State of Our Earth: Eco Conference @ American Visionary Art Museum

In conjunction with the current exhibit ALL THINGS ROUND: Galaxies, Eyeballs & Karma, the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore is hosting an all-day, FREE Eco Conference this Sunday, January 22nd starting at 10:00am. Speakers include:

• Ecologist, author of Living Downstream, and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber
• Marine toxicologist, Dr. Susan B. Shaw
• Epidemiologist, Shira Kramer 
• CEO of the National Aquarium, John C. Racanelli
• Award-winning photo-journalist, Antrim Caskey
• Founder & Director of the U.S. Climate and Emergency Council, Mike Tidwell 

There will be a 7:00pm screening of "What on Earth?" as well. Check out the conference details and schedule here.

'If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant.'

As you have all been reading/hearing, thousands of dead drum fish recently washed ashore of the Arkansas River between Ozark and Clarksville and then on New Year's Eve thousands of red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas.

I have several theories:

1.) One of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 forgot to push the button and is moving the island therefore causing a magnetic pole shift.
2.) ManBearPig is real.
3.) We've got a mutated species of petroleum-eating Chytridiomycota fungus on our hands that is capable of making the whole world's oil supply disappear and someone needs to find Tom Clancy.
4.) Some human beings are doing/dumping something they shouldn't in/around the Arkansas River.

Apocalyptic thinking aside, the fact that the deaths were limited to certain species in a certain region leads me to believe this could be something like the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, but with the most recent news of near 500 dead blackbirds and starlings in Louisiana in this short period of time and talk of deadly blood clots in the recovered carcases, I think I am one of many now concerned that there is a stronger and faster-spreading problem affront.

Please feel free to share any theories or articles of interest in the comment section. Here are a few readers have sent in:

For Arkansas Blackbirds, The New Year Never Came
Mass La. Bird Deaths Puzzle Investigators
Nearly 3,000 Dead Birds Fall From Arkansas Sky
Dead Fish Cover 20-Miles of Arkansas River

Climate Change and the Chesapeake Bay

Just found this great segment on Terpvision:



TERPVISION FALL 2010: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CHESAPEAKE BAY (Segment 2) from University of Maryland on Vimeo.

Learn more from CIRUN.

Forests are growing faster!

Ecologist Geoffrey Parker and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute postdoctoral fellow Sean McMahon have discovered that, on average, the forest is growing an additional 2 tons per acre annually (which is the equivalent of a tree with a diameter of 2 feet sprouting up over a year). For more than twenty years, Parker has tracked the growth of 55 stands of mixed hardwood forest plots in Maryland and after an estimated quarter of a million measurements, he believes he has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years.

The paper, published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on the driving forces accelorating the growth: Climate change i.e. higher temperatures, longer growing seasons and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. From ScienceDaily:

"During the past 22 years CO2 levels at SERC have risen 12%, the mean temperature has increased by nearly three-tenths of a degree and the growing season has lengthened by 7.8 days. The trees now have more CO2 and an extra week to put on weight. Parker and McMahon suggest that a combination of these three factors has caused the forest's accelerated biomass gain."

Hmph. Perhaps Mother Nature does have a way of self-regulatiing?

Penguin Party!

January 20th is National Penguin Awareness Day! In honor of our flightless, flippered friends, JustSaying invites you to waste a solid hour of company time looking at pictures and videos of these little fellas. Here are some fun facts and photos to get you started:

• Penguins can swim at up to 15 miles per hour!
  
• The distinctive markings of penguins is no accident. The white underside and a dark upper-side is camouflage against predators - from above or below sea level.
  
• Penguins are very social animals, breeding in groups or in large noisy colonies called rookeries. After mating on shore in the spring - almost always with the same partner- female penguins lay one or two eggs (although usually only one chick is reared). Please watch March of the Penguins for a deeper understanding of penguins love, life and rookeries.
  
• Penguins are found in the Southern Hemisphere. The greatest number is found on the coasts of Antarctica and on the subantarctic islands. Some penguin species live as far north as the Galapagos Islands on the Equator and the subtropical coasts of South America, South Africa and Australia.

• That's right: Penguins don't only live on icebergs. They can be found in warm areas (like Humboldt Current along the western coast of South America and Benguela and Agulhas Currents around South Africa) but only because there are cold water currents there.
  
• Speaking of climate conditions, penguins are extremely sensitive to climate change and their greatest threat is global warming.
  
• Today's penguins face a number of other threats including: destruction of nesting habitats, competition with fishermen for fish and shrimp, and introduced predators (such as rats, dogs and foxes) which eat penguin eggs and young.
  
• Emperor penguins, who live on floating ice packs in Antarctica, can grow to be up to four feet in height and 80 pounds in weight.They are also the deepest diving penguins, capable of diving to depths of 1,700 feet! 

If you enjoy these seabirds as much as I do and want to help, consider adopting one or two through the World Wildlife Fund. (Note: This is a symbolic adoption. You will not actually be recieving a little penguin pet in a WWF box. So just saying... don't waste the vacation day waiting for him/her.)

Worst case scenario?

Warming Debate

I've avoided addressing this topic for a few days now but suppose it is time to at least acknowledge it. On the left, we have a lot of folks highly concerned about the human impact on our planet and desperate to prove that there is in fact a problem here - be it visible in climate change, species depletion, melting polar ice caps etc. On the right, we have a camp eager to point out the vast number of improvements made by the human species, the progress we've made in carbon emission regulation in the past few decades, the unsustainable habits of very wealthy Al Gore, etc. I say: thank heaven for both sides because they are passionate and keep the debate alive, progressive, current and fair.

This past weekend I had breakfast with my father - a scientist who is a registered republican (rare, I know) - and as much a I resisted, it seems he brought my chair from the far left of this debate to somewhere around the middle. He pointed out the historical flattening of populations, the crisp white snow on the ground that would look a lot more like a scene set in a Dicken's novel had America not progressed leaps and bounds in the cleanliness of our automobiles, the unmatched medical and scientific innovation of folks who aren't busy farming all day and of course the factory farmed eggs in my omelette.

I argued that climate change isn't linear and that coastal cities are doomed, that so much of our scientific innovation is treating western diseases brought about by a food system that needs an overhaul not a band aid, and that species are dissappearing from land and seas as fast as forests are being torn down for McNeighborhoods. For once though, I listened more than I talked and I learned more than I preached. And I learned that there are a few things we can all agree on and perhaps my energy is best focused there.

No one on either side wants to see species endangered and dissappearing. No one wants weather patterns disrupting entire cities and farm lands. What the hot-headed debaters fail to acknowledge is that we are all in this together and interested in the smartest, cheapest, most effective solutions and those ideas come from both ends of the political spectrum.

So although I truly believe that the human species has done plenty of harm to nature, I don't necessarily believe that nature is as passive and weak as I did before. Perhaps the changing climate is nature's way of fighting back and what we deem as detrimental may be part of a naturally developing solution. Of course that solution may be to wipe out the human species with droughts, extreme temperatures, hurricanes and floods but it may not. Maybe these are warnings, not warmings, and we're evolving side by side with the climate, coming up with greener solutions and even fudging some data to convince everyone that this is serious and we can't ignore it.

Don't get me wrong - I'm still going to preach the enviro-benefits of being a vegetarian, scold folks for drinking bottled water, emphasize the importance of recycling and respecting our mother earth, chain myself to trees and all that important stuff - but just saying... maybe I'll cool it a little with the global warming comments and let nature speak and fight for itself.

Sunny Sunday

There was a time when a warm day in November seemed like a gift to gardeners - the perfect temperature to spend a few hours cleaning up the yard before winter sets in. These days it seems a bit more bittersweet because there is this looming sense that the 68 degree high set for today, albeit quite a few degrees short of the record of 79, comes with a price of dangerous weather patterns somewhere else. Like the "hot April day" Maryland encountered earlier this year.

Anywho, while on the topic of climate change, I've been meaning to share a factoid from J.S. Foer's new book (that I'm about halfway through and looking forward to discussing):

"Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change."

Just saying, folks.

Hard to argue with this evidence

According to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 85% of the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro has melted away since 1912. The primary cause: "increase in global temperatures." Experts predict that it will disappear completely within twenty years. The images above, taken in 2001 and 2009, show the near 26% decline in the last decade alone. Read more here.

Reading the morning news...

Whenever I recommend Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and The Olive Tree, I struggle to articulate his take on globalization - perhaps because it takes reading the whole book to gain that greater understanding I so wish I could hand to people. Thankfully, my man wrote another typically insightful Op-Ed for today's NY Times. From Jao Flats, Botswana, Friedman connects the dots with 54 year old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, Map Ives:

We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.

They all need to go on safari together.

“We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion, constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett, senior vice president with Conservation International. “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue, but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture. So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.”

But we also need to double food production to feed a growing population. “So we’ll need to do that without clearing more forests and draining more wetlands, which means farmers will need new technologies and practices to grow more food on the same land they use today — with less water,” he added. “Healthy forests, wetlands and grasslands not only preserve biodiversity and store carbon, they also help buffer the impacts of climate change. So our success in tackling climate change, poverty, food security and biodiversity loss will depend on finding integrated solutions from the land.”

This passage does not include Ives most fascinating - and so widely overlooked - observations on nature so find the entire op-ed here.

Bad News...

"Man-made climate change is already lifting temperatures, increasing rainfall, and raising sea levels around the United States -- and its effects are on track to get much worse in the coming century, according to a report released this afternoon by federal scientists."

...from a new report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, summarized here in The Washington Post.

East Coast hardest hit by sea level rise

Looks like I'll be saying a few I told you so's sooner than I thought. Although I wish that were not the case. The Washington Post reports:

Three studies this year, including one out last month, have made newly worrisome forecasts about life along the Atlantic over the next century. While the rest of the world might see seven to 23 inches of sea-level rise by 2100, the studies show this region might get that and more -- 17 to 25 inches more -- for a total increase that would submerge a beach chair.

And here are some frightening predictions on a local level:

Even before the recent research forecast accelerating rise, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge -- a rare, vast marsh on Maryland's Eastern Shore -- was predicted to become mainly open water by 2030.

In the Washington region, Environmental Protection Agency official James G. Titus said, Hains Point, along the Southwest Waterfront, and K Street NW in Georgetown might have to be elevated. Sections of the waterfront Fells Point neighborhood in Baltimore might also need to be jacked up.

Seasons

Ahh... looks like we're going to have another "hot April day" today. I guess that's normal now. Hot April days. On our ride home from FedEx Field yesterday, Redskins Radio commentator Steve Czaban said this puzzling phrase as if April is supposed to be as warm as August. Just doesn't sound quite right to me...

Today's forecast: High of 92 degrees Fahrenheit. If we reach it, that would be a record high, according to marylandweather.com. What is the "normal" high, you ask? 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Just saying.

RACE TO SAVE THE FROGS

Jennifer S. Holland (senior writer) and Joel Sartore (photographer) have put together a haunting yet hopeful feature for the April issue of National Geographic about the vanishing frog population that is an absolute must-read.

If you remember from previous posts, not only have habitat loss, climate change and pollution delivered fatal blows to many amphibians, but the fungal infection known commonly as chytrid has devastated frog populations worldwide.

From the article:

Why care about frogs? "I could give you a thousand reasons," says herpetologist Luis Coloma. Because their skin acts not only as a protective barrier but also as a lung and kidney, they can provide and early warning of pollutants. Their insect prey carries human pathogens, so frogs are an ally against disease. They serve as food for snakes, birds, even humans, playing a key role in both freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. "There are places where the biomass of amphibians was once higher than all other vertebrates combined," says University of California, Berkeley, biologist David Wake. "How can you take that out of the ecosystem without changing it in a major way? There will be ecological consequences that we haven't yet grasped."

Find the full article and incredible photographs online here.

(Note: The frog pictured in this post is not from Nat Geo. He is my neighbor.)

Climate Debate

It will not surprise you that my beliefs echo Mr. Thomas L. Friedman's in that I think Al Gore underestimated climate change in An Inconvenient Truth. Nevertheless, this recent NY Times article is an interesting read regarding the science, politics, and press about/around/behind global warming.

**update**

DotEarth responds

A nice collection of photos...

Great slide show up on The Post's website, called Eye on the Earth, offering a view of human influence on climate and geographic change. The sixth and tenth images made a particularly strong impact on me. I wish there were more.

Arable Agriculture

This practical, inexpensive and achievable approach to reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is the recent suggestion of Andy Ridgwell and his colleagues at the University of Bristol in England, who have been researching agriculture as an alternative to building an enormous sunshade infrastructure in space or disseminating sulfate particles into the atmosphere.

Their calculations say that summertime cooling of more than one degree Celsius, about two degrees Fahrenheit, is achievable across central North America and parts of Europe and Asia simply by planting crop varieties with maximum solar reflectivity (albedo), a practice they call Leaf Albedo Bio-geoengineering.

From their findings, published in Current Biology:

Ultimately, genetic modification of plant leaf waxes or canopy structure could achieve greater temperature reductions, although better characterization of existing intraspecies variability is needed first.

Will rising temperatures trigger food shortages by 2090?

The results of a recent study by David Battisti (University of Washington) and Rosamond Naylor (Stanford University) analyzing data from 23 global climate models has revealed a 90% chance that most of the tropic and sub-tropic regions of our plane will experience "unprecedented seasonal average temperatures by the end of the twenty-first century." This alone, of course, is hardly surprising news. Here's the other part. On top of studying those 23 global climate models, which were produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they examined case studies of three areas that have experienced extreme heat waves and the resulting impact temperatures had on food production. From the Nature article:

"France felt some of the greatest impacts of the 2003 heat wave in Western Europe, seeing mean temperatures rise to 33 °C between June and August — nearly 4 °C higher than the country's average historical temperature for those months. Over this period, production of maize (corn) fell by 30%, fruit harvests declined by 25% and wheat harvests dropped by 21% compared with the year before. The study, published in Science, claims that by the end of the century, the temperatures experienced in the summer of 2003 will be the norm for the season in France."

Critics have pointed out these agricultural shortages could (or should) be attributed to drought, as opposed to extreme heat, and that with sufficient rainfall or irrigation, crop yields could potentially increase in other regions. Of course you then have to ask what causes droughts and so on and so forth...

I recommend reading David Biello's recent article on the topic in Scientific American, that acknowledges climate change, a greater demand for food, biofuels, and so forth as causes leading to an agricultural breaking point, not just record-breaking heat. Find it (and more info about the doomsday temperature increase maps posted below) here.

Alaska, anyone?

dwindling moose population

In the last 20 years, the moose population in the Upper Midwest United States has plummeted and scientists are pointing fingers at climate change, specifically the gradual rising of temperatures in the Northwest. The LA Times reports:

"Solitary and grumpy, moose have made it clear in their estimated 13,000 years in North America that they hate warm weather. The concern about the fate of the moose comes as the Bush administration, in its last weeks, is revising regulations in ways that prohibit federal agencies from evaluating the effects of increased global warming on endangered species. Officially, the moose is not endangered in the U.S. But it is in danger of disappearing from the Midwest, which is the far southern fringe of its range. There are about 7,700 moose in Minnesota, nearly all in the northeast part of the state. That's down about 50% from 20 years ago...

...Whereas deer, wolves and bears have adapted to warmer temperatures, wildlife biologists say, moose have suffered. Moose require shade, water and cool weather, each of which is dwindling in northwest Minnesota, where the moose population struggles among small patches of aspen woods and farmland. When temperatures rise, the moose have to work harder to obtain food and find places to stay cool... that affects their immune systems, prevents them from putting on more fat in the summer (which they need to get through the winter) and makes them vulnerable to parasites."

please help save the frogs

Because football has apparently taken over Thursday nights now, on top of Sunday and Monday nights, I was only able to catch the first quarter of The Animal Planet documentary, The Vanishing Frog. I learned enough in that short time, however, to understand the threats facing our planet's amphibian population. Here are some facts:

Since the 1980s, more than 120 species of frogs have gone extinct.

Right now, one-third to one-half of the world's amphibian species are threatened.

For example, a decade ago there were tens of thousands of Southern Mountain Yellow-Legged frogs in the lakes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Today, less than 200 remain.

Climate change, pollution, the introduction of non-native species, fires, and most recently a deadly chytrid aquatic fungus are the main suspects in the disappearance of the frogs and so many other amphibian species.

Chytrid fungus is currently unstoppable and untreatable in the wild. The World Conservation Union calls it the worst infectious disease ever recorded among vertebrates.

The top five critically endangered frogs are: the Southern Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog, the Panamanian Golden Frog, the Variable Harlequin Frog, the Lehmann's Poison Frog, and the Southern Corroboree Frog (pictured).

Only about 250 Southern Corroboree frogs remain in the wild, 25% of which are expected to vanish in the next three years, quite possibly because of the chytrid aquatic fungus.

I encourage you to check your local listings for The Vanishing Frog or watch the full documentary here on Animal Planet's website. And if you'd like to help, learn more by visiting savethefrog.com or click here to purchase a t-shirt or make a donation to Amphibian Arc that supports their global amphibian rescue efforts.