Guest blogger Lisa Moore, Ph.D., is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.
Last week, Bill summarized two new studies about carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and ocean. This week brought three very different topics: hurricanes (quite timely, since today is the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season!), global rainfall patterns and rainbow trout.
If you’re concerned about hurricanes and global warming and you’ve been reading the newspapers and magazines, you are probably confused.
Perhaps in an effort to be “balanced,” most stories in the media these days present a muddled picture. Cornelia Dean’s piece in the New York Times is a good case in point: a scientific paper is cited claiming a connection; another is cited claiming the opposite. The implication is that the science is inconclusive.
If you’re an avid follower of the news, you may have heard of a company called Planktos that’s trying to fight global warming and make a profit at the same time through a process called "ocean fertilization".
The concept is simple: phytoplankton (tiny one-celled algae) take up carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis. Fertilizing the ocean encourages growth of phytoplankton, and increases the rate at which CO2 is consumed – presumably leading to less CO2 in the atmosphere. Since ocean photosynthesis is often limited by lack of iron, the idea is to dump iron into the ocean and watch the phytoplankton bloom. Planktos sees this as an economic opportunity: Increase CO2 uptake in the ocean, and sell it as an offset to carbon emitters. (I talked more about how offsets work in a previous post on land-based offsets.)
Ocean fertilization may sound like a good idea, but it has some very serious problems. Here’s why.
The second installment of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment on Climate Change, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, was released on April 6, 2007. In recognition of this report, I’m doing a weekly series called “Climate Dangers You May Not Know About“.
1. More Acidic Oceans
2. Drinking Water and Disease
3. Shifts in Lifecycle Timing
4. Drought and Violence
5. The Melting of the North Pole
The North Pole is surrounded by the huge Arctic Ocean. For millennia, that ocean has been covered by ice, but today that sea ice is rapidly melting. We’ve lost about 20 percent of summer sea ice since 1980 – an area equal to Texas, California and Montana combined – and it’s happening faster than we had predicted. The North Pole could be ice-free during summer months well before 2050.
Illustration by Steve Deyo, ©UCAR, based on research by NSIDC and NCAR.
A lot of press attention has been focused on how the loss of sea ice is threatening the polar bear. Much less attention has been paid to global impacts of this melting sea ice.
The second installment of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment on Climate Change, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, was released on April 6, 2007. In recognition of this report, I’m doing a weekly series called “Climate Dangers You May Not Know About“.
1. More Acidic Oceans
2. Drinking Water and Disease
3. Shifts in Lifecycle Timing
4. Drought and Violence
5. Melting of the North Pole
Spring is finally here, and lifecycles are on display all around us — flowers are blooming, birds are migrating, eggs are hatching. The signs of spring may seem simple, but actually they’re intricately choreographed. Flowers bloom when insects are around to pollinate them; migrating birds and newborns normally arrive when there is food for them to eat. Life’s fragile choreography is based on signals from the environment, such as light or warmth. As global temperatures rise, what happens to all those cues?
Lisa Moore is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program in Environmental Defense’s New York office. Along with principal author Jennifer Kefer, colleague Tim Searchinger and the National Wildlife Federation’s David Conrad, she is a co-author of the new report “America’s Flood Risk is Heating Up.”
This weekend’s monster nor’easter prompted flood warnings and evacuations from the Carolinas to Maine. And what ironic timing: last week, as the storm wreaked havoc in the South, Environmental Defense and the National Wildlife Federation released a report detailing how the Army Corps of Engineers’ flood-control program needs to be completely re-vamped [PDF], especially in light of climate change.
While helping draft the report, I was struck by two things in particular.