This month’s open thread. Usual rules apply.
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Northern Forests Climate Hub Holds Workshop on GHG Mitigaton and USDA Building Blocks
The USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub and Forest-Climate Working Group “Perspectives from the field” workshop, was held March 29 – 30, 2016 in Chicago. The workshop provided information on carbon science and policies, and associated USDA programs. Agency representatives identified resources, policies, and programs that can be used to further GHG mitigation in natural resource conservation and management in the forest sector. Speakers also showcased real-world examples of mitigation projects in the forest sector. The workshop focused on the USDA’s Building Blocks for Climate Smart Agriculture & Forestry. Attendees identified actions to utilize Forestry’s potential for reducing greenhouse gases and and developed an understanding of how forestry can contribute to the goals of the USDA building blocks. 
Considering Assisted Migration for Trees in a Changing Climate
Trees are genetically adapted to their local climate. Local populations of trees may become maladapted if climate changes faster than species or populations ability to move or evolve. Recent research on the genetics of Douglas-fir stated that “Current populations are expected to be poorly adapted to future climates.”1 The authors also suggested “Human intervention will be required to ensure productive and adapted Douglas-fir forests in the face of climate change.” An approach to addressing this problem is assisted migration – the deliberate movement and establishment of a new population of a species or genetic type outside its current geographic range to another in order to introduce better adaptive traits.
What types of trees would you plant if you wanted to anticipate a warmer climate in the future? How would you decide?
Apart from the context of climate change, maladaptation of Douglas-fir in the Pacific Northwest has been observed in “off-site” trees planted too far outside their parent tree’s area of local adaptation. Problems such as weather damage, increased disease, slow growth, and poor health result from off-site trees being genetically maladapted to local conditions. Most problems resulting from planting trees off-site are a legacy of past practices, done before we understood the importance of local adaptation. Current practice is to plant trees from local seed sources within geographic “seed zones” determined from genetic research on each species. But if climate changes significantly, our current seed zones eventually won’t match up with the climate.
Over the long term, large-scale controlled experiments are being established to provide research-based answers on how to approach assisted migration. But landowners and forest managers have an immediate need to decide what to plant each year. Given the complexity of biological systems and the uncertainty of future climate, there are no clear guidelines for assisted migration yet – people deciding what trees to plant have to make an educated guess.
From research on climate and tree genetics, one approach suggested for assisted migration is to plant a mixture of local seed sources along with some seed sources from lower elevations and farther south. This could be combined with higher planting density plus thinning to allow for some selection of better trees depending on future climate conditions.
Another approach to dealing with the uncertainty of future climate is the deployment of genetically improved seedlings, which is already standard procedure for most timber companies and agencies in Oregon. Tree improvement programs generally aim to breed trees with superior characteristics in terms of growth rate, disease resistance, and tolerance to weather extremes. “Because parent trees in tree improvement programs come from a wide geographic area, planting stock may be more diverse than naturally regenerated stands. …seed from breeding programs may be useful for buffering against an uncertain future climate.” 1
Assisted migration is already being deployed in British Columbia (BC), where the degree of warming over the last 35 years has raised immediate concerns about maladaptation. Seed transfer standards in parts of BC were changed starting in 2008 to allow moving seed of Douglas-fir and other species 200 m higher in elevation and one seed zone further north (up to 300 kilometers or 2 degrees of latitude).2,3 Also, standards in BC were amended to allow planting western larch in some areas outside of its current range of occurrence, up to 10% of the species mix in new plantings.
Specific changes to seed zones and seed transfer guidelines have not been proposed for Oregon. The degree of warming in Oregon over the last 35 years is much less than that in higher latitudes of BC. However, for coastal Douglas-fir in Oregon, genetic traits including timing of bud break, summer growth and bud set, along with drought hardiness are all strongly related to local climate of the parent tree’s origin. These traits are key determinants of Douglas-fir maladaptation, related to climatic factors such as winter temperature, frost dates, and drought severity. Future projections suggest that warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons, and increased drought severity will stress Douglas-fir that are adapted to current climate conditions.
A challenge with implementing assisted migration is the tradeoff between short-term vs. long-term maladaptation. While current populations of Douglas-fir may not be adapted to the future climate, trees from warmer climate zones may not be adapted to the current climate at higher elevations or further north. Regardless of the approach one takes to assisted migration, it is advisable to be cautious, take small steps and observe the results over time.
For landowners planting the next generation of trees, there appear to be a few basic options to consider with climate change in mind:
- Planting native seedling stock within current seed zones matching your planting site (status quo).
- Choosing a mix of seed origins, some from local seed zones, some from zones further south or lower in elevation.
- Planting genetically improved stock from existing tree breeding programs.
- Combinations of the above?
Foresters in charge of reforestation across a variety of forest ownerships in Oregon are considering these options. To find out what they are thinking about assisted migration, stay tuned for a future blog on Oregon Forests and Climate Change.
References
- Genetic Maladaptation of coastal Douglas-fir seedlings to future climates. St. Clair and Howe. 2007. Global Change Biology, 13 p 1441-1454.
- Assisted migration to address climate change in British Columbia: recommendations for interim seed transfer standards. O’Neil and others 2008. BC Ministry of Forests. Technical Report 048.
- Chief Forester’s Standards for Seed Use in British Columbia.
- Assisted Migration: What It Means to Nursery Managers and Tree Planters. Williams and Dumroese 2014. Tree Planters Notes, Vol. 57, No. 1, p 21-26.
The post Considering Assisted Migration for Trees in a Changing Climate appeared first on Oregon Forests and Climate Change.
Nenana Ice Classic 2016
Just a quick note since I’ve been tracking this statistic for a few years, but the Nenana Ice Classic tripod went down this afternoon (Apr 23, 3:39 Alaska Standard Time). See the earlier post for what this is and why it says something about the climate (see posts on 2014 and 2015 results).
With this unofficial time, this year places 4th earliest for the breakup of ice in the Tanana river. It is unsurprising that it was early given the exceptional warmth in Alaska this year.
The exact ranking of years depends a little on how one accounts for leap-year and other calendrical effects. The raw date is the 4th earliest, but given that this year is a leap year, it would be the 5th earliest counting Julian days from the start of the year. Tying the season to the vernal equinox is more stable, which again leads to the 4th earliest. But regardless of that detail, and consistent with local climate warming, the ice break-up date have advanced about 7 days over the last century.
As a side bet, I predict (based on previous years) that despite enormous attention in the skeptic-osphpere given the Nenana result in 2013 (when it was remarkably late), it won’t be mentioned there this year.
Climate Learning Network Spring Webinar Series
The CLN has partnered with The Pacific Northwest Climate Change Hub, The University of Georgia Department of Geography, and the USDA AFRI Coordinated Agricultural Project: Regional Approaches to Climate Change – Pacific Northwest Agriculture (REACCH) to deliver a series of webinars this spring.
The second webinar will in the series will feature Dr. J Marshall Shepherd from the Weather Channel’s Wx Geeks show. Dr. Shepherd will present: Climate Change Science 101 for Land Grant University Administrators: A Primer for Deans, Directors and Support Staff on May 19th, 2016 at 10:00 am EDT. Registration is open now.
Stay tuned to climatelearningnetwork.com for more information.
The climate agreement, 2 degrees, and your children’s future
Not too long ago, just after the Paris COP21 climate meeting, I read two interesting articles that contradicted each other. The first said “COP21: Paris deal far too weak to prevent devastating climate change, academics warn.” The second was more optimistic, “Rapid switch to renewable energy can put Paris climate goals within reach.” “So which is it?”, I wondered. The first one discussed a letter sent by eleven supposedly prominent climate scientists to The Independent that warned that the climate deal reached at the COP21 gives “false hope” and will result in insufficient action being taken. A few choice quotes Continue reading The climate agreement, 2 degrees, and your children’s future
The post The climate agreement, 2 degrees, and your children’s future appeared first on The Climate Advisor.
The Volcano Gambit
Anyone reading pundits and politicians pontificating profusely about climate or environmental science will, at some point, have come across the “volcano gambit”. During the discussion they will make a claim that volcanoes (or even a single volcano) produce many times more pollutant emissions than human activities. Often the factor is extremely precise to help give an illusion of science-iness and, remarkably, almost any pollutant can be referenced. This “volcano gambit” is an infallible sign that indicates the author is clueless about climate science, but few are aware of its long and interesting history…
From Augustine to Mt. St. Helens
The ur-usage was a legitimate paper in Science in July 1980 by seismologist David Johnston writing about chlorine emissions in eruptions:
Earlier estimates of the chlorine emission from volcanoes, based upon evaluations of the pre-eruption magmatic chlorine content, are too low for some explosive volcanoes by a factor of 20 to 40 or more. Degassing of ash erupted during 1976 by Augustine Volcano in Alaska released 525 x 106 kg of chlorine (±40%), of which 82 x 106 to 175 x 106 kg may have been ejected into the stratosphere as hydrogen chloride [HCl]. This stratospheric contribution is equivalent to 17 to 36% of the 1975 world industrial production of chlorine in fluorocarbons.
In the main text, there was also this quote:
[The] eruption of the Bishop Tuff from Long Valley Caldera, California, 700,000 years ago generated 100 km3 of air-fall ash(19). If the magma degassed 0.25% chlorine (equivalent to Augustine Volcano), this eruption may have injected 289 x 109 kg of HCl into the stratosphere, equivalent to about 570 times the 1975 world industrial production of chlorine in fluorocarbons.
For context, a big issue at the time was to characterise the budget for chlorine in the stratosphere, given it’s importance in ozone depletion. While there is quite a lot of HCl emitted by volcanoes, that form of chlorine is soluble, and is swiftly rained out, unlike the much less reactive human-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which can stay in the atmosphere from many decades. Multiple studies subsequent to the Johnston paper confirmed that the volcanic contribution to stratospheric chlorine is actually very small, but this paper was a genuine attempt to constrain this term. To summarise, there are two cases mentioned, Augustine (in Alaska, 1976) and the Long Valley Caldera (California, 700,000 yrs ago), with estimated multiples of 0.17-0.36 and 570 of HCl injection into the stratosphere compared to the annual industrial source of Cl in CFCs. [Note – if anyone has an earlier usage, please let me know].
An important volcanic event in 1980 was of course the huge eruption of Mount St Helens in May of that year. Tragically, the author of the Science paper, David Johnston, an up-and-coming USGS volcanologist, was himself killed in the blast a couple of months before his paper appeared.
Later that year, in October, Ronald Reagan commented on the eruption, suggesting that “one little mountain out there [Mt. St. Helens], in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind.” However, while the volcano emitted roughly 2×106 metric tons SO2, annual emissions from cars were 30 x 106 tons (out of a total human emission of ~131×106 tons). Reagan was out by a factor of 150. This was just the beginning of the mangling.
More relevant for the growth of the volcano gambit, these results got more and more warped in subsequent retellings. For instance, in 1990, Dixy Lee Ray, the ex-marine biologist and former (Democratic) governor of Washington, wrote in her book: “The eruption of Mt. St. Augustine in 1976 injected 289 billion kilograms of hydrochloric acid directly into the stratosphere. That amount is 570 times the total world production of chlorine and fluorocarbon compounds in the year 1975…. So much is known.” She mixed up the huge eruption 700,000 years ago, with a much smaller one in 1976, but it would get worse.
The Johnston paper also became a staple of the folks engaged in rearguard defenses against the 1989 Montreal Protocol, in particular, the Maduro and Schauerhammer book “Holes in the Ozone Scare” quotes the paper accurately, but ignores subsequent work ruling out the HCl source for stratospheric chlorine. This was well discussed by Sherwood Rowland in a 1993 Science commentary which aptly enough was focused on the need for better scientific communication with the public.
… to Mt. Pinatubo
In June 1991, Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, and unsurprisingly became the volcano of choice for the contrarians.
Rush Limbaugh discussed this at various points in 1992 and in his 1993 book. On Nightline he stated: “it is man-made products which are causing the ozone depletion, yet Mount Pinatubo has put 570 times the amount of chlorine into the atmosphere in one eruption than all of man-made chlorofluorocarbons in one year”. (Note the further confusion attributing the eruption 700,000 yrs to the one that just happened). In his book “The Way Things Ought To Be” (1993) Limbaugh stretched the facts still further: “Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of ozone-depleting chemical in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons manufactured by wicked, diabolical, and insensitive corporations in history.” He claims he got this information from Dixy Lee Ray’s book, “the most footnoted, documented book I have ever read.” Which, as noted above was already garbled. (More discussion on Limbaugh’s errors here and here).
From Chlorine to Greenhouse Gases
The Dixy Lee Ray book turns out to be a major source for disinformation, though with little evidence anyone read it carefully or looked up the references. In 2004, the conservative commentator, Jude Wannski mis-remembered Dixy Lee Ray: “[the] book she wrote, Trashing the Planet … debunked a number of myths about the environment. In it she had the following line: “The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 dumped more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all that has been released since the industrial revolution. Volcanoes have been erupting for millions of years with the same result. If this really affected climate, don’t you think it would have happened by now?””. This swaps HCl for greenhouse gases, conflates Mt St. Helens with St Augustine in her text (which in any case should have been the Long Valley Caldera)…
As environmental concern moved to the impact of global warming on ice sheets, so disinformers moved the volcanoes accordingly. In 2006, Christopher Monckton (“the Potty Peer”) said “In a good year for eruptions, Erebus can put out as much CFCs as Man used to.”
A year later (2007), Martin Durkin in his execrable documentary claimed that “One volcanic eruption for example, puts more pollution into the atmosphere than ten years worth of human activity.” This, despite being totally unspecific (which pollutant does he think he is referring to?), is of course wrong in any case. Perhaps he was channeling Reagan?
As in 1992, a new eruption gave rise to a new eruption of the gambit. In 2009, the “Stop Global Cooling” crowd stated: “Sure, volcanoes like the one spouting off in Alaska right now spew much more CO2 than humans could ever think of”. Similarly, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher in March of that year added: “Can one huge volcano spew more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the people? Yes”. Ummm… no.
And yet it goes on. Ian Plimer in another contrarian tome included some even more made up facts: “massive volcanic eruptions (e.g. Pinatubo) emit the equivalent of a years’ human CO2 emissions in a few days” (p472) and “Volcanoes produce more CO2 then the world’s cars and industries combined” (p413). On p217 he claims that while “Mt. Pinatubo . . . released 20 millions tonnes of sulphur dioxide” it also released “very large quantities of chlorofluorocarbons”, citing Brasseur and Granier (1992) who don’t say there were any CFCs in the eruption, and even on chlorine, actually say the opposite: “after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the input of chlorine to the stratosphere was probably small”.
From Pinatubo to Eyjafjallajökull
In 2013, it was the turn of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland to steal the limelight. Ex-Gov. Mike Huckabee said: “The volcano that erupted over in Northern Europe actually poured more CO2 into the air in that single act of nature than all of humans have in something like the past 100 years.“. Senator Lisa Murkowski in 2014 similarly mentioned a volcano she “had heard about” in Iceland. “The emissions that are being put in the air by that volcano are a thousand years’ worth of emissions that would come from all of the vehicles, all of the manufacturing in Europe,” she said. Huckabee was using the same point as recently as July 2015: “a volcano, in one blast, will contribute more [CO2] than 100 years of human activity“. A century or a millennium – who’s counting?
Again this is all patent nonsense – the amount of CO2 emitted by Eyjafjallajökull was in fact more than 20 times smaller than just European aviation emissions per day – and the claim was rightly debunked by FactCheck.org, Slate, and HuffPo at the time.
Summary
So let’s recap with a simple graphic charting the use and abuse of these claims, colour-coded by the degree of wrongness:
To summarise, a speculative paper (that was later contradicted) about HCl emitted in a volcano 700,000 years ago is the progenitor of statements related to SO2, CO2, greenhouse gases or just “pollutants” in general, and has been associated with Mt. Augustine, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Pinatubo, Erebus and Eyjafjallajökull, with comparisons to all industrial emissions in a year, 100 years, or since the industrial revolution, all cars in a decade, or indeed a thousand years.
The volcano gambit is the universal comparison, untethered to any actual facts, and look for it to resurface again the next time a big volcano hits the news.
References
D.A. JOHNSTON, “Volcanic Contribution of Chlorine to the Stratosphere: More Significant to Ozone Than Previously Estimated?”, Science, vol. 209, pp. 491-493, 1980. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.209.4455.491
F.S. Rowland, “President’s Lecture: The Need for Scientific Communication with the Public”, Science, vol. 260, pp. 1571-1576, 1993. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.260.5114.1571
G. Brasseur, and C. Granier, “Mount Pinatubo Aerosols, Chlorofluorocarbons, and Ozone Depletion”, Science, vol. 257, pp. 1239-1242, 1992. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.257.5074.1239
Unforced Variations: Apr 2016
This month’s open thread. Standard rules apply…
Midwest Climate Hub Holds Workshop on Climate Change and Midwest Agriculture
CLN staff attended the Climate Change and Midwest Agriculture: Impacts, Challenges & Opportunities workshop held March 1st-2nd in Madison, WI. The Workshop provided an in-depth overview of climate change impacts in the Midwest and facilitated a working session using the beta version of the Adaptation Resources for Agriculture Workbook which is currently being adapted from the Northern Forestry Climate Hub’s Northern Forestry Adaptation Workbook.
The Workshop was attended by Midwest Climate Hub and Northern Forests Climate Hub staff and Leadership as well as Extension, ARS, NRCS and other USDA Agency Staff. Researchers from Universities throughout the Midwest were also in attendance. The working session using the new Workbook provided valuable feedback to the team adapting the document to fit agriculture. This feedback will be used to tailor the workbook for use in agriculture ultimately providing the Climate Hubs with a highly useful resource for Extension agents to use with producers in the region.
Climate, Forests and Woodlands Community of Practice launches new website
The Climate, Forests and Woodlands eXtension Community of Practice is excited to announce their new website, found at www.climateforestswoodlands.org. This site is a gateway to all the science-based information housed on eXtension, but offers a user-friendly interface for also connecting to our blog, social network sites, our partners, to search our resources, and more. Keep checking back because we are adding new features and content regularly!
CLN readers may be interested in the upcoming CFW webinar on March 3rd at 3:00 p.m. EST. The folks from the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center will be presenting on Monitoring, Assessment, and Engagement to Sustain Forest Benefits in a Changing Climate. Connect here: https://connect.extension.iastate.edu/woodlands.
