New Birch Trees in Arctic Speeding Climate Change

Growing up in the foothills of the Adirondacks, and having spent other formative times of my life in Russia, I have a deep, abiding love for birch trees, and so it comes as VERY unwelcome news that their northward expansion into the Arctic tundra may contribute to climate change.

"[U]sing a novel methodology based on measuring the radiocarbon content of the carbon dioxide being released, the researchers found that the birch trees appeared to be stimulating the decomposition of soil organic matter. Thus, the research was able to identify a mechanism by which the birch trees can contribute directly to reducing carbon storage in soils."

(Found through "Expansion of Forests in the European Arctic Could Result in the Release of Carbon Dioxide" - Science Daily, June 17, 2012)

Retiring the term "no regrets" - Optimal solutions instead

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Thank you Shaun Martin,WWF Managing Director of Conservation Leadership and Capacity Building, for this article on the problems of the term "no regrets" on the WWF ClimatePrep site.

He suggests avoiding "low regrets" as an alternative, instead offering "optimal solutions" - actions which "maximize benefits while minimizing negative consequences."

I couldn't agree more that we need to stop focusing on the amount of "regrets" and focus on the appropriateness -- optimality -- of the action to respond to the known climate threat. Besides being a syntactically clearer word, for me using the word "optimal" also serves to turn towards the desire for sufficient preparation and away from all that we fear in adapting to climate change-- whether it be spending too much money or planting the wrong thing in a threatened landscape.

"The World Daily" - cool new iPhone app for tracking climate impacts

Kirk Klausmeyer, my friend and fellow climate change researcher over at the San Francisco office of the Nature Conservancy -- author of this cool 2009 map showing drought and heat stress for California under climate change -- has just come out with the World Daily for the iPhone, the first app to display near real-time satellite images of any location on the planet ($1.99, not yet available for Android).

Kirk writes of the app:

[Its] images are from MODIS and are medium-resolution so you can see cities, landforms, weather patterns, wildfires, and snow cover, but not smaller things like houses.  ... It is a great way to watch the effects of climate change in real time. You can monitor hurricanes, typhoons, super cells... The app also has an option to view non-visible light bands to track changes in wildfires, even through thick smoke.  The [app's] facebook page has a time series album that shows the progression of the New Mexico wildfire in the Gila National Forest.  There is also another sensor on the satellites that show snow and ice, so you can track shrink[ing] glaciers all over the world.  Keep an eye on Greenland and be the first to report the loss of the ice shelf!  So while this may not help with adaptation, you can at least monitor climate change in the comfort and safety of your own home.  

Comfort and safety, unless of course you live somewhere like the Gila National Forest or Greenland, I suppose...