http://www.livescience.com/environment/071024-earths-oceans.html

Satellite Video Shows Struggling Seas

By Dave Mosher, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 24 October 2007 10:39 am ET


The ocean's cerulean, aquamarine and emerald hues offer more than artistic inspiration—they reveal how sea biology is struggling with climate change.

NASA's Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) has constantly measured ocean color as an indicator of sea life productivity since the satellite reached orbit in 1997. Combined with ocean temperature data, the observations suggest climate change is playing a big role in negatively altering ocean ecosystems.

A new video made from the decade of data illustrates how blooms of phytoplankton, which form the base of the oceanic food chain, are gradually thinning. In the video, purples and blues indicate low concentrations of chlorophyll, which plants and phytoplankton use to gather light energy, whereas yellows, oranges and reds show the highest concentrations.

“Without SeaWiFS, any chance of producing data to assess climate change would not be possible," said Gene Feldman, SeaWiFS project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It’s the benchmark of long term, stable observations.”

Despite the simple benchmark of color, those observations have led to countless studies about how the world's changing climate continues to impact oceanic ecosystems.

"SeaWiFS allows us to observe ocean changes and the mechanisms linking ocean physics and biology," Feldman said. "And that's important for our ability to predict the future health of the oceans in a changing climate."

Project managers said the satellite data has also been used to set pollution standards, regulate water quality and design ways to sustain coastal economies reliant on tourism and fisheries.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/071022-ap-climate-leaves.html

Climate Change Blamed for Fading Foliage

By Dave Gram, Associated Press

posted: 22 October 2007 10:55 am ET

EAST MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP)—Every fall, Marilyn Krom tries to make a trip to Vermont to see its famously beautiful fall foliage. This year, she noticed something different about the autumn leaves.

"They're duller, not as sparkly, if you know what I mean," Krom, 62, a registered nurse from Eastford, Conn., said during a recent visit. "They're less vivid."

Other "leaf peepers" are noticing, too, and some believe climate change could be the reason.

Forested hillsides usually riotous with reds, oranges and yellows have shown their colors only grudgingly in recent years, with many trees going straight from the dull green of late summer to the rust-brown of late fall with barely a stop at a brighter hue.

"It's nothing like it used to be," said University of Vermont plant biologist Tom Vogelmann, a Vermont native.

He says autumn has become too warm to elicit New England's richest colors.

According to the National Weather Service, temperatures in Burlington have run above the 30-year averages in every September and October for the past four years, save for October 2004, when they were 0.2 degrees below average.

Warming climate affects trees in several ways.

Colors emerge on leaves in the fall, when the green chlorophyll that has dominated all spring and summer breaks down.

The process begins when shorter days signal leaves to form a layer at the base of their stems that cuts off the flow of water and nutrients. But in order to hasten the decline of chlorophyll, cold nights are needed.

In addition, warmer autumns and winters have been friendly to fungi that attack some trees, particularly the red and sugar maples that provide the most dazzling colors.

"The leaves fall off without ever becoming orange or yellow or red. They just go from green to brown," said Barry Rock, a forestry professor at the University of New Hampshire.

He says 2004 was "mediocre, 2005 was terrible, 2006 was pretty bad although it was spotty. This year, we're seeing that same spottiness."

"Leaf peeping" is big business in Vermont, with some 3.4 million visitors spending nearly $364 million in the fall of 2005, according to state estimates.

State tourism officials reject the notion that nature's palette is getting blander. Erica Housekeeper, spokeswoman for the state Department of Tourism and Marketing, said she had heard nothing but positive reports from foresters and visitors alike this year.

The problem is perception, Housekeeper says: Recollections of autumns past become tinged by nostalgia.

"Sometimes, we become our own worst critics," Housekeeper said.

People who rely on autumn tourism in New England are worried.

"I don't have a sense that the colors are off, but the timing is definitely off," said Scott Cowger, owner and innkeeper at the Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast Inn at Hallowell, Maine.

"Some trees are just starting to change now," Cowger said Thursday. "It used to be, religiously, it was the second week of October when they were at their peak. I would tell my guests to come the second week if you want to see the peak colors. But it's definitely the third or fourth week at this point."

People in Northampton, Mass., are still waiting on fall color. If foliage-viewing is the goal, "I wouldn't send anybody down this way yet," Autumn Inn desk clerk Mary Pelis said this past week.

"The way things are going, the foliage season is the one sure thing for us," said Amie Emmons, innkeeper at the West Mountain Inn, in Arlington, Vt. "We book out two years in advance. It's very concerning if you think the business could start to be affected."

And there goes our island one of these days!

http://www.livescience.com/environment/071020-ap-rising-seas.html

Rising Seas Threaten Major Cities

By The Associated Press

posted: 20 October 2007 04:02 pm ET

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Cities around the world are facing the danger of rising seas and other disasters related to climate change.

Of the 33 cities predicted to have at least 8 million people by 2015, at least 21 are highly vulnerable, says the Worldwatch Institute.

hey include Dhaka in Bangladesh; Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro; Shanghai and Tianjin in China; Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt; Mumbai and Kolkata in India; Jakarta in Indonesia; Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe in Japan; Lagos in Nigeria; Karachi in Pakistan; Bangkok in Thailand, and New York and Los Angeles in the United States, according to studies by the United Nations and others.

More than one-tenth of the world's population, or 643 million people, live in low-lying areas at risk from climate change, say U.S. and European experts. Most imperiled, in descending order, are China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, the U.S., Thailand and the Philippines.

I'm not convinced with about this one solidly, although it happens in Ausralia too:

http://www.livescience.com/environment/071024-gw-fires.html


Is Global Warming Fueling Forest Fires?

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 24 October 2007 02:36 pm ET

Wildfires that raged in Southern California this week and forced more than half a million people from their homes spread so rapidly in part because the landscape was parched by a hot, dry summer—conditions that may become more of a norm for the Southwest, thanks to global warming.

But can these wildfires be attributed to a changing climate?

This very issue was brought to light Tuesday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters, “One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming,” according to The Hill.com, a political news Web site, though Reid later said many factors contributed to the wildfires.

Like hurricanes and other extreme events that could possibly be influenced by global warming, it is impossible to connect any one wildfire to climate change. But scientists say that in a warming world, the likelihood of wildfires like the ones tearing across Southern California is definitely higher.

"I think the only thing we can say is that it is likely that the probability of fire initiation [a fire starting] will be higher during [hot] and dry periods of time," said Guy Brasseur of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

Climate changes

Climate models run by scientists have shown a clear drying trend in the subtropics, which includes the American Southwest, Mexico, the Mediterranean, Australia and parts of Asia, over the course of this century.

"If they get drier, the likelihood for fires will be higher," Brasseur said.

The hot, dry conditions that dominated the Southwest this summer were a small taste of what could become the prevailing conditions in the future, and they helped provide the fuel for the fires to start.

"When you have a hot summer and a dry summer, boom, you have a lot of fires," Brasseur told LiveScience.

But temperature and humidity aren't the only factors affecting the likelihood of wildfires occurring. The frequency of the occurrence of thunderstorms is also important because lightning triggers most wildfires—"so if lightning increases, we could have more fires," Brasseur said.

The wildfires burning now in California have also shown how important winds are to the ability of the fire to spread. The ferocious and chaotic Santa Ana winds in California make predicting which way the fires will move very difficult, and so they are a challenge for firefighters to control. Just how these winds will be affected by climate change is a big unknown, Brasseur said.

California's population explosion is another key factor in terms of the threat to humans, because, "the more people you have, the more fires you might also have by people," Brasseur said.

Wildfire's effects

While wildfires are a huge threat to the homes of people who live in areas prone to these disasters, they are also a threat in terms of the pollution they emit.

Wildfires create intense emissions of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, smoke, particles, aerosols and other chemical compounds. Carbon monoxide in turn contributes to the formation of ground-level ozone, a pollutant. These pollutants can damage the lungs of firefighters and fleeing residents who breathe them in.

The fires also affect the local ecosystem—forest fires have always been a natural phenomenon that helped clear out underbrush, but the changes that humans have wrought to the landscape have changed that dynamic.

"[Forest fires are] good because [they] rejuvenate the forest in a way, so it's part of the natural system," Brasseur said. "The problem is that, of course, humans have affected the forest to a certain extent in certain places. The resistance of the forest might not be the same as it used to be against fire."

The spate of forest fires in recent years has called forest management practices into question. Many years ago, forest rangers would clear out underbrush with proscribed, or controlled, burns to deprive forest fires of their main fuel source. That approach is similar to what would happen naturally, when frequent lightning-sparked fires would burn underbrush but not be intense enough to destroy entire forests.

But in recent years, the practice was to let forest grow and to stamp out fires before they got out of control, which set up a situation in which "the forest may be more vulnerable to fires than it used to be," Brasseur said.

Wie Min Hao of the United States Forest Service said that in addition to encouraging residents in fire-prone areas to be more careful, the Forest Service is moving back to using proscribed burns, but he said these can only be performed under limited forest and weather conditions when the fires won't accidentally spread out of control.

"You don't get too many chances," he said.