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Microbes Stage Breakout from Icy Prison

Filed Under: Uncategorized by Mark Nykanen — Leave a comment
April 17, 2012

Sorry, but I couldn’t resist the imagery in that headline. It’s prompted by a wonderful story in today’s The Daily Climate about the tiny organisms that have been locked up in the ice of Antarctica and Greenland, in many cases longer than humans have been on earth. Now, thanks to climate change, those little critters are defrosting and, yes, many of them are coming back to life. So what does that mean? That’s the thrust of the story.

To broad-stroke the impact, scientists say that melting glaciers could release substantial amounts of carbon from decomposing organic matter. Think of the microscopic life cumulatively acting as a massive composting pile. Also, those organisms are flushing into the sea, which has delicate chemistry; witness, if you will, the growth of “dead zones” around the world.

One of my favorite constructs is “bacteriasicles,” formulated by microbiologist Brent Christner at Louisiana State University, to describe the bacteria frozen for hundreds of thousands of years, and now all ready to grow and divide as favorable conditions arrive. Christner has revived bacteria found in 750,000-year-old-ice. That comes to mind because of a sub-head in the story: “Prehistoric Pestilence.” It refers to viruses that existed at a time when host populations had built up antibodies. But now, if the viruses survive in the ice, those host populations aren’t likely to still have their earlier resistance. But there’s only the tiniest chance of virulent viruses emerging. The bigger threat is the huge amount of organic matter heading to the seas, which could set off vast bacterial growth that could consume all the oxygen in the water, destroy fish habitats, and generate more dead zones.

Then there is the release of all the carbon dioxide, that marvelous heat-trapping gas so essential to life and so daunting as a greenhouse agent.

What’s fascinating–and scary–is we don’t know with great precision what’s going to happen with the melting of the ice sheets. We are, however, going to find out. Here’s the link to The Daily Climate:

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2012/04/ancient-ice-bugs

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Extreme Weather, Extreme Temps

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April 15, 2012

The past 24 hours have been a meteorological horror show–if you live in tornado country. And the whole month of March, if you haven’t heard by now, was a broiler by historical standards. But first things first, given that upwards of 120 tornados ravaged much of the U.S. over the past day, killing at least five people, including two children. Lots of injuries as well. At dawn, teams headed out to investigate the tornados and try to determine their exact numbers, wind speeds, and the size of the paths they took. Much of “Tornado Alley” was affected; in this case, that means Oklahoma,Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, etc.

You may recall that last year was the deadliest tornado season on record; this year is staring off with the troublesome toll of 62 people killed by twisters. And more tornados are expected in the nation’s heartland before the end of the day.

This comes, as we’ve all been told repeatedly, after the warmest March in U.S. history. While those headlines were jarring, the actual numbers of records broken are the true shockers: More than 15,000 high temperature records were broken across the U.S. last month, close to evenly split between daytime and nighttime highs.

Meantime, winter itself failed to show its frosty face–at least by historical measures–through much of the country. What shocked me most was to hear of 87 degrees in Chicago in March. I lived there for seven years; I’ve never been colder. I once bundled up with face covering to walk ten feet to pick up the Sunday papers. With a -75 wind chill factor, it proved a wise decision.  The city has continued to break temperature records with August-like weather.

CommonDreams.org has a gathering of reports on the tornados that have just passed, as well as the ones that may be imminent:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/15

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Arctic Oil Drilling Brings Bad News

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April 12, 2012

Insurance companies are not the most sentimental interest groups we’re likely to run across, so when Lloyd’s of London, the world’s biggest insurance market, warns the business world about the huge potential environmental damage from oil drilling in the Arctic, perhaps all of us should sit up and take notice. There certainly is a great deal of desire to extract oil from the Arctic, with about $100 billion dollars of new investment heading up there, according to an estimate by Lloyd’s.  The firm says that cleaning up any oil spill, especially in ice-covered regions, would present “mulitple obstacles, which together constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk.” That’s according to a story in this morning’s London Guardian.

The paper says Lloyd’s chief executive is urging companies not to “rush in [but instead to] step back and think carefully about the consequences of that action.” The action is the extraction of “…oil, that is, black gold.” (Odd how the innocent theme songs of another era come flying back at times like this.)

Moreover, according to the paper, Lloyd’s feels that it is “highly likely” that future economic activity in the Arctic will disrupt ecosystems already suffering consequences brought on by climate change.

Here’s the link to the Guardian for the full story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/12/lloyds-london-warns-risks-arctic-oil-drilling

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Tennessee Says Yes to Disputing Climate Change in Classroom

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April 11, 2012

You’ve got to hand it to Tennessee governor Bill Haslam: He knows how to duck an issue. When Tennessee legislators approved a bill by a 3-1 margin that would permit teachers to spend classroom time on theories denying climate change and evolution, he didn’t veto the bill. Instead, he simply didn’t sign it, letting it become law even though he said the measure would create confusion over the state’s science standards. How’s that for a profile in political courage? The American Civil Liberties Union says the new law provides legal cover to teachers to introduce pseudoscientific ideas. That’s a kind way to put it.

The larger picture is that the teaching of climate science has now become as controversial as teaching evolution with the superstitious religious right. Many of those folks, you may recall, believe the hokum about the planet being 6,000 years old. No, others say, it’s actually 10,000 years old. Quite the debate in those hills and hollers.

In effect, the new law permits teachers to introduce their personal religious beliefs on the origin of life into the classroom, according to the executive director of the ACLU in Tennessee. At least somebody down there has a mind she’s willing to use.

The LA Times has a story worth reading:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tennessee-climate-law-20120411,0,665705.story

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Antarctica Ice Melt; March Heat Madness

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April 10, 2012

For ten years the European Space Agency has had a satellite keeping a close eye on Antarctica’s ice shelves, which a rapidly melting because of climate change. The satellite, Envisat, shows that the ice is thinning and that in summers the periods of ice melt are lasting longer. It appears, according to scientists, that the ice shelves are sensitive to atmospheric warming and to changes in ocean currents and temperatures. And it has most definitely been warming down there: the northern Antarctic Penisula has warmed about 2.5 degrees over the past fifty years. Perhaps one of the biggest concerns is what the warming and melting trend means for the much larger ice masses of West Antarctica. Scientists have theorized that if the West Antarctica ice sheet collapses, the earth’s oceans could rise more than three meters. Environmental News Service has the details about the satellite and its observations:
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2012/2012-04-06-01.html

Meantime, lots of melting in March as more than 15,000 U.S. heat records were broken, roughly half of them at night and half during the day. The Indian Express has more:
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/us-records-warmest-march-since-1895/934889/

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Rising Temps Linked to Infectious Diseases

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April 5, 2012

Today’s headline is hardly a bulletin but it is worth noting that more research links climate change to the spread of infectious–and often deadly–diseases. The usual suspects arise immediately: diarrhea, cholera, and tick-borne illnesses, such as Lyme disease. Just about any blood disease in which mosquitos play a role is likely to increase as mosquito terrain spreads north and into higher elevations. West Nile is a good example of that.

The Daily Climate has a quick piece on this issue this morning:
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2012/04/climate-infections

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Arctic Sends Warm Weather South

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April 4, 2012

As paradoxical as it sounds, Arctic weather is sending exceptionally warm weather south. A study by scientists at Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison links the strikingly fast Arctic climate change to the extreme weather endured in the U.S. and Europe. That’s the word from Climate Central today (link, as always, to follow).

The study shows that the Arctic, which has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, is altering the jet stream. Typically, the jet streams directs weather systems from west to east. But the warming Arctic is sending the jet stream farther south, making it “wavier,” which is creating “blocking weather patterns.” One of those led to the record-breaking heat in March that saw increases of more than 40 degrees F above average. Fourteen thousand heat records were broken during March.

The Arctic is heating up so rapidly because of “Arctic amplification.” Basically, that means positive feedback loops are being created as melting sea ice and snow expose land and water to the sun. More of the sun’s energy is absorbed, which leads to greater warmpth and more water vapor in the air through evaporation.

This is a fascinating and important development. There’s more about it at Climate Central:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/arctic-warming-is-altering-weather-patterns-study-shows/

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Climate Change and Hot Spots

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April 2, 2012

The Daily Climate has a piece this morning that looks at the impact of climate change on likely hot spots around the world. Those concerns arise amid increasing warnings that climate change will trigger wars as countries, denied basics, such as food and water, seek to feed their people and expand their borders. TDC notes that higher food prices were a big factor in the much heralded Arab Spring; and those higher prices were a result of the Russian wheat crop failure in 2010. That was the heat wave that lasted…and lasted. Or as one expert is quoted as saying, “There are going to be Darfurs all over the place.

Also noted in this piece are Yemen and the Middle East; the Arctic, where the U.S., Canada, Russia, Norway, China, and South Korea are all vying for resources and shipping lanes as ice cover decreases; Africa, always vulnerable, it seems, to tragedy from drought and mass starvation; and Bangladesh and South Asia, where flooding is likely to lead to mass migration and the violent dislocations associated with the unwelcome resettlement of millions of refugees.

Here’s the article at TDC:
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2012/04/climate-geopolitics

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Climate Change Likely to Trigger Mass Migration; Sea Level Rise Threatens U.S. Cities

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March 14, 2012

Interesting report out of Manila this morning: bankers, not the most soft-headed types, warn that climate change could set off major migrations. That heads-up comes from the Asian Development Bank, which notes that natural disasters forced 42 million folks from their homes in the Asia-Pacific in 2010 and 2011. Moreover, it notes that one-third of Southeast Asia’s population lives in areas considered at-risk. Among those countries are Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Six of the ten countries most likely to experience adverse impacts from climate change are in the Asia-Pacific. Some that are listed are hardly a surprise, such as Bangladesh, which is at the top of the list, but others may not prove so obvious, including India, Nepal, and Afghanistan, as if the last noted doesn’t have enough problems as it is.

Bottom line: climate change is likely to emerge as a major cause of migration in this century. Huffington Post more on this story here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/13/environmental-migration-climate-change_n_1340868.html?ref=green

The New York Times has a report on sea level rise and its likely impact on American cities. According to Climate Central, the source of the Times’ story, 3.7 million Americans now live within a few feet of high tide. Not a lot of wiggle room. All of the country’s coastal regions are at some risk, but the states most at risk are Florida, Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, and California. Here’s the link to that report:

tp://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/science/earth/study-rising-sea-levels-a-risk-to-coastal-states.html

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Greenland Ice Melt Likely at Lower Temperatures

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March 12, 2012

The journal Nature Climate Change reported yesterday that the Greenland ice sheet could melt at lower global temperatures than scientists had thought — and that could lead to sea level rise of several meters. What would that mean? Well, it would change the face of the planet as we know it with many, if not most, coastal cities seriously imperiled or destroyed. Greenland is significant because it alone accounts for about a twentieth of the world’s ice.  Melt all of it and scientists say there would be a 6.4 meter rise in global sea levels. Note that the collapse would not be rapid, according to the new research, but a 20 percent melt of the ice sheet in the next five hundred years. That said, Andrey Ganopolski at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said Earth may already be approaching the critical threshold for the ice sheet collapse.

PlanetArk has a report on the study:

http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/64909

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