Author: postMigrator

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” … the freeze killed … in an area encompassing Nebraska, Maryland,
South Carolina, and Texas. Subsequent drought limited regrowth.”
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  Public release date: 3-Mar-2008
American Institute of Biological Sciences

Contact: Holly Menninger
hmenninger@aibs.org
202-628-1500

Will global warming increase plant frost damage?

Widespread damage from 2007 Eastern US spring
freeze attributed to earlier warming

Widespread damage to plants from a sudden freeze
that occurred across the Eastern United States
from 5 April to 9 April 2007 was made worse
because it had been preceded by two weeks of
unusual warmth, according to an analysis
published in the March 2008 issue of BioScience.
The authors of the report, Lianhong Gu and his
colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
and collaborators at NASA, the University of
Missouri, and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, found that the freeze
killed new leaves, shoots, flowers, and fruit of
natural vegetation, caused crown dieback of
trees, and led to severe damage to crops in an
area encompassing Nebraska, Maryland, South
Carolina, and Texas. Subsequent drought limited
regrowth.

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“Now that all the records have been shown to
coincide, “it suggests that the whole world
hydrologic cycle varies in unison, on a pretty
rapid time scale,” said Gisela Winckler …”
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Public release date: 28-Feb-2008
The Earth Institute at Columbia University

Each year, long-distance winds drop up to 900
million tons of dust from deserts and other parts
of the land into the oceans. Scientists suspect
this phenomenon connects to global climate-but
exactly how, remains a question. Now a big piece
of the puzzle has fallen into place, with a study
showing that the amount of dust entering the
equatorial Pacific peaks sharply during repeated
ice ages, then declines when climate warms. The
researchers say it cements the theory that
atmospheric moisture, and thus dust, move in
close step with temperature on a global scale;
the finding may in turn help inform current ideas
to seed oceans with iron-rich dust in order to
mitigate global warming. The study appears in the
Feb. 28 edition of Science Express, the advance
online edition of the leading journal Science.

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“Under the calving grounds of the Western
[Alaska] Arctic Herd is one of the largest
low-sulfur coal deposits in the world. The
Teshekpuk Lake area of the National Petroleum
Reserve-Alaska, the calving grounds of the
Teshekpuk Herd, is facing proposed oil
development, and as you continue east across
North America from calving ground to calving
ground, you find activities or proposed
activities for development of uranium and diamond
mines, access roads, and other gas and oil
development.”
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University of Alaska at Fairbanks
http://www.uaf.edu/news/news/20080213123944.html

Submitted by Marie Gilbert
.
Seeking sustainability in a world of instability
New approaches to management of human-caribou systems

For most northern indigenous people, the roughly
3 million caribou in the world are their most
important terrestrial subsistence resource, and
while hunters and scientists alike have long
expressed concern about the on-going availability
of caribou, their perceptions of the causes of
change have differed.

“For years people have managed natural resources
based on their knowledge of how ecosystems have
functioned in the past, which assumes conditions
of equilibrium,” said Gary Kofinas, a resource
policy and management scientist and director of
the Resilience and Adaptation Program at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks.

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