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Is geoengineering the best way to fight climate change? It all depends on whom you ask.
Geoengineering, of course, is any scheme to deliberately manipulate the climate to try to counteract global warming. You’ll remember it mainly for the most outlandish ideas to cut down on the amount of sunlight reaching Earth: the fleet of mirrored sunshades positioned between the Sun and the Earth, or the massive zeppelins pumping cooling aerosols into the stratosphere from giant hoses tethered to the ground.
Last week, ecologists had their chance to weigh in on some of these proposals at a session — apparently the first on this topic for this meeting — at the Ecological Society of America conference in Albuquerque. I’ve got a story over on Nature News of the sorts of things they talked about. As some readers have pointed out, many ecological impacts of proposed geoengineering schemes did not make it into the story. They include the fact that no matter how much you try to cut down on solar radiation reaching earth, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have other knock-on effects, such as acidifying the world’s oceans.
In general, the ecologists at the Albuquerque meeting seemed as if they were just now startling to grapple with the enormity of some of the geoengineering suggestions; these are, after all, ideas that are more normally tossed around in geophysics or atmospheric conferences. But if geoengineering is really going to take place — a question that is far from answered at this point, as so many doubts about it remain — those who study life on land are going to need to be integrally involved.
Expect more information in early September, when Britain’s Royal Society is expected to release a major report on geoengineering.
I’ve always been fascinated with large-scale ecological manipulation experiments. This week, at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Albuquerque, I got perhaps more than I was looking for.
During a session on results from the recently-concluded International Polar Year, Walt Oechel and Donatella Zona of San Diego State University presented a pair of talks about their work at the Barrow Environmental Observatory. This is a 3,000-hectare reserve, set aside by the Ukpeagvik Inupiat, about 10 kilometers from the coastal town of Barrow, Alaska. The far north coastal town. You really just can’t get any farther north in Alaska than Barrow.
Which all goes to show that Barrow is a convenient place for the US to measure changes in the Arctic, and atmospheric researchers have been working there for decades. In the latest work, Oechel and Zona took a lake, 1.2 kilometers long, and divided it into three parts. One part they left alone. One part they pumped water out of, into the third part.
The objective? To manipulate the water table and see what effect that had on greenhouse gas emissions from the tundra. As I report in a story over on Nature News, they found the higher the water table, the more carbon dioxide was given off. This observation relies on just a single year of data so far, but if it turns into a trend – as so many things in the Arctic are these days – it would be more grim news for Arctic carbon fluxes in a globally warmed world.
When Kevin Rudd was elected prime minister of Australia in 2007, hopes were high that climate action might soon follow. And Rudd indeed ratified the Kyoto Protocol his first day in office, which his predecessor John Howard had not done. (See this earlier Nature story for context about the role of climate in that election.)
Things are looking a lot different these days. Australia’s nascent stab at creating cap-and-trade legislation to create regulate* greenhouse gases — introduced as a white paper last December and then as draft legislation last month — is running into political trouble, as Roberta Kwok reports in this week’s issue of Nature. Perhaps not surprisingly, the problem stems in part from struggles among parties; Rudd’s Labor party does not have a majority in the Senate and only a slim majority in the House of Representatives, so he needs either opposition Liberals or the Greens on board to make the legislation reality. And that’s a long way from happening; the Liberals cite the costs of such restrictions in the economic downturn, while the Greens think its target of 5 to 15% reductions doesn’t go far enough.
On the other side of the world, the United States is just starting to embark on its own version of the same political game. On Tuesday, Congressmen Henry Waxman (Democrat, California) and Ed Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts) introduced their first draft of extensive climate and energy legislation — including an outline of a cap-and-trade system. You can read the bill in all its gloriously gorey detail here.
Alex Witze
*Corrected 2 April 2009.
Jane Lubchenco, a marine tidal ecologist at Oregon State University, is on the job this week as the new head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She replaces Vice-Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, who led NOAA until last October, and becomes the first woman to head up the agency, which is a sprawling beast charged with everything from managing US fisheries to running the country’s operational earth-monitoring satellite programme. 
On her first business day on the job after being sworn in (by the highest-ranking official at the Department of Commerce who was available; she’s undoubtedly hoping for Vice-President Joe Biden for the ceremonial swearing-in that comes later), Lubchenco granted me and Eli Kintisch, a reporter for Science, 30 minutes of her time. I’ve posted up an edited version of that conversation here. What might not come through to the casual reader is just how well-versed Lubchenco is in the world of policy. She’s never run a major agency or facility or group before, but she has plenty of experience in communicating with the public and, perhaps more importantly in her new job, with Congress.
As my colleague Rex Dalton reports in a story in the upcoming issue of Nature, she created the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, perhaps the most respected programme in the world to train environmental scientists to communicate with policymakers. I’ve spoken to Lubchenco casually before on science topics, but in our talk this week it became clear just how practiced she is at dealing with the short attention spans of not just journalists, but also policymakers. She speaks clearly and in practiced sentences, sometimes coming off as stiff but more often as thoughtful. She uses small words, short sentences, and stays on topic throughout her answers. And perhaps most significantly, she knows when to say she doesn’t know something.
A science-policy friend of mine says that Lubchenco stands out because she knows more than she thinks she does, whereas the opposite is usually the case with people who ascend to high levels of government. It’ll be interesting to see where she takes the agency and how she fares in the dog-eat-dog world of Washington.
Cross-posted from The Great Beyond
Jim Hansen, the earth scientist known for his outspokenness about global warming, is marching today as part of a climate protest against burning coal. The focus of all the attention is the Capitol Power Plant, a coal-burning monstrosity just blocks from the US Capitol building that is one of the biggest sources of emissions in the District of Columbia. Hundreds of protestors have reportedly turned out, even in the snow that coats Washington several inches deep and snarled commutes this morning.
Over at Nature’s Twitter feed, reporter Jeff Tollefson notes that Hansen says he is willing to get arrested. Check out the action live as Jeff reports it.
Image (sans Darryl Hannah): Jeff Tollefson
Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok
The US could soon offer one-stop shopping for climate information, in the form of a central National Climate Service (see Nature story here) that would consolidate data and forecasts from multiple sources.
The idea of a National Climate Service is old, dating back to the late 1970s, but Jane Lubchenco might finally make it a reality. At her 12 February nomination hearing, Lubchenco said she would work toward creating such a service under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency she is slated to lead.
What exactly would a National Climate Service do? For starters, it would synthesize climate data that is currently fragmented across multiple NOAA programmes, the US Geological Survey, the US Department of Agriculture, and university research groups. It would also take a “user-oriented” approach, tailoring new research and data analysis toward urgent problems such as drought, flood risk, agriculture, and vector-borne disease transmission. Finally, it would attempt to improve predictions of climate-change impact at the local or regional level, where demand for information is growing.
Translating global forecast data to the community level is key, says Larry Larson, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers in Madison, Wisconsin. Scientists are predicting climate change and sea level rise worldwide, he says, but the question he often gets from members is: “What does that mean to me?”
Providing answers will require a better climate observing system, says Chet Koblinsky, director of NOAA’s Climate Program Office. Existing systems are ad-hoc because many of them were originally set up for other purposes, he says, and some parameters such as soil moisture are not well-monitored. Ed Sarachik, a climate scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle, warns that “without a climate observing system, you’re going to hit a wall.”
A National Climate Service might also invite a larger role from the private sector, says Richard Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Companies could do the work of analyzing data for specific uses, the same way the Weather Channel interprets NOAA’s National Weather Service data for the public.
Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok
Scientists have found a new way to estimate past climate: snakes. 
In case you haven’t seen the media flurry, researchers have uncovered the remains of a gigantic snake in northeastern Colombia (which news outlets have described as “” https://features.csmonitor.com/discoveries/2009/02/04/prehistoric-one-ton-super-snake-ate-alligators-for-lunch">Super-snake", “”https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gvMX4MXQYzy22YM8gMEBTIUR6lFQ">Bus-sized boa", and “”https://www2.canada.com/technology/columnists/grandaddy+snake+world+unearthed+colombia/1252613/story.html?id=1252613">Granddaddy of the snake world", among other things). The newly named Titanoboa cerrejonensis would have measured 13 metres long and weighed about 1,135 kilograms, making it the biggest known snake, living or extinct.
Why does this matter for climate predictions? The snake lived 58 to 60 million years ago, around the Palaeocene when the Earth’s upper latitudes were much warmer than they are today. This was a time when ice at the poles had melted and crocodiles roamed the Arctic. But, as climate scientist Matthew Huber describes in a Nature News & Views article, researchers are less sure how hot the tropics were during that time.
Vertebrate paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues, who reported the snake discovery in Nature, reasoned that such a large snake could only survive at a certain temperature. Snakes rely on external heat from their environment to help fuel their metabolism. The bigger the snake, the more heat it requires, which is why you don’t see pythons in Minnesota.
The researchers used a model relating animal body size and ambient temperature to determine how hot the tropics must have been to support the snake. Today’s tropics average 26-27 degrees Celsius, and the largest “verifiable” modern anaconda is 7.3 metres long, the study says. Assuming Titanoboa had a similar metabolic rate to today’s snakes, the team calculated, the Palaeocene tropics must have been 30-34 degrees Celsius.
“We’ve taken the snake and turned it into a giant thermometer,” says Head.
The finding suggests that as Earth’s higher latitudes warmed up during the Palaeocene, the tropics got hotter as well. This goes against the argument that the Earth has a ‘thermostat’ mechanism that keeps tropical temperatures steady. And while the comparison between the natural global warming of the Palaeocene and modern human-induced global warming is “very tenuous”, Head says, it might mean that today’s tropics will heat up just as fast as the rest of the world, potentially leading to more extinctions around the equator.
Lisa Sloan, a climate scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, calls the study “intriguing”. Although it would have been nice to get estimates from other large Palaeocene creatures as well, she says, the approach has “a lot of potential” for future research.
Image: Jason Bourque