CLIMATE, SPECIES, AND PRESERVATION

In coastal areas of the U.S., plants and animals
will be refugees from rising seas.

How will Americans respond?
Lance

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” …  land managers will sometimes actually have to
embrace non-native invasive species …”

” … we should be looking to preserve land further inland
to give some of these species a chance for preservation,” she said.
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Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio, US)
Friday, October 12, 2007

ENVIRONMENT

Preservationists need to adjust to climate change, expert says

Michael Scott
Plain Dealer Columnist

Groups who seek to preserve parks and natural
areas need to rethink their mission in light of
already advancing changes in plants and animals
because of global climate change, an ecology
expert said this week.

“Forget trying to preserve a site and an
ecosystem exactly as you would like to – as a
close representation of what it was once like
without human effect,” said William Platt, an
ecology professor at Louisiana State University.

Platt spoke Tuesday at the 34th annual Natural
Areas Conference at the Marriott Key Center in
Cleveland. He said the ap proach is a departure
from the long-accepted idea to preserve parkland
as it once was.

He told about 400 parks and natural areas
managers attending the conference that some
species of plants and animals will not be able to
keep up with coming changes. That means land
managers will sometimes actually have to embrace
non-native invasive species which thrive in salt
water, for example.

Platt referred to the bleak forecast for
Louisiana where the Gulf of Mexico is rising at a
rate where 70 percent of the current coast is
projected to be under salt water by 2100 as “a
harbinger of things to come elsewhere,” including
Ohio.

Changes are already evident in the Great Lakes
region, said Kim Herman, president of the Natural
Areas Association, who lives in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula. She said Platt made sense when he said
that some species would “stretch” inland while
others would be “squeezed” from that advance.

“That means we should be looking to preserve land
further inland to give some of these species a
chance for preservation,” she said.

Climate effect:

An article in this month’s “National Parks” makes
this astonishing point: 73 percent of what was
once ice in Montana’s Glacier National Park is
now bare rock.

Some scientists project that by 2030 – only 23
years from now – there won’t even be a glacier in
the glacier park.

Several national parks managers echoed what Platt
told the Cleveland crowd: Climate change
discussion has moved from whether it’s actually
happening to how to best respond to it.

So national parks are likely to become more and
more “carbon neutral,” using trams to move people
around instead of cars, for example. Many parks
will also use the changes as educational
opportunities.

© 2007 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.

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WATER IS LIFE !!

———————-
“We are faced with … rising rates of
consumption that nature can’t match.
Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave
of privatization that is sweeping across the
world, turning water from a precious public
resource into a commodity for economic gain.”

“The case gained international attention when it
was featured in the film and book Thirst:
Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water. The
public finally won out in July, when the city
council voted to get rid of the 20-year contract
and send the corporation packing.”
——————-

The late, great Corbin Harney-spiritual leader of the
Western Shoshone People of the dry Great Basin region
of the U.S.-dedicated his life to spreading this very
message.

Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on October 11, 2007, Printed on October 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64948/

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist
and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said,
“Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and
medium. There is no life without water.”

We depend on water for survival. It circulates
through our bodies and the land, replenishing
nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed
down like stories over generations — from
ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.

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UNCERTAINTY IN CLIMATE SCIENCE

Science is the process of disciplined dissent. The process of
disciplined dissent relies on evidence — evidence that can force a
change of mind by challenging the consensus that scientists had
earlier achieved.

That’s nowhere more true than in climate science, where the consensus
process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has
been challenging its own, earlier consensus about the speed and
seriousness of what lies ahead.  What climate researchers regarded as
mostly likely in 2001 had been seriously challenged by early 2007,
and it now looks very likely that even the better consensus climate
scientists had reached in the spring of 2007 will be seriously
challenged by new evidence expected to come out in November.

Few groups are as prepared to challenge their own consensus as the
science community is. But scientists saw need of change coming, and
you saw the preview when it was posted to this list in October ’06.
Lance

—————————————
” ‘… the extreme scenarios that tend to fall out of the IPCC
process may be exactly the ones we should most worry about,’ he says.”

“Michael Schlesinger, a climate scientist at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, points to another example. ‘Things are
happening right now with the ice sheets that were not predicted to
happen until 2100.'”
——————————————-

SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org
VOL 314    13 OCTOBER 2006

NEWS FOCUS

Trying to Lasso Climate Uncertainty

An expert on climate and population looks for a way to help society avoid a
“Wile E. Coyote” catastrophe
-JOHN BOHANNON

LAXENBURG, AUSTRIA – A few weeks ago, Brian O’Neill hunkered down
around a table with a dozen other climate scientists in Cape Town,
South Africa, to talk about the future of the planet. It was no idle
speculation: Whatever they agreed upon – they knew in advance – would
have clout. They were hammering out the final draft of a chapter on
research methods for the massive “Fourth Assessment” of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The product of 3
years of consensus-building among several hundred researchers from
around the world, the IPCC report is the scientific bedrock on which
policymakers will negotiate everything from carbon taxes to long-term
greenhouse gas targets.

But for all its authority, the IPCC exercise left O’Neill with a
nagging concern: What were they leaving out? “It’s important that we
climate scientists speak with a single voice,” he said in an
interview back in his office, high up in the attic of a former
Habsburg palace outside Vienna. But “the extreme scenarios that tend
to fall out of the IPCC process may be exactly the ones we should
most worry about,” he says.

O’Neill, a climate scientist at the InternationalInstitute for
Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) here, is frustrated to see
uncertainties in research used as a reason to delay action. At age
41, he is one of the youngest scientists in the IPCC network trying
to reformulate climate-change projections that can cope better with
uncertainty by accounting for “future learning.” O’Neill hopes the
strategy will make it clear that, even with gaps in understanding, it
pays to act now.

His work is gaining notice. Although an American, O’Neill has scooped
up one of the coveted European Young Investigator Awards (EURYI), a
$1.5 million grant meant in part to keep Europe’s most promising
scientists at home. “He is one of the brightest young scientists out
there, and we’re all watching to see what he does,” says Simon Levin,
an ecologist at Princeton University.

A winding path

O’Neill’s job is to predict the future, but his own career path has
been unpredictable. With 3 years’ training in engineering and a
degree in journalism, he became passionately involved in the 1980s in
efforts to prevent ozone depletion, working for Greenpeace in
California. After collecting a Ph.D. in earth-system sciences from
New York University, he did research stints at Brown University and
the Environmental Defense Fund in New York City. In 2002, he moved to
IIASA, a center for multidisciplinary research founded in 1972. Here,
O’Neill has built up a new program focusing on population and climate
change. The treatment of demographics in most climate-change
analyses, he says, is “simplistic at best.” With the EURYI money,
he’s assembled a team of a half- dozen demographers, economists,
statisticians, and physical scientists to sharpen the models.

A long-limbed basketball player who looks like he could be fresh out
of graduate school, O’Neill seems to peel away layers of uncertainty
as he speaks. His slow-paced answers to questions often begin with a
detailed preamble of assumptions, conditions, and footnotes. But as
the father of two daughters, he says, “thinking about how the world
will be in 50 years is not so abstract for me anymore.”

At IIASA, his work focuses on building realistic demographic
projections, and China has become his main beat. Different
predictions of how the country’s population will age and urbanize —
and how carbon-emission policies will shape Chinese consumption —
have an enormous effect on global climate change scenarios. But
obtaining accurate demographic data has been difficult. With the help
of a Chinese member of his new team, O’Neill has done an analysis
revealing that the IPCC assumptions about China’s rate of
urbanization and energy consumption could be off by a factor of 2.

Learning about learning

Earlier this year, O’Neill organized a unique meeting at IIASA,
bringing together experts from different areas of climate science,
economics, and demography to think about how they generate knowledge.
One of the most important questions that emerged, says Klaus Keller,
a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University in State
College, is how do you avoid “the Wile E. Coyote effect?” The cartoon
coyote often doesn’t realize he’s falling off a cliff until he looks
down, too late to turn back. One of the potential cliffs in climate
change involves the ocean’s conveyer-belt system — known as the
meridional overturning circulation (MOC) — which prevents a Siberian
chill from spreading across western Europe by carrying warm water
north from the equator. Scientists worry that global warming could
abruptly change or even shut down the MOC. “These are the kind of
climate thresholds that we need to identify,” says Keller.

Scientists need to know more about the natural variability in MOC
behavior, says O’Neill. But they don’t even know “how precise your
measurements have to be” or how large an area must be studied before
uncertainty could be sufficiently reduced to spot “the edge of the
cliff.” He argues that the only way to attack such complex
uncertainties with limited time and resources is to have scientists
from different fields work together, assessing observations over many
years to learn which approaches pay off the most. O’Neill and others
did exactly this with 2 decades of research on the carbon cycle,
finding that some kinds of observations narrowed uncertainty in model
parameters far better than others. Such big-picture,
multidisciplinary studies are low on the priority scaleof funding
agencies, but this is exactly what’s needed if you want “to learn
about the potential of an MOC shutdown,” he says.

The second big question to emerge from the IIASA sessions is how can
we tell if mainstream research is headed in the wrong direction?
O’Neill, Michael Oppenheimer, and Mort Webster, climate scientists at
Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge,
respectively, use the term “negative learning” to describe cases in
which scientific consensus builds around the wrong model. “This is
what happened with ozone,” says Oppenheimer. People believed that
ozone’s key interactions are with other gases, until scientists
realized that the critical reactions driving ozone depletion occur on
the surfaces of airborne particles. With revised reaction rates, it
was suddenly clear that the planet’s protective ozonelayer was in
much bigger trouble than had been thought. Oppenheimer proposes that
scientists team up with philosophers and historians to find common
signs of negative scientific learning. A search for such red flags
could be built into climate science’s regular review process.

And O’Neill says more funds should be set aside to explore hypotheses
outside the mainstream. Researchers desperately need a strategy for
tackling climate uncertainties, O’Neill says. Michael Schlesinger, a
climate scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
points to another example. Polar ice sheets are melting more rapidly
than anticipated, and some observers fear that this could lead to a
catastrophic sea-level increase ( Science , 24 March, p. 1698).
“Things are happening right now with the ice sheets that were not
predicted to happen until 2100,” Schlesinger says. “My worry is that
we may have passed the window of opportunity where learning is still
useful.”

Whether a catastrophe can be averted using some form of scientific
introspection — or learning about learning, as O’Neill calls it —
remains unclear. The concept, like O’Neill’s career, is still at an
early stage of development.

RTNA JOINS MAINE IN FIGHTING PLUM CREEK LAND DEBACLE !!

MAINE VS. THE MULTI-TENTACLED PLUM CREEK ALIEN

Many people across Turtle Island (North America) are not aware that a relatively small but respectably-sized chunk of wild and nearly-wild forest ecosystem struggles for survival in northern Maine. The Maine North Woods essentially represents part of the southeastern edge of the Great North Woods, which stretch in an arc (mostly in Canada) across the North American continent from the Atlantic Seaboard to the prairies of the Great Plans. In Maine, this region encompasses most of the northern half of the state, is the largest undeveloped region in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River, and is home to, among many other species, loons, bald eagles, deer, moose, black bear, the threatened Canada lynx, wolves, and the extirpated caribou. A satellite photo of the eastern United States will show a significant dark region where no artificial light is visible in northern Maine. It is the largest wild, undeveloped area in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River.

Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Co. is one of the nation’s largest private landowners. It is the largest landholder in Wisconsin, Montana, Washington-& Maine. These 4 states hold some of the last, best, healthiest remaining wild or nearly-wild lands left in the Lower 48. These 4 states also hold some of the most self-sufficient, fiercely- independent human populations anywhere in “American society.” Many people in the forest defense movement around the world are depressingly familiar with Plum Creek’s dismal forest management practices as well as their propensity toward “developing” forested wildlands into extravagant, exclusive playgrounds for those humans rich, white, and callous (or clueless) enough to afford them. Such “developments” as the Yellowstone Club in Montana and the Suncadia development in Cle Elum, Washington, are already in place-doing nothing but damage to local ecosystems, wildlife, and economiesand now Plum Creek has set its sights on northern Maine’s Moosehead Lake Region for another such resort complex that also will do nothing but damage to ecosystems, wildlife, and local/regional economies in Maine. Fortunately for the Moosehead Lake Region (and the rest of the Maine North Woods)-and contrary to what Plum Creek’s decision-makers want to believe-Mainers are far from stupid, and have been tracking these plans carefully. Plum Creek’s first proposal, submitted in 2005 to the Land Use Regulatory Commission (LURC), was rejectes after a vociferous outcry from concerned citizens. Their second, revised proposal, submitted in April of 2006, was also rescinded by Plum Creek because they knew the public would not accept it. Finally, in April of 2007, Plum Creek submitted their latest proposal, claiming-“You spoke, we listened.” Had they really listened they would be out of Maine altogether by now. While there are some people in Maine who welcome the development project-many, many others across the state, from all walks of life, want absolutely nothing to do with Plum Creek and its plans for commodifying the Maine North Woods for its own personal profit.

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