More studies showing species having unexpected responses to climate change

UC Berkeley's Grinnell Resurvey Project has generated data which allows researchers to assert some unexpected truths about species' responses to climate change.

The general wisdom is that species will move upslope/north to retreat from warming conditions. But that isn't how some species are responding. Two new studies -- "The push and pull of climate change causes heterogeneous shifts in avian elevational range" (Tingley, Koo, Moritz, Rush, and Beissinger) published Aug. 6, 2012, in Global Change Biology, and "Anthropogenic refugia ameliorate the severe climate-related decline of a montane mammal along its trailing edge" (Morelli, Smith, Kastely, Mastroserio, Moritz, and Beissinger) from Aug. 15, 2012, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B -- look at this puzzle. The first study found as many as 25% of species have shifted in ways not predicted, considering temperature changes. Lead author Morgan Tingley says, "We find that precipitation changes can have a major, opposing influence to temperature in a species’ range shift." The second study looks at Belding's ground squirrel, an animal perceived to be relatively common in the Sierras which has apparently disappeared from 42% of the places where it was recorded in the early 1900s by the original Grinnell survey. Local extinctions appeared more likely where winters are warmer and rain more frequent. UC Berkeley's Toni Morelli elaborates, "[T]he rate of decline is much greater than that seen in the same region for the pika, a small mountain-dwelling cousin of the rabbit that has become the poster child for the effects of climate warming in the contiguous United States."

Eerily, Tingley pointed out in this Aug. 15 article announcing the two studies' release, "More worrisome are the species that have not shifted. How are they adapting? Are they moving, but we just can’t detect it? Or are they slowly declining as environmental conditions gradually become less ideal where they live?"

Meanwhile, the ground squirrel seems to be doing particularly well in places modified by humans-- artificial oases like Mono Lake County Park. In the end, human land management choices might play a bigger role in the survival of a species than global changes in temperature or rain. It should make our state and local governments reconsider the importance of preserving open space-- you never know what species is making its last stand against climate change there.

California State Vulnerability and Adaptation Study Released at Long Last

The California State Vulnerability and Adaptation Study is finally out! Seven months after it was due to be released, it was launched yesterday (July 31, 2012). I'm not entirely sure what the delay was, but I'm relieved it's out. My component was done almost a year ago, with research centering on an event that took place in January 2011-- the Future of Wild Marin, a scenario planning workshop.

• Read my report on decision-making tools for resource managers facing climate change (167 p. , 2 MB)  
• The V&A Study's 14-page summary document 
•  See a list with links to all 35 studies that comprise the State V&A Study

 Yesterday's press release calls this the "third assessment," so I asked the project coordinator for links to the first two:

• Read the first assessment's non-technical summary from July 2006;  
• See a list with links to the documents comprising the second assessment, which was not peer-reviewed, from 2009 - called the "Climate Action Team Biennial Report to the Governor and Legislature" or "CAT Report"

Go California climate researchers!

The Award for Best Use of a Pogoism in Climate Change Journalism Goes To...

...Bill McKibben for "we have met the enemy and they is Shell" in Global Warming's Terrifying New Math (Rolling Stone, published online July 19, 2012, coming out in the Aug. 2, 2012, print edition). A really great piece of journalism, hopefully not falling on deaf ears in Washington as the summer brings about one superlative after another (hottest/ dryest/ biggest heatwave/ drought/ wildfire/ etc.).

This is a tweak on the 1970 Pogoism "we have met the enemy and they is us" by Walt Kelly. It is a parody of "We have met the enemy, and they are ours" (authored by U.S. Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry after the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813). In 1953 Walt Kelly first parodied this phrase in the Pogo Papers' forward ("A Word to the Fore"): 

...it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

(From Wikiquote)

It was later used on a 1970 Earth Day poster.

After you read what McKibben says -- that we can't control climate change until we put a price on carbon -- it's something of a relief to read Walt Kelly, reminding us of all that makes us human, bad and good. As much as Shell is the enemy, Shell is also a company of people, and we are people. It is just as true, therefore, by my lights, that we are the ones who can make this right-- put a price on carbon and make the fossil-fuel industry as a whole internalize the externality of climate change. Hopefully not after the focusing event that I fear will be required to motivate the people at Shell and ExxonMobil and BP-- the catastrophic flooding of an economic center like lower Manhattan.

The Adaptation Fund commits $50 mill+ to seven projects, but what is it exactly?

A June 29, 2012, press release from the Adaptation Fund just drifted into my inbox. It is committing over 50 million dollars for seven projects. The Adaptation Fund's brief FAQ tells me it issues decisions about funding four times a year. The footer on the press release says:

The Adaptation Fund is a self-standing fund established under the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which receives most of its funding from a two percent share of proceeds of all Certified Emission Reductions issued under the Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism projects. The Fund is designed to finance concrete climate change adaptation projects and programs based on the needs, views and priorities of developing countries. The Global Environment Facility provides secretariat services to the Adaptation Fund and the World Bank serves as its trustee, both on an interim basis.

I confess I still feel in the dark about this fund and how it works. 
Well, poking around a bit more, I realized that I had heard about it as a theoretical funding instrument with terms under negotiation. It was proposed in 2001, but has been issuing grants only since Sept. 2010.

Poking the internet a little, I found a nice break-down of the working parts of the Adaptation Fund, housed on the Climate Funds Update, a really user-friendly site with information on climate change action funding that's updated twice a month, a joint project of Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the Overseas Development Institute.

As with the Adaptation Fund, I can't tell from their site when they actually started functioning. More internet poking.

Aha! A 12-page briefing issued by Heinrich Böll Stiftung, dated May 2012, reporting on the work of the Climate Funds Update, says:  

CFU was launched in 2009 and seeks to monitor 22 dedicated public climate change finance initiatives from the point when donors pledge funding, through to the actual disbursement of climate finance. 

I wish the authors of these helpful sites would be a little more explicit and up front about who they are, what they do, and when they started doing it! In the meantime, adaptation funding mechanism watchers should add the AF and CFU to their bookmarks.

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...