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...

"Adaptation Futures" is here!

This week hundreds of climate change adaptation planners and researchers are convening for Adaptation Futures, the second international climate change adaptation conference, being held in Tucson, Arizona. It's going to be 100 degrees F and the conference organizer has warned us to dress for the heat. He wrote, "Tucson is famously casual and hot. Not used to either of those? Take a cue from the conference – adapt!" (I think I'm going to enjoy this conference. They are using imperative verbs in the orientation e-mail telling us to leave our pretensions at home.)

Here's the current program. I'm scheduled to present about my scenario planning case study in a panel with robust decision-making folks from Rand on Thursday (2:45 - 4:00 PM, Session C, in Gallagher). After that I should be answering questions at my poster in the poster session room (4:00 - 4:45).

Watch the plenary sessions streaming online here.

Some of the adaptation researchers I'm looking forward to hearing speak are Saleemul Huq, someone who has been writing about adaptation in the developing world for a decade or more, now a Senior Fellow in the Climate Change Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development in the UK, Patrick McCarthy of the Southwest Climate Change Initiative, and, from the West Coast, Susi Moser, one of California's top climate change adaptation thinkers/researchers, and -- representing the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington -- Amy Snover  and Lara Whitley Binder, who brought us the famous 2007 guidebook used by governments all over the U.S. "Preparing for Climate Change, A Guidebook for Local, Regional and State Governments."

Right now it is 54 degrees F in Oakland, so packing for 100 degrees is an exercise in imagination. Truly, this is one of the biggest challenges in climate change adaptation planning-- trying to imagine and sufficiently prepare for a completely different climate from the one you know! I'm packing my bathing suit, sandals and a paper fan--  and a sweater just in case.

When the Climate Tells You It's Time to Go

In "Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific," an 80-page report released March 13, 2012, by the Asian Development Bank, researchers attempt to tease out climate change factors from the many other factors driving migration and displacement in the region expected to sustain the worst population impacts from climate change.

[I]t [is] hard to predict with any degree of certainty the number of people who will be displaced by climate change. However, it is possible to identify the processes by which these migrations will occur, as well as the places where they are most likely to happen. This is what this report aims to do, focusing on extreme weather events, water stress and land degradation, and sea-level rise.

Based on one report I read from the International Organization on Migration (Migration and Climate Change, from Oli Brown, 2008), those who STAY worry me more than those who GO. The ADB report addresses this in their chapter "Strengthening Adaptation Through Migration" (from page 46):

At the same time that an increasing number of populations find themselves forced to move because of climate change, significant numbers of populations often find themselves forced to stay. Climate change could indeed prevent the most vulnerable from migrating, as their resources will be reduced [...]. 

I like that this report (a) doesn't raise alarms about invading hoards of poor climate migrants sweeping up on rich countries' shores (which Brown calls out as a myth in his 2008 report) and (b) points to the need to anticipate and plan for wise migration rather than waiting for it to happen on its own, possibly in ways that leave people in greater danger.

Basically, where Asian Pacific countries are concerned, good migration policies make good neighbors! This has always been true, but the pressure is on to strengthen these policies now. The report ends on this note:

Governments at all levels, regional bodies, and international organizations have a responsibility to act with urgency on this issue. They have before them an opportunity to shape a future of human mobility that promotes better, more inclusive living conditions for the people of the world’s most populous region. 

You can't force a person to move out of harm's way, but you can-- and governments must-- create the conditions that allow for safe passage to a better place when the climate tells you it's time to go.

New study: the low price of carbon puts brakes on innovation

A former professor from my public policy graduate school, Margaret Taylor (now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), has just published a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) with her findings about how the low price of carbon in current cap-and-trade programs is leading to a slow-down on technological innovation to reduce greenhouse gases. Read it here: Innovation under cap-and-trade programs (March 12, 2012).

New Sea Level Visualization Tool Launched by Climate Central

On March 14, 2012, Climate Central, a climate science and climate communications-oriented NGO based in Palo Alto, CA, and Princeton, NJ, launched a new report with an on-line interactive tool for analyzing the risk from US coastal sea level rise-- Surging Seas. Its map is searchable by US postal code or city name.

Read the press release about the launch of the report and on-line tool.

Here's Climate Central's compendium of news coverage about the Surging Seas on-line tool.

And here's the scientific report published on March 14 whose methods form the basis for the Surging Seas map outputs: Tidally adjusted estimates of topographic vulnerability to sea level rise and flooding for the contiguous United States (Strauss, Ziemlinski, Weiss and Overpeck, in Environmental Research Letters).

The first thing I notice is that Alaska and Hawaii aren't included in this map. When I searched "Alaska" it said "No affected location found." Looking back at the title of the methodological basis... "contiguous United States." Aha. (I hope someone is creating a tool like this for those states' extremely vulnerable coasts!)

Searching my hometown of Oakland, CA, it tells me: "Over 1 in 6 chance sea level rise + storm surge + tide will overtop +1ft by 2020 at nearest flood risk indicator site: San Francisco - San Francisco Bay, 13.4 miles away." 

I like that it spells out in a sentence the meaning of what you see in the map that is generated. However, with any tool like this I have to wonder if someone is going to misuse it in an actuarial capacity, or use it to refuse financing to someone looking for a mortgage. The 1 in 6 risk (that's 16% -- we're not told how much over that percent, just that it's over that percent) is for a location 13 miles away; will the sea rise and overtopping happen exactly the same way all the way around the San Francisco bay? If not, that 16% might be only a VERY rough estimate. As with any simplified tool like this, we can't see the error bars or caveats. 

Curious, I looked at their disclaimer. It includes this:

You are cautioned that Content should NOT be used:

• to assess actual coastal or other hazards, insurance requirements, or property values.

• in lieu of Flood Insurance Studies and Flood Insurance Rate Maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

• for navigation, permitting, zoning or other legal purposes.

I hope people heed those words! In the meantime, it's a very accessible tool to provoke thinking (and hopefully motivate policy action) to protect our coasts' future under climate change.

And also... perhaps is has already provoked a little tongue-in-cheek future history of San Francisco after catastrophic sea level rise... From "San Francisco Archipelago" on the blog Burrito Justice, March 20, 2012: "While the submerged ruins of the Sunset and the Mission have always been popular diving attractions, many have already forgotten the locations of long-flooded streets and avenues."