Climate 411

This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

Have you ever spent time scrolling through NASA’s image gallery? Some of the pictures are mesmerizing. I particularly like the "Blue Marble" image of the Earth (at right), which was stitched together using satellite data.

Satellites provide more than pretty pictures. Our ability to understand and predict climate change depends on continuous high-quality satellite data.

Unfortunately, this critical data stream is threatened by budget cuts and lack of political support. In 2005, the National Academies assessed the situation and deemed it "alarming". Three years later, the outlook has not improved.

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

What does wildlife conservation mean to you? Setting aside land? Restoring habitat? Reducing local stresses to species or ecosystems? These are the conventional methods. But because of rapid climate change, scientists in a recent paper say this may not be enough:

[T]he future for many species and ecosystems is so bleak that assisted colonization might be their best chance.

Assisted colonization – moving species to sites where they aren’t native – is a high-risk suggestion. There are many cases, for example, where introduced species have become invasive and wreaked havoc on native ecosystems. So why would some of the world’s leading biologists make such a suggestion?

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

In 1992, the world’s nations gathered to negotiate the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The 192 nations that ratified this treaty – including the U.S. – agreed to the following objective:

[T]o … prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system… within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

The definition of "dangerous" is a social and political judgment that is informed by science. But even if we all agreed on which outcomes we wanted to avoid, scientists couldn’t say precisely how much we have to cut emissions to achieve these outcomes. We have good best estimates, but there’s always a degree of scientific uncertainty.

Here’s why.

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund. You can meet Lisa at the Netroots Nation conference, July 17-20.

Congress and producer groups are pressuring the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to release millions of acres from Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) contracts and open them up to crop production. Supporters say this move would increase production and bring down food prices.

Wrong! Ripping up conservation lands would not make a big dent in commodity supplies or prices, but it would waste billions of taxpayer dollars that have been invested in conservation on these lands.

It also would be a tragedy for wildlife, water quality, and climate.

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

IPCC scientists have been saying for years that man-made global warming is likely to increase extreme weather events. A new report ("Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate") from U.S. government scientists confirms these findings, and focuses specifically on the U.S.

It’s certainly timely, considering the devastating floods in the Midwest.

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This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.

In IPCC‘s Third Assessment Report (2001), scientists reported that carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane levels were higher than at any time in the past 420,000 years. In their latest report (2007), IPCC scientists raised the number to 650,000 years.

Last week, scientists again revised the number upward. New research shows that CO₂ and methane levels are higher today than they have been in at least 800,000 years.

Here’s how they know.

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