied by a boilerplate warning: Despite being marked “final draft,” these conclusions could change between now and the official release in March.

 

Global warming will probably kill a whole lot of people

As the world heats up, heat waves, fires, and crop-withering droughts will leave heavy casualties in their wake. (Then again, fewer people will die of frostbite. Har!) Overall, though, the authors of the report have “high confidence” that any world health benefits will be overwhelmed by negative impacts.

“The most effective adaptation measures for health in the near-term are programs that implement basic public health measures such as provision of clean water and sanitation, secure essential health care including vaccination and child health services, increase capacity for disaster preparedness and response, and alleviate poverty,” the authors note.

Meanwhile, climate change is expected to exacerbate wars and violent protests. It will do that by fostering the types of problems that traditionally lead to violence: poverty and economic shocks. That in turn will shape national security policies. “[C]hanges in sea ice, shared water resources, and migration of fish stocks, have the potential to increase rivalry among states,” the report says.

There’s plenty of danger to go around

The type of climate risks vary widely in different parts of the world, but the report authors conclude that certain threats are widespread. They include the risks of death and disruption in low-lying coastal zones; dangers of food insecurity, with risks of starvation greatest among the world’s poor; “severe harm” risks of flooding in cities; the collapse of ocean and land ecosystems and the food they provide; and deaths and illnesses caused by heat waves.

Hundreds of millions of people will be affected by flooding, with many of them driven from their homes by the end of the century. The majority of those affected will live in Asia. Certain low-lying developing countries and island states (like Tuvalu) face very high impacts from rising seas (like, uh, disappearing altogether).

Farming gets harder

The biggest impacts from climate change will be felt on farms, which will endure worsening water shortages and will have to deal with shifting growing ranges. That’s going to make it harder to feed the world its staples of wheat, rice, and corn. Climate change could reduce yields of these crops by as much as 2 percent each decade for the rest of the century, and that will coincide with rising demand for food by growing populations. But if farms and agricultural systems proactively adapt to global warming, they could actually reap a rare benefit and increase yields by as much as 18 percent compared with today’s harvests.

Climate change is helping some farming regions, especially those close to the poles, but “[n]egative impacts of climate change on crop and terrestrial food production have been more common than positive impacts.”

Animal Planet will get really boring

Species of plants and animals are more likely to go extinct as the weather goes haywire, and polar ecosystems and coral reefs are especially vulnerable to ocean acidification.

Governments the world over are developing plans and policies for adapting to the changing climate

In North America, most climate adaptation work is occurring at the municipal level, with much of the region’s climate planning focused on energy and infrastructure impacts. In Africa, “most” national governments are initiating adaptation systems. In Europe, adaptation efforts are focused mostly on managing coastal, water, and disaster risks. In Asia, adaptation efforts are focused on managing water resources. Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding islands are planning for sea-level rise, with residents and regional governments in southern Australia preparing for ongoing water shortages. In Central and South America, efforts to conserve wild places and native cultures as the climate changes are becoming increasingly common. Residents of the Arctic have a long history of adapting to changing weather patterns, but “the rate of climate change and complex inter-linkages with societal, economic, and political factors represent unprecedented challenges.”

Better late than never

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades could “substantially reduce risks of climate change” during the second half of the 21st century, when the planet is expected to really go bonkers.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Sea Change – Can sea life adapt? (text and video)

Posted: 04 Nov 2013 05:26 AM PST

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — The violet bottom-dwelling, prickle-backed spheres wriggling in the tank in Gretchen Hofmann’s lab aren’t really known for their speed.

But these lowly sea urchins adapt so quickly they’re helping answer a question that’s key to understanding ocean acidification:

As fossil-fuel emissions disrupt marine life, will evolution come to the rescue?

Like Darwin’s finches or Great Britain’s peppered moths, these hedgehogs of the sea increasingly embody nature’s stunning capacity for resilience.

 

A number of plants and animals threatened by souring seas, including some mussels, abalone, rock oysters, plankton and even a few fish, appear likely — at least at first — to adjust or evolve. But few seem as wired as these saltwater pincushions to come through the next several decades unscathed.

Yet work with urchins, as well as other species, suggests that acidification sooner or later may still push these and other marine organisms beyond what they can tolerate.

“Evolution can happen, and it can happen quickly,” said Hofmann, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), who has studied urchins for years. “But concerns about extinctions are very real and very valid. Biology can bend, but eventually it will break.”

The oceans are absorbing a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas. That, researchers say, is causing sea chemistry to change faster than it has for tens of millions of years.

Which plants and animals can accommodate these more corrosive seas — and for how long — will depend on many factors, from where they live to their population sizes to the depth of stress they face from other forces, such as warming temperatures and pollution. Survival will vary species by species. Not everything will make it.

“This kind of change is not free; evolution is not a gentle sport,” said Stephen Palumbi, an evolutionary ecologist at Stanford University, who also works extensively with urchins. “When evolution happens, it’s because the unfit are dying. It’s pretty brutal.”

And that’s when things work well.

‘Terrifying’ research

In the late 2000s, commercial urchin fisherman Bruce Steele feared things would not go so well. And for good reason.

Urchins graze on algae, drive out kelp and are eaten by sea otters, sunflower stars and humans. Steele, a scuba diver, had made his living since the 1970s scooping the spiny delicacies off the seafloor to sell to sushi restaurants as uni.

But when he read a research paper about acidification, he saw right away what it could mean for his business — and for the ocean he loved.

“When you start knocking out the very bottom of the food chain, it’s incredibly terrifying,” Steele said. “But that’s what the research is showing us.”

Increasing CO₂ not only makes oceans more corrosive, it reduces carbonate ions, which everything from scallops to crabs, coral and sea urchins need to build shells or skeletons.

So Steele dialed up Hofmann, his local university expert on spiky echinoderms.

“She thought it was a crank call or something, because … I don’t know,” Steele said. “I guess people figure a sea urchin diver’s not going to be reading a whole bunch of science.”

Hofmann dismissed Steele at first, but quickly called back and started investigating his concerns. She exposed sea urchin larvae to high-CO₂ water and made a troubling discovery: Their bodies often got smaller.

“Overall, their body size really matters in how well they swim and how much food they get,” Hofmann said. “So if you’re smaller, it’s really bad news if you’re a baby sea urchin in the water.”

But Hofmann noticed something else, too: Some larvae didn’t change at all.

“When we started raising our babies in the lab, we saw that some of them shrank,” Hofmann said. “But, in fact, some of them didn’t. There were some in there that didn’t respond the same way.”

Hofmann knew enough about genetics to know that distinction might prove important.

Signs of evolution

In the century after Charles Darwin returned from the Galapagos carrying birds with different-shaped beaks, these finches came to represent the power of natural selection. As the birds expanded to areas with new foods, variations in their genetic code allowed new traits to emerge.

Such selection can be simple, elegant and fast. In Manchester, England, a common tree moth evolved from mostly speckled ivory to black in just decades. Soot from the Industrial Revolution had killed lichen and darkened local trees, which scientists believe allowed birds to more readily pick off the lighter insects. Once pollution was controlled, the tree trunks grew light again, and ivory-colored moths returned to dominance.

Hofmann suspected variations in urchin DNA left some predisposed to handle acidified seas. Nature, quite by accident, had been preparing a long time for this very moment.

It was all about the water. Water chemistry close to shore is rarely static. Ocean CO₂ can vary with the time of day or the tides, when plants suck up CO₂ to grow, or when animals die and decay.

The change is more pronounced in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. When heavy winds blow along shore, deep, cold water that naturally holds more CO₂ suddenly wells up from the bottom and gets drawn toward the beach. That means some West Coast urchins have spent millions of years being exposed to high-CO₂ waters.

In fact, upwelling is part of the reason Northwest oyster larvae were among the world’s first-known victims of acidification. Because the water already was near the extreme edge of what oyster larvae can tolerate, when man-made acidification spiked it higher, that wiped out billions of shellfish.

So Hofmann and a colleague, UCSB evolutionary biologist Morgan Kelly, mated “wimpy” Southern California sea urchins — those experiencing less CO₂ exposure — with hardier males from northern upwelling zones.

The result: northern animals passed on genes more resistant to acidified water.

“The progeny, the babies — the kids — of that father were much better at maintaining the size of their body and not succumbing to the stress of high-CO₂ water,” Hofmann said.

At the same time, Palumbi and other Stanford researchers reared urchins in water from Southern California and from high-CO₂ zones in Oregon. They found the frequency of some gene sequences shifted in response to growing up under higher CO₂.

Urchins, in both cases, were showing they could evolve.

“It was really kind of surprising, and a little bit on the hopeful side,” Hofmann said.

The very upwelling phenomenon that makes the Northwest an acidification hot spot could actually help some species get through it.

But which ones? And for how long?

“The truth is we don’t know,” Palumbi said. “The experiments don’t tell us how long it will take for them to reach their limit. And it doesn’t tell us the price they’ll pay.”

‘Against guardrails’

Animals affected by elevated CO₂ don’t always need to adapt. Sometimes new environmental stressors trigger a change in the way they or their offspring use the genes they have.

For example, baby clownfish born to parents reared in high-CO₂ water seem to survive just fine, while juvenile clownfish simply placed in high-CO₂ water die more often.

Parents produce kids that survive better in the environment they’re going to face, said Australian scientist Gabrielle Miller, at James Cook University, who has studied this phenomenon. “But it’s not a change in genetic makeup. It’s not evolution.”

There are, however, signs that some fish, too, might evolve in response to acidification. Scientist Philip Munday, also at James Cook University, recently exposed wild damselfish to CO₂ levels expected in coming decades. That water fouled up behavior for half the animals, leading many to die prematurely.

But, importantly, half the fish didn’t seem to change at all, and they survived as well as normal, healthy fish. Does that mean that some of these Great Barrier Reef fish were genetically predisposed to dealing with higher CO₂? It’s too soon to say.

“For some organisms, especially short-lived species, there is considerable opportunity for adaptation,” Munday said.

But evolution does have limits. When scientists breed mice for size, they get bigger over successive generations until reaching a point where they can get no larger. So what happens if the driver of all this change is an environmental cue that just keeps worsening?

Not every species can adapt enough. And not all of those that can will do so at the same speed, even if they live in similarly variable environments, such as areas near shore.

When Kelly, in Santa Barbara, exposed a microscopic species of tide-pool plankton to higher temperatures expected in coming years, she found these copepods lived in such an isolated environment they lacked genetic capacity to adapt much at all.

When Jennifer Sunday, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., studied mussels, she found that they, like urchins, are exposed to wild swings in sea chemistry. But evidence suggested these fast-growing mussels would still take far longer than slow-growing, long-lived urchins to adapt to rising CO₂.

And that pace can matter a great deal.

While adaptation is under way, many creatures may die, which can shrink populations — sometimes substantially. The question is, how many individuals can each species afford to lose?

That’s one reason scientists believe that organisms with enormous populations, like urchins, have the best shot.

“Our results are less likely to apply to species that live in less variable environments — for instance, open-ocean fish,” Kelly said. “And our results are less likely to apply to species with small population sizes.”

Three other issues, however, remain concerning for those trying to predict the marine world’s future. For starters, acidification and ocean warming will occur simultaneously.

“What happens if the individuals best able to tolerate high temperatures are the least tolerant to high CO₂?” Munday asked. “That could slow adaptation for either of those traits.”

Meanwhile, in 40 or 50 years, CO₂ in places like the Northwest will reach extremes even hardy animals like urchins have never experienced in their history. Scientists aren’t certain adaptation will keep up.

“Eventually we’re going to push things up against the guardrails of their tolerances and, pretty soon, they’re going to go right over the cliff,” Hofmann said. “That’s what’s worrisome.”

Lastly, all these changes will take place at once, potentially leading many populations to struggle as their food — and their predators — do the same. It’s tough to predict how that could upend relationships in the sea.

“The bottom line is we can’t count on adaptation to erase the effects of ocean acidification,” said Kelly. “It’s just not a panacea.”

But Palumbi, at Stanford, said it could buy the world time to address the problem.

“Frankly, it seems to me that we need to use that extra time,” he said.

 

Australian Electoral Commissioner apologises over WA Senate vote and says he expects legal challenge

Updated 20 minutes ago

The Australian Electoral Commissioner has apologised “unreservedly” to Western Australian voters for the state’s botched Senate election.

Commissioner Ed Killesteyn says he has no choice but to announce the result of the recount today, despite the near-certainty that it will be the subject of an immediate legal challenge by Labor and Clive Palmer.

The recount – triggered when the original vote resulted in just a 14-vote margin – descended into farce last week when the Australian Electoral Commission confirmed that nearly 1,400 ballot papers had gone missing.

Mr Killesteyn says the gravity of the situation is not lost on him.

 

“Nearly 1,400 Western Australian electors have had their Senate [votes] disenfranchised and I apologise unreservedly to those electors,” he told Radio National this morning.

“This is really now a matter that has to be dealt with in the courts.

 

“I’m obligated to declare the result, irrespective of the fact that these ballots are missing. Legally, I just have no other choice.”

Today’s announcement will give the final two Senate spots to the Greens’ Scott Ludlam and the Australian Sports Party’s Wayne Dropulich, with Labor’s Louise Pratt and the Palmer United Party’s (PUP) Dio Wang missing out.

The Palmer United Party will challenge the recount, as will Labor’s Senator Pratt.

This morning Mr Killesteyn dismissed claims by PUP leader Clive Palmer that the counting process had been corrupt, saying he had absolute “confidence” in his officers and their integrity.

Constitutional expert Professor Anne Twomey says the AEC itself is likely to petition the High Court to get any re-run of the ballot completed before next July.

 

“If it has doubts about the outcome, even if those doubts arise from errors that seem to have been made within the Commission perhaps in relation to these votes going missing, well it needs to be back on the front foot ensuring confidence in the system,” she said.

“I think that’s one of the reasons it would take this sort of action.”

Professor Twomey says a fresh election could be open to new candidates.

“Unless the court finds some kind of over-riding requirement that this being a replacement election for the earlier one you need to have the same candidates, etc, unless it did that … it would be effectively open slather and anyone could nominate,” she said.

The new Senate does not sit until July next year, so any new election could take place in February or March next year.

At the weekend, Federal Infrastructure Minister Warren Truss said this new election should be held sooner rather than later.

Any new campaign in Western Australia would be an interesting contest between newly endorsed Prime Minister Tony Abbott and newly elected Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

 

Topics: government-and-politics, elections, wa

First posted 2 hours 30 minutes ago