Running Gamak: Warren Senders' Blog

Year 4, Month 5, Day 24: Born A Poor Young Country Boy

Have you hugged a tree today? The Portland Press-Herald:

Unless people dramatically cut the amount of carbon dioxide they’re putting into the air and water through industry, farming, landfills and fossil fuel consumption, Maine’s largest manufacturing industry will be damaged in ways scientists can only begin to predict.

That’s the conclusion reached by experts who are studying how climate change is likely to affect Maine’s more than 18 million acres of forests.

The nation’s most heavily forested state, Maine is likely to be in for a rude awakening in forestry within the next 20 to 100 years, state specialists predict. Which trees will flourish, and where, will change — gradually over time — and imperceptibly at first to most observers.

Which trees might disappear — literally migrating to reach more congenial growing conditions — and what the survivors will need to protect them from an erratic climate and a host of predators are questions researchers are trying to probe, knowing how difficult such projections can be.

But the implications are huge. In Maine, forests translate into a lot of land, money and jobs.

It’s getting harder and harder for denialists to keep it up…not when there’s real money involved. May 12:

Humanity’s success and prosperity would have been unthinkable without the essentially benign climate which made agriculture possible, setting the stage for our civilization to develop into a complex and planet-wide web. We could not have become who we are without closely cooperating with Earth’s natural cycles over countless thousands of years.

No more.

By releasing eons’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, humans have traumatized their environment, with planet-wide consequences, from Maine’s endangered forests, drought-withered Midwestern corn fields, or Bangladeshi farmland inundated by rising sea levels.

These impacts are symptoms of our decision to separate ourselves from the tightly woven fabric of Earthly life. Fighting climate change demands not just that we change our energy economy and find ways to sequester atmospheric CO2, but that we build a relationship with the natural world that is once again based on principles of cooperation, not of competition.

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 5, Day 10: You Need A Hug

The Berkshire Eagle assesses climatic impact on the economy of Western Massachusetts:

By the end of the century, the Berkshire County economy — much like the global economy — may be forever altered by the effects of climate change. Some local economic changes have already begun in response to impacts expected from climate change in the coming decades.

Land-use planners and policy specialists in the insurance industry are preparing for changes likely to be brought on by warmer temperatures and more severe weather events. Local farmers and business owners are already looking to their future, many doubtful about the climate change concept, but still determined to build revenue streams that will withstand climate changes or compensate for weather-generated losses.

In one example of a specific local economic effect likely to result from climate change, Cameron Wake, associate professor with the Institute of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire and a lead author of the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists, had a dire assessment of the local ski industry: “By the end of the century, the only ski areas that remain viable [in the Northeast] will be in the western mountains of Maine.”

It’s one of my favorite parts of the world. April 27:

The Berkshires aren’t alone in experiencing the accelerating impact of climate change, a real-world crisis that even the most vehement denialists cannot ignore much longer. Between dwindling snowpacks, multi-year droughts, unseasonal monsoons, and the arrival of invasive insect pests, this planetary phenomenon manifests itself at local and regional levels in ways that will bring significant economic, social and environmental effects. There may be temporary benefits for a few species here and there, a few communities poised to take advantage of short-term circumstances — but the future offered by our radically transforming climate is almost entirely bleak.

Are there positive aspects to this slo-mo disaster? Only that we humans may, at long last, fully grasp that our individual and collective behaviors have effects far distant in space and time. The lives of our descendants hinge on our recognition that the greenhouse effect renders political and cultural distinctions utterly and finally irrelevant.

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 5, Day 3: When You Gonna Let Me Get Sober?

The Riverside Press-Enterprise (CA) talks about climate change’s effect on winemakers in the area:

Grape growing in the Temecula Valley Wine Country and other prime wine-producing regions of California would wither by mid-century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated and farmers don’t make significant adjustments to their crops, say the authors of a new climate change study.

Under a worst-case scenario, the area suitable for wine production in the Temecula region would shrink by more than half by 2050, according to the work by Conservation International and Environmental Defense Fund, which looked at the impacts of climate change on wine production and conservation. The loss would be smaller if international agreements were reached to reduce emissions, researchers said.

“Certainly in the lowlands it looks like there’s plenty of declining suitability,” said study co-author Patrick Roehrdanz, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. “We don’t use the word disappear, but you have to do something to compensate for decline in precipitation.”

Under state projections, temperatures around the Temecula wine country would increase about 2 degrees by 2050 under the lowest emission levels. The average temperature in the area was 62.6 degrees in 1975; by 2050, it is expected to be 67.2 degrees, according to the Cal-Adapt website.

And those projections are the conservative ones. April 21:

As California winemakers assess the impact of climate change on their grapes, they can feel comforted that conservative politicians and media figures believe the greenhouse effect is a liberal hoax. These prominent denialists also believe that decades of careful scientific research on the world’s climate are irrelevant, since scientists are only interested in money. By viewing the climate crisis through ideological lenses, they’ve made it impossible to discuss science without a political slant — and the consequences are going to be devastating to agriculture in America and the world.

The undisputed facts of global warming have been part of climate science for decades, but denialists have steadily hindered and delayed action for the basest of motives: short-term greed. Their radical refusal address the consequences of our greenhouse emissions is now bearing fruit, and as Temecula Valley vintners are coming to realize, it’s going to be a bitter vintage indeed.

Warren Senders

Published.

Year 4, Month 4, Day 17: Charm Offensive

The Denver Post alerts us to the fire problem:

The hotter, drier climate will transform Rocky Mountain forests, unleashing wider wildfires and insect attacks, federal scientists warn in a report for Congress and the White House.

The U.S. Forest Service scientists project that, by 2050, the area burned each year by increasingly severe wildfires will at least double, to around 20 million acres nationwide.

Some regions, including western Colorado, are expected to face up to a fivefold increase in acres burned if climate change continues on the current trajectory.

Floods, droughts and heat waves, driven by changing weather patterns, also are expected to spur bug infestations of the sort seen across 4 million acres of Colorado pine forests.

“We’re going to have to figure out some more effective and efficient ways for adapting rather than just pouring more and more resources and money at it,” Forest Service climate change advisor Dave Cleaves said.

“We’re going to have to have a lot more partnerships with states and communities to look at fires and forest health problems.”

Reality bites, don’t it? April 4:

Well, 2012 was the world’s hottest year in recorded human history, so it would be a good time for Americans to finally acknowledge the implications of global climate change. The Forest Service’s prediction of increasingly severe forest fires over the coming decades is just one of many ways that atmospheric CO2 is going to impact our lives.

While “global warming” sounds vaguely comforting (everybody likes being warm, right?), the true picture of climate change is one in which dangerous factors are going to be getting worse. Already suffering from droughts? Brace yourself for multi-year water shortages. On the other hand, if you’re already getting rained on, you should brace yourself for massive flooding. And if forest fires are a problem where you live, the next century’s going to give starring roles flames, soot, smoke and destruction.

Climate-change denialists are in a losing battle with the facts of the greenhouse effect.

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 4, Day 14: We’re Not Even Peninsulas

The Columbus Dispatch recycles a story from the NY Times on the intertwined fates of the fig and its little insect symbiote:

There are more than 700 species of wild fig in the tropics. Most can be pollinated only by a unique species of fig wasp. In turn, the wasps rely on fig plants as hosts for their eggs. Neither species can survive without the other.

Now a new study from equatorial Singapore, in the journal Biology Letters, finds that the wasps are vulnerable to climate change, meaning that the wild fig plants are, too. And that is ominous news for many other species, the researchers say, including birds, squirrels and other animals that feed on figs.

The scientists found that temperature increases of a few degrees could cut the adult life spans of pollinating fig wasps to just a few hours, from one or two days.

Are we Donne yet? April 1:

The microscopic wasps whose life-cycle is bound up with that of the fig tree offer a revealing analogy to our own species current predicament. Plant and insect are so tightly connected that neither’s existence is possible without the other; thinking of them as two independent species is misleading. Rather, they’re part of a single system of mutual support — a system now critically endangered a runaway greenhouse effect.

Similar intimate connections are found everywhere on our planet; symbiosis and interdependence are the rule, not the exception. Only one species — our own — claims exemption, and by reintroducing hundreds of millions of years’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological eyeblink, we have unwittingly rent asunder the tightly woven fabric which sustains us all. The fig-and-wasp partnership is just one of thousands of likely casualties of our hubristic separation from the great web of Earthly life. If we clever apes cannot recognize that no living thing is an island, we’ll find, when we finally ask for whom the bell tolls, that it’s tolling for us.

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 4, Day 12: When We Said We Were “Against Drones,” This Was NOT What We Meant

The NYT’s article on neonicotinoids and bee death has a fine conclusion:

Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.

Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.

“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”

Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.

Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”

If they can say “you told us so,” we won’t say “We told you so.” Idiots. March 30:

Bret Adee’s grudging recognition that tree-huggers’ warnings about the dangers of unrestricted pesticide use were “ahead of the curve” highlights a central dilemma: environmentalists would love to be proven wrong. We’d love to be wrong about pesticides, about pollution, about ocean acidification, and (most of all) we’d love to be wrong about climate change — but denial is not a viable option.

Facts are troubling things, as American apiarists are now discovering. As the dismaying data accumulates on their doorsteps, even the most ardent climate-change deniers will eventually have to face the painful truth that those hippie liberal scientists knew what they were talking about. But environmentalists are a forgiving lot: if erstwhile skeptics like Mr Adee can acknowledge that we were right all along about neonicotinoids, maybe they’ll pay attention to our concerns about the greenhouse effect — before it’s too late for action to be of any use.

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 4, Day 10: Keep Repeating, “It’s The Berries!”

U.S. News And World Report, on the looming end of coffee:

But in recent years, keeping the world’s coffee drinkers supplied has become increasingly difficult: The spread of a deadly fungus that has been linked to global warming and rising global temperatures in the tropical countries where coffee grows has researchers scrambling to create new varieties of coffee plants that can keep pace with these new threats without reducing quality.

While coffee researchers can do little to prevent climate change, they’re hard at work to keep up as Earth braces for temperature increases of several degrees over the next several decades.

“Coffee is the canary in the coal mine for climate change,” says Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you can’t think about the long term risk for planetary impacts, think about the short term risk for your coffee. Know that a day without coffee is potentially around the corner.”

The problem has gotten so bad that on March 18, Starbucks bought its first ever coffee farm, specifically to research new climate change-resistant coffee varieties.

“The threats climate change pose isn’t a surprise to us,” says Haley Drage, representative for the company. “We’ve been working on this for more than 10 years and it’s something we continue to work with farmers on.”

Drinking my cappuccino right now, in fact. I’m sure gonna miss it when I’m old. March 28:

The fact that climate change will significantly impact the world’s coffee growers should open a few more eyes to the dangers of a runaway greenhouse effect. But beyond the Arabica beans that go into our morning cup, practically every aspect of agriculture around the world is facing enormous disruption.

Starbucks’ work on developing new varieties which can withstand the coming weather extremes is a rare example of corporate readiness to look farther into the future than the next quarterly report — something which other corporations should emulate.

If fossil fuel companies behaved this way, they’d abandon an irresponsible fixation on short-term profits, and instead foster respect for the planetary environment. Instead of providing lavish funding for anti-science politicians, we’d see them investing heavily in the development of the sustainable energy sources we’ll be needing in the years to come.
And that would be a wonderful thing to wake up to.

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 3, Day 27: Who’s That Knocking At My Door?

From the Davidson County Dispatch (NC), more on the Somalia famine story:

Scientists with Britain’s weather service studied weather patterns in East Africa in 2010 and 2011 and found that yearly precipitation known as the short rains failed in late 2010 because of the natural effects of the weather pattern La Nina.

But the lack of the long rains in early 2011 was an effect of “the systematic warming due to influence on greenhouse gas concentrations,” said Peter Stott of Britain’s Met Office, speaking to The Associated Press in a phone interview.

The British government estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died from the famine. But the new research doesn’t mean global warming directly caused those deaths.

Ethiopia and Kenya were also affected by the lack of rains in 2011, but aid agencies were able to work more easily in those countries than in war-ravaged Somalia, where the al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremist group al-Shabab refused to allow food aid into the wide areas under its control.

One-worlders unite! March 15 (making up for not doing a letter yesterday due to massive gig commitments):

As the evidence substantiating the existence of human-caused planetary warming has accumulated to the point where it’s absolutely incontrovertible, former climate-change denialists have gradually changed their tune. The new line is either that addressing a global crisis is somehow too expensive, or that the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect will be felt only by people somewhere else.

The news that climate change has been fingered as the primary cause of the 2011 famine in Somalia probably won’t change any minds. After all, Somalians are nothing if not “people somewhere else.” But aside from exemplifying a grotesque moral irresponsibility, such an attitude is simply incorrect. As the ramifications of industrial civilization’s fossil-fuel binge become apparent in floods of climate refugees and increasing numbers of deaths, national boundaries are going to become less and less relevant.

We — all of humanity — live on a single planet. There is no “somewhere else.”

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 3, Day 26: No Laughing Matter

Newsday runs an AP story on the causes of the famine in Somalia. Guess what factor is accorded a central role?

(AP) — Human-induced climate change contributed to low rain levels in East Africa in 2011, making global warming one of the causes of Somalia’s famine and the tens of thousands of deaths that followed, a new study has found.

It is the first time climate change was proven to be partially to blame for such a large humanitarian disaster, an aid group said Friday.

You should force yourself! March 15:

The role played by climate change in the Somali famine deserves far more attention in our media and politics. There are far too many people who’ve chosen to ignore the humanitarian costs of a transformed climate — some who think that climate science is a wacky conspiracy, some who believe that the impact of increased atmospheric CO2 won’t be felt in their comfortable air-conditioned chambers, some who dismiss any notion of planning for global heating’s effects as “too expensive.”

While the acts of the Al-Shabab militants groups who hindered food distribution were deplorable, those extremists didn’t cause the 2011 droughts that brought on the famine in the first place. That responsibility rests with us — the developed world — and our century-long fossil-fuel binge. Somalia’s misery is a harbinger of what the rest of the world can expect as the greenhouse effect gets worse, and we ignore it at our peril.

Warren Senders

Year 4, Month 3, Day 20: You Know You Know

The Bismarck ND Tribune runs an article on a plan to study climate change impacts in the state…and introduces us to this guy:

The Senate Natural Resources Committee is mulling a resolution that would direct the committee of North Dakota legislative leaders, called Legislative Management, to study the effects of climate change. But Jeff Magrum of Hazelton told lawmakers enough studies have been done and a lot of money already has been spent worldwide looking into the issue.

Magrum, who also is an Emmons County commissioner, said if the state wants to spend money, it should buy more plows to help clear North Dakota’s snow-filled roads. The snowplows could be fitted with enhanced devices to capture carbon dioxide emissions that are blamed for global warming, “if climate change is a concern,” he said.

{snip}

Magrum, who owns an excavating business in south central North Dakota, said he has to work outside during the state’s notoriously brutal winters. He said global warming isn’t a bad thing for him.

“A little bit warmer weather wouldn’t matter to me,” Magrum said. “I’m in the construction business.”

There just aren’t enough faces and palms to go around. March 8:

In voicing opposition to studying the impact of climate change, Jeff Magrum asserts that “a little bit warmer weather wouldn’t matter,” since he works in the construction business. Well, perhaps. On the other hand, the droughts now hitting American farm states are going to raise Mr. Magrum’s grocery bills pretty significantly over the next couple of years. And when that “little bit warmer” turns into a summer like the one that recently hammered Australia (it got so hot that their national weather service had to invent new color correlations for their temperature map) — well, it’s a fair bet that he might not want to work outside at all.

But more to the point, human beings have accomplished wonders because we’ve been willing to sacrifice temporary benefits in favor of collective achievement and long-term happiness for our posterity. This is called civilization; and if we are to preserve what our species has accomplished in the past ten thousand years, we can no longer afford to dismiss the burgeoning climate crisis with the short-sighted platitudes of selfishness.

Warren Senders