Protecting nature is the best way of protecting ourselves from rising tides and storm surges, according to new research.
Sand dunes, wetlands, coral reefs, mangroves, oyster beds, and other shoreline habitats that ring America help to protect two-thirds of the coastlines of the continental U.S. from hurricanes and other such hazards.
Developers see these coastal areas and think — *ding* *ding* *ding* *ding* — opportunity. They want to replace shoreline habitats with waterfront homes, shipping channels, highways, and other delights of urbanism and commerce, along with hulking concrete structures designed to keep the rising seas at bay.
Or, another idea would be to leave nature intact and let it continue to shelter us.
The latter approach would, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change, be the superior option for protecting lives and property in most of the nation’s coastal areas.
Led by Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project, researchers mapped the intensity of hazards posed to communities living along America’s coastlines from rising seas and ferocious storms now and in the decades to come. They examined the hazards those communities would face in the year 2100 with and without the coastal habitats left intact. Here is what they found:
Habitat loss would double the extent of coastline highly exposed to storms and sea-level rise, making an additional 1.4 million people now living within 1 km of the coast vulnerable. The number of poor families, elderly people and total property value highly exposed to hazards would also double if protective habitats were lost.
The East Coast and Gulf Coast would feel the largest impacts from depleted ecosystems, because they have denser populations and are more vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surge.
Florida would see the largest increase of people exposed to hazards by 2100 under one sea-level rise scenario highlighted by the researchers. If coastal habitats were preserved, about 500,000 Floridians would face intermediate and high risk from disasters, compared with almost 900,000 people if the habitats disappeared.
New York sees one of the biggest jumps as a percentage of people facing risk under the same scenario. With habitat, a little more than 200,000 people would face high risk, compared with roughly 550,000 people without habitat.
But what’s wrong with building seawalls, levees, and such? Couldn’t such infrastructure allow builders to develop the shorelines safely, keeping rising waters at bay? The paper explains some of the problems with that approach:
In the United States — where 23 of the nation’s 25 most densely populated counties are coastal — the combination of storms and rising seas is already putting valuable property and large numbers of people in harm’s way. The traditional approach to protecting towns and cities has been to ‘harden’ shorelines. Although engineered solutions are necessary and desirable in some contexts, they can be expensive to build and maintain, and construction may impair recreation, enhance erosion, degrade water quality and reduce the production of fisheries.
So let’s maybe thank nature for protecting us by leaving it intact, yeah?
A Chilean appeals court ruled against the world’s largest gold mining company on Monday, favoring Chilean Indians who accuse Barrick Gold Corp. of contaminating their water downstream and creating more doubts about the future of the world’s highest gold mine.
The judges in the northern city of Copiapo unanimously ruled that Barrick must keep all its environmental promises before moving forward with construction of the Pascua-Lama mine at the very top of Chile’s mountainous border with Argentina. They also said Barrick must monitor the condition of three glaciers next to the mine project.
Chile’s environmental watchdog agency already ordered construction stopped until Barrick builds systems to keep the mine from contaminating the watershed below, and Barrick executives have publicly committed the company to fulfilling the requirements of its environmental permit.
But Monday’s ruling goes beyond that by demanding repairs to damage in the watershed below, by calling for increased monitoring of the impact on surrounding glaciers, and by opening up the project’s environmental license for review. The judges found no evidence of contamination due to mine construction, but said the watershed could face “imminent danger” without more environmental protections.Attorney Lorenzo Soto, who represents about 550 Diaguita Indians in the case, said this review might even kill the $8.5 billion mine, which has been under development for more than seven years. “The project’s conditions aren’t the same as they were in 2006. New conditions could be established, and we don’t discard any scenario, including the closing of the project,” Soto said.Scarce river water is vital to life in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and the Diaguitas fear that the Pascua-Lama mine above them is ruining their resource.Barrick acknowledged the ruling in a statement late Monday that did not say whether or not the company would appeal.
The company said it “is committed to diligently working to complete all of the projects the regulatory requirements” and is working with Chile’s environmental regulator to construct a water management system by 2014, after which time it expects to renew construction on the actual mine.
Still, the ruling could mean more lengthy delays for the binational mine, which was initially expected to be producing gold and silver already. While Argentine officials are eager to keep building, most of the ore is buried on the Chilean side. On the Argentine side, where Barrick fuels a third of San Juan province’s economy, officials have been watching closely and trying to figure out how to preserve thousands of jobs.
Barrick’s stock traded up slightly Monday at $15 a share after reaching near-historic lows due to falling gold prices and Pascua-Lama setbacks.
M. Kalani Souza, Native Hawaiian, head of the nonprofit Olohana Foundation, played the guitar for attendees of the Rising Voices of Indigenous People in Weather and Climate Science Workshop July 1 – 2 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He is also with the Federal Emergency Management Agency , University of Hawaii, where he is national director of population centers, working on Native community capacity for climate change.
By Carol Berry, Indian Country Today Media Network
The hydrologist had carefully studied the scientific data and knew for a fact that water would be present if he drilled. So sure was he that he ignored a Hawaiian elder’s warning against drilling for water in that spot. The scientist did indeed hit water—but it was red, brackish and undrinkable.
He had drilled on a hill that had been named, millennia ago, Red Water. Nearby was another site that had carried the name Water for Man for thousands of years. That is where the drinkable water could be found, but it did not take a hydrologist with fancy instruments.
“We assume contemporary knowledge displaces that of the past, but it’s not true,” said Ramsay Taum, Native Hawaiian, board director of the Pasifika Foundation and on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, after giving this example of science’s potential to erroneously override indigenous knowledge.
Taum’s comments were among several themes aired in a workshop, Rising Voices of Indigenous Peoples in Weather and Climate Science, sponsored partly by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on July 1–2 in Boulder, Colorado. Also backing it were the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy, South Dakota; the Olahana Foundation, Big Island, Hawai’i; the Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Working Group, and the Getches–Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment.
During the two-day conference, scholars and tribal college students grappled with the readiness issues noted in President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which he released on June 25. (Related: Obama: No Keystone XL if It Increases Carbon Emissions)
Taum’s anecdote was just one example of the myriad ways in which traditional knowledge can trump scientific knowledge, even as climate change creates yet another Trail of Tears in forcing the relocation of Native communities due to flooding, fire and other encroachments on their traditional territories. The reliance on science to the exclusion of millennia of careful observation is another way in which culture is being eroded, participants said.
“The fear of our elders is that knowledge is running faster than wisdom,” said Papalii (“Doc”) Failautusi Aveglio, a hereditary Samoan leader and a faculty member at the University of Hawaii’s school of business.
Culture is not just lost via relocation. It can result indirectly when, for example, water contamination stops people from eating locally caught fish. Tribes then require money to buy replacement food, and the loss of local food sources ultimately ends daily fishing by grandfathers and grandsons in which tradition was passed down, said Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs, Climate Institute, Washington, D.C.
Because of such changes, Native communities are increasingly involved in addressing climate questions, workshop planners said.
Even as Native peoples become the first- and hardest-hit by climate change, their traditional ways of relating to the natural world are distorted and undervalued by Western science. On top of that lies the irony that those least affected by climate change likely had the most to do with creating the conditions that caused it, said Daniel Wildcat, Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation and a faculty member at Haskell Indian Nations University.
The harsh climate effects could mean a “whole new Trail of Tears,” Wildcat said.
Yet such clashes between traditional and scientific knowledge seemed destined to continue, if one scientist’s insight is any indication.
“I’m not interested in reconciling science and Native knowledge,” said panelist Roger Pulwarty, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “They mean different things.”
Pulwarty was concerned about who would represent tribal peoples in seeking climate-change solutions, since asking them to collect information would be asking them to divulge potentially confidential tribal history. Taum countered that indigenous knowledge could be presented in different ways, sometimes embodied in stories that had been passed down through generations.
“One of the things indigenous people bring to the table is a whole different concept of our place in the world,” said Wildcat in summing up the workshop’s main underlying theme. “We have been treating life around us like resources—they’re not resources, they’re relatives.”
The emphasis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be on the influx of the cheapest goods and services and the promotion of transnational corporate profits, regardless of costs to the environment, communities or human lives. This will affect food, fishing, agriculture, energy extraction, retail goods, banking – literally all sectors of our lives.
Yet after three years of discussion, negotiators still refuse to tell the public what’s being proposed. While secrecy is the rule when it comes to the public, hundreds of corporate lobbyists have “cleared advisor” status granting them access to the text. Even more concerning, is that the U.S. trade representative is pushing to “fast track” the agreement.
Will you join Grassroots International, our Global South partners, and our allies in the US Food Sovereignty Alliance in saying “No!” to the TPP and the fast track?
Together we can stop the one of the most destructive, secret, corporate-driven policies of the decade.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana stand to become the first tribes in the country to own a major hydroelectric dam. In Colorado, tribes are managing parts of hydro projects. All are examples of tribes regaining control of resources on their land. Aspen Public Radio’s Marci Krivonen reports.
Credit Marci Krivonen The Kerr Dam in Northwest Montana was built in the 1930’s on the Flathead Indian Reservation. It’s been owned by non-tribal companies since it was built.
In Colorado’s southwest, the Ute Mountain Ute tribe co-manages part of the Dolores Water Project. And, near Durango, the Animas/La Plata project is partially managed by the state’s two tribes. Ernest House directs the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs.
“Not only do these water projects strengthen tribal sovereignty, but they also solidify a treaty obligation to the Utes here in Colorado. I think that by the tribe’s involvement in a lot of these projects, it provides a very important tool for future economic development, especially, specifically, water,” he says.
While the project is different, the goals are similar in Montana. When the tribes take over the dam there, they say, their sovereignty will be strengthened.
Jordan Thompson of Energy Keepers Inc. stands high above the Kerr Dam outside of Polson, Montana. The tribes in this area are preparing to take over the hydro project in 2015.
The massive Kerr Dam in Montana is near snowcapped mountains, close to ancient buffalo hunting grounds. Emerald green water violently sloshes over the lip of the dam and into the Flathead River. To say the area’s beautiful, is an understatement.
A 19th century treaty created the Flathead Indian Reservation, and later, white settlement brought agriculture. The massive dam was built on tribal land by a local power company in the 1930’s to quench the thirst of newly planted farms.
“This is a place of great spiritual significance for the tribes, and so when the dam was being built, they really resisted, they were trying to not have that dam built,” says Jordan Thompson.
Thompson’s with the tribally-run company that’s preparing to take over ownership of the dam. Despite tribal protests in the 30’s the dam was built and has been producing electricity ever since..
“There were just a bunch of people who built it, over 1200 people at one point. Ten tribal members were killed during the construction of it. It was built because the tribes were just powerless to do anything to stop it,” Thompson says.
Over the years, the dam supplied millions of dollars worth of power. The tribes received a small portion, as rent. Fish habitats were damaged, as the dam continued to generate electricity.
Now, the dam is about to change hands. A treaty signed in 1985 transfers ownership of the dam to the Salish and Kootenai.
“This is significant because it’s an assertion of the tribes sovereignty over the resources they’ve used for their entire existence,” says Sarah Bates with the University of Montana.
She studies water, natural resources and tribal lands. She says what the Salish and Kootenai are doing is a model for other tribes in the U.S.
“It’s happening around the country, this is something that tribes have the capacity to step up and play not just a stakeholder role, but actually an owner and management role. When they aren’t just participants in a process, but actually gain authority over those facilities, that’s a major step forward in asserting and realizing their sovereignty.”
Tribes in Oregon and New York state are now attempting to gain control of hydroelectric projects.
The 1000 foot boardwalk takes you to an overlook of the Kerr Dam, which stretches 540 feet across and 200 feet high.
The Kerr Dam is run by the company PPL Montana and the tribes are still negotiating the purchase price. PPL Montana values the dam at about $51 million, while the tribes say the number is closer to $16 million. Once the issue is resolved, tribal members plan to take over the dam in September of 2015.
This story is the result of an environmental fellowship put on by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.
A Bonneville Power Administration transmission-tower construction project has been on hold for more than a year as a landowner tries to defend ancient Indian archaeological sites and stops on the Lewis and Clark Trail.
The BPA wants to finish a project near an ancient-village site on land that runs past this bridge and around the bend on the Columbia River. STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
WISHRAM, Klickitat County —
All he was looking for was a little retirement property. But Robert Zornes, a Forks RV-park owner, wound up with quite a lot more.
“I kept seeing this property, 122 acres on more than a mile of the Columbia River for a quarter-million dollars, then it’s lowered to $100,000. And I am thinking, ‘This has to be a practical joke,’ ” Zornes said. So he bought it, right off a real-estate website, without ever talking to the property owner.
Then came the big surprise: He had purchased one of the most historically and archaeologically sensitive pieces of property in the state.
Home to a campsite and portage route on the Lewis and Clark Trail. A cave, with prehistoric Indian rock art. Indian burials, petroglyphs and story stones. And some of the last upland vestiges of an important Indian village near Celilo Falls, once one of the greatest Indian salmon fisheries, gathering grounds and trading areas in North America.
“I wanted a pig, a horse and a cow, or maybe a dog,” Zornes said. “I wasn’t looking for a historical property. I just wanted some place to retire.”
But since he purchased the property in 2011, Zornes often can be found in what he calls his war room: a study in his double-wide by the river, packed with historic photos and books — and documents from two years of frustrating correspondence with the Bonneville Power Administration.
The federal agency — which sells power from the dams on the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers — is in the middle of construction of a 28-mile, more than $200 million transmission line. Construction started right about when Zornes bought the property — and he soon received a letter from the agency informing him the BPA was about to cross the river and replace a tower near the cave. The new tower would be taller, wider and require blasting to construct — which he feared would destroy the cave and its ancient art.
And Zornes, as it turns out, is a history buff. As he put two and two together, he came to understand just how special the landscape he had purchased was. “BPA starts talking about a bulldozer and we kind of freaked out.”
BPA informed him in a 2012 letter that if he didn’t grant access across his property, the agency would dynamite an alternative access road, doing potentially more damage. The fight was on.
Zornes denied access across the easement on his property, saying it was granted to a different federal agency for another purpose, and since expired. He filed trespass claims. He invited the Yakama Indian Nation to revisit sacred lands on his property. He cold-called the lead preservation officer for the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail in Omaha and invited him to come have a look.
Zornes’ efforts so far have helped shut down construction of the project on his property at a cost of $2 million and counting. The agency contends its easement is valid, and that it can and will proceed with the project. Zornes is just as adamant in his opposition.
“You think the government is your friend,” Zornes said. “But they are more like the kid that beat you up for your lunch money.
“I’m not a senator, I am not a congressman. Here we are, two uneducated, lower- middle-class people in Forks,” he said, speaking of himself and his wife. “We have held them up more than a year. I think that’s significant.”
Bonneville officials say the agency has wanted to listen to all sides to reach agreements in the dispute, and stopped construction in order to do so.
“It’s a sensitive site, and we are trying to be extra careful,” said Lorri Bodi, BPA’s vice president for environment, fish and wildlife. She acknowledged there have been “bumps in the road.”
“We have discovered additional things, and certainly we have made some mistakes along the way,” she said. Those include a BPA contractor mistakenly bulldozing and destroying a prehistoric relic documented as a burial cairn on Yakama lands, despite promises to protect it.
Bodi contended the agency has made up for those mistakes and is working hard to minimize the damage by the project.
Preservation concerns
State records show a continuing pattern of frustration in getting the right answers from Bonneville, or any at all.
When the contractor bulldozed the cairn, the agency did not seem to appreciate the seriousness of the matter, state assistant attorney general Sandra Adix wrote Bonneville last summer.
Repeated attempts by the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation to gain specific information about the agency’s construction and its ongoing and potential effect on archaeological resources “seem to have fallen into a black hole,” Adix wrote in other correspondence.
The agency also has not included the National Lewis and Clark Historic Trail as a full partner in the consultation process, said Dan Wiley, chief of stewardship. “We have gotten short shrift and have continuously tried to bring to the table the recognition that this a unique site, a special site, and it deserves protection from further negative impacts.
“I don’t know if it is too late or not. That is really up to BPA and whether or not they have real concern about cultural resources, and protection of cultural resources.”
Wiley would like to see the transmission line located miles to the east. As planned, it will be in view from Columbia Hills State Park, with its petroglyphs, as well as the Lewis and Clark Historic Trail, and from across the river at the Confluence Project art installation planned at Celilo Village by internationally known artist Maya Lin.
It also will further clutter views of the Columbia River Gorge, but BPA already has obtained a promise from the Friends of the Columbia River Gorge not to sue in return for a payment of $1.8 million. The BPA also in December paid a more than $2 million settlement to the Yakama Indian Nation to allow the project to continue despite impacts to its culturally sensitive lands.
Conflict still unsolved
At Bonneville, there’s not at present a willingness to consider another alignment, top officials say. Because there is already a utility line across the river, landing on a tower dating to the 1950s near the cave. That alignment, chosen through a lengthy public review process as part of an environmental-impact statement, is preferred by BPA.
“It’s much like repaving an old highway; are you better off moving it, or leaving in the same place?” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president for transmission services at BPA. “In this case we have chosen using the existing line, because it had lesser impacts than trying to find other routes that would move the line on both sides and have a new river crossing, as well as time delays. So the bottom line is we would reuse the existing line and not relocate it to another location.”
But what Bonneville has in mind is nothing like the impact of what is already there today, historic preservationists say.
“This is not just repaving,” said Allyson Brooks, Washington’s State Historic Preservation Officer. “It is the equivalent of taking a two-lane road and making it a superhighway. It is not the same thing. Maybe in essence, but in size and impact, it is greater.
“One of the reasons these are public processes is so people get to say what the impact is, it is not a unilateral decision. That is democracy.”
Bonneville has committed to moving the tower 20 feet farther north of the cave with its prehistoric rock art. But it will be a bigger, higher tower — 243 feet tall, compared with the 190-foot-tall tower near the cave today, with 22 lines instead of three. The new tower also has a much larger and taller footing, and requires controlled blasting to set it in the basalt cliffs above the river.
BPA assures the blasting won’t destroy the cave. But that’s still under review — and the agency’s credibility has been dented by historic sites and archaeology overlooked and even destroyed as construction got under way.
“We are still working on damage assessment for the cairn, and the impacts for the Lewis and Clark Trail are unresolved,” Brooks said. “If we could lessen the direct and visual impacts, we would certainly prefer that happening. It’s been difficult. It feels rushed, and in the rush the time hasn’t been taken to really balance things the way they should be balanced.”
To Zornes, the fact that one transmission line is there today doesn’t justify building another, it argues for backing off a place that already has been altered by industrialization. First came the railroad. Then the inundation of Celilo Falls to build the Dalles Dam in 1957. Then the transmission towers built that exist today — to be superseded now by even larger towers, with more lines.
“Our preference is no new towers,” Zornes said. “Two wrongs don’t make a right. The first tower should not have ever been placed on this historic and culturally rich and highly scenic bluff.”
Bonneville has since written Wiley to state the agency doesn’t believe the trail merits listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which would afford it more protection — a decision blasted by Washington’s Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and Johnson Meninick, Yakama Indian Nation cultural resources program manager.
The conflict remains unresolved.
“What is left is intact”
Wiley said it wasn’t until he came here in person that he understood just how significant this place is.
“You can only see so much from your desktop,” he said.
Once on the site, he walked the same sands that bedeviled Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery as they portaged around the roaring falls at Celilo, one of the greatest fisheries in the aboriginal world.
Just above on the cliffs is the very spot where William Clark likely stood to draw the famous Codex H map of what he called “the Great Falls of the Columbia” — Celilo Falls, with Indian lodges and fish-drying racks along the banks.
“It is a highly significant location for the two cultures of the Pacific Northwest and their intersection,” Wiley said. “What is left is intact. The palisades that are above the water are described in the journals. The walkway that Lewis and Clark took on the north bank, that is pretty much intact, and there is no other place on the planet that the events of Oct. 22 and 23 and 24, 1805, could have taken place.”
Just above Lewis and Clark’s portage route is the cave, used for tribal vision quests and other religious and spiritual rites for centuries untold. Inside, the light is soft, and drawn figures with outstretched arms keep an enigmatic vigil on the cool rock walls.
Through its narrow opening, the cave looks to a view not seen in all the centuries people have stood here: the transmission towers Bonne- ville already has built in its chosen alignment, just across the river.
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Prehistoric Indian art on a cave on Robert Zornes’ property.
Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com
Survival International has received reports that Brazil’s military has launched a major ground operation against illegal logging around the land of the Awá, Earth’s most threatened tribe.
Hundreds of soldiers, police officers and Environment Ministry special agents have flooded the area, backed up with tanks, helicopters and close to a hundred other vehicles, to halt the illegal deforestation which has already destroyed more than 30% of one of the Awá’s indigenous territories.
Since the operation reportedly started at the end of June, 2013, at least eight saw mills have been closed and other machinery has been confiscated and destroyed.
Little Butterfly, an Awá girl. The Awá have pleaded for all illegal invaders to be evicted from their forest.
The operation comes at a critical time for the Awá, one of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in the Brazilian Amazon, who are at risk of extinction if the destruction of their forest is not stopped as a matter of urgency.
But while the operation is making it more difficult for loggers to enter Awá territory and remove the valuable timber, the forces have not moved onto the Awá’s land itself – where illegal logging is taking place at an alarming rate and where quick action is crucial.
Amiri Awá told Survival, ‘The invaders must be made to leave our forest. We don’t want our forest to disappear. The loggers have already destroyed many areas.’
Tanks, helicopters and close to a hundred vehicles have been deployed to protect the forest.
Tens of thousands of people worldwide, including many celebrities, have joined Survival International’s campaign urging the Brazilian government to send forces into the Awá’s territories to evict the illegal invaders, stop the destruction of the Awá’s forest, prosecute the illegal loggers and prevent them from re-entering the area.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘Brazil has taken a promising first step towards saving the world’s most threatened tribe, and it’s thanks to the many thousands of Awá supporters worldwide. This is proof that public opinion can effect change. However, the battle is not yet won: the authorities must not stop until all illegal invaders are gone.’
If you live near water in the American Southeast, you may have run across the green tree frog – or at least heard the species as it croaks (in a sound that kind of resembles rapid fire quacking). It’s a small frog that’s often found in pet stores. It’s the state amphibian of Louisiana and Georgia. And it’s one of many species of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and even mammals that may be incapable of evolving fast enough to keep up with what global warming has in store.
That’s the upshot of a new study in the journal Ecology Letters, whose authors used a vast body of data on 540 separate species’ current climatic “niches,” and their evolutionary histories of adapting to different conditions, to determine whether they can evolve fast enough to keep up with the changing climate. More specifically, the study examined “climatic niche evolution,” or how fast organisms have adapted to changing temperature and precipitation conditions in their habitats over time.
Under normal circumstances, the answer is very slowly. On average, the study found that animals adapted to temperature changes at a rate of less than 1.8 degrees F per million years. By contrast, global warming is expected to raise temperatures on the order of 7.2 degrees F in the next 100 years.
“It seems like climate change is too fast, relative to how quickly the climatic niches of species typically evolve,” explains evolutionary biologist John Wiens of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who conducted the research along with a colleague at Yale University.
Take the green tree frog. According to data provided by Wiens, the annual mean temperature in the species’ range across the U.S. Southeast is about 66 degrees F. For its closely related “sister” species the barking tree frog, meanwhile, it’s 65.3 degrees. The two species diverged some 13.4 million years ago, and their common ancestor is estimated to have lived in mean climatic conditions somewhere in between these two numbers, at 65.5 degrees.
The rate of evolutionary change in response to temperatures for these frogs is therefore extremely slow — “about 100,000 to 500,000 times slower than the expected rate of climate change within the range of the species from 2010 to 2100,” says Wiens.
Even if you take a species that evolved much more rapidly in relation to changing temperatures, the conclusion remains the same. The species still didn’t change fast enough in the past for scientists to think that it can evolve to keep up with global warming in the future.
An example of a faster-evolving species would be the Northern banded newt, which lives at relatively high altitudes in a range that spans from Russia to Turkey. Annual mean temperatures in its habitat are about 50.4 degrees F; but for a closely related species, the Southern banded newt, the average temperature is vastly different — 65.7 degrees. The two species’ common ancestor is estimated to have lived only 350,000 years ago, amid mean temperatures of about 59.5 degrees. Adaptation to new climatic conditions among these newts thus happened much faster than among tree frogs — “but still about 1,600 to 4,700 times slower” than the kind of changes we expect from global warming, according to Wiens.
In the new paper, Wiens and his coauthor apply a similar analysis to several hundred other species, ranging from cranes to crocodiles and from hawks to turtles. And none adjusted to temperatures in the evolutionary past at anything like the rate at which temperature change is now coming.
This does not mean that each and every species will go extinct. Some may shift their ranges to keep up with favorable temperatures. Some may perish in certain locales but not others. And some may find a means of coping in a changed environment. Just because these species have never experienced what climate change is about to throw at them doesn’t prove that they’re incapable of surviving it.
Nonetheless, the new research as a whole validates a striking statement made recently by the renowned climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University. At a Climate Desk Live event in May, Mann remarked that there is “no evidence” from the planet’s past to suggest that life can adapt to changes as rapid as the ones we’ve now set in motion.
Wiens’ data add an exclamation point to Mann’s statement. And it also raises an unavoidable question: What is going to happen to the species responsible for all of this, namely, humans?
“Humans will be fine,” says Wiens, “because we have things like clothes and air conditioning.”
Sea-level rise is currently measured in millimeters per year, but longer-term effects of global warming are going to force our descendants to measure sea-level rise in meters or yards.
The world is currently trying (and failing) to reach an agreement that would limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Business-as-usual practices could yet raise temperatures by 4 (or even more) degrees Celsius.
Multiply 2.5 yards by 4 and you are left with the specter of tides that lap 10 yards higher in the future than today. That’s 30 feet, the height of a three-story building. For comparison, the seas rose less than a foot last century.
Here is a chart from the new study that illustrates long-term sea-level rise projections under four warming scenarios:
PNASClick to embiggen.
Now, it’s important to note that the new study looks at sea-level rise over the next 2,000 years. The study doesn’t make predictions for how rapidly the seas will rise during that time frame; it just lays out what is possible in the long term. From the study:
On a 2000-year time scale, the sea-level contribution will be largely independent of the exact warming path during the first century. At the same time, 2000 years is a relevant time scale, for example, for society’s cultural heritage.
The difference between this study and others, some of which have foretold less dramatic rises in water levels, is the extent to which it considers ice-sheet melting.
Compared with the amount of water locked up in the world’s glaciers, which are melting rapidly, Earth’s two ice sheets hold incredibly vast reservoirs. The Antarctic ice sheet alone could inundate the world with 60 yards of water if it melted entirely. And then there’s the Greenland ice sheet, which suffered an unprecedented melt last summer.
The ice sheets are not yet melting as dramatically as the glaciers, insulated as they are by their tremendous bulk. In fact, the melting glaciers and the melting ice sheets are contributing roughly equally to today’s rising seas, despite the differences in their overall bulk.
But a hastening decline of the ice sheets is inevitable as accumulating greenhouse gases take their toll.
The authors of the new study, led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, analyzed sea levels and temperatures from millennia past, combining those findings with climate models to get a glimpse of the shifting coastlines of the future. From the study:
[C]limate records suggest a sea-level sensitivity of as much as several meters per degree of warming during previous intervals of Earth history when global temperatures were similar to or warmer than present. While sea-level rise over the last century has been dominated by ocean warming and loss of glaciers, the sensitivity suggested from records of past sea level indicates important contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
The study’s lead author, Potsdam researcher Anders Levermann, said the results reveal the inevitability of rising water levels as heat accumulates on Earth.
“Continuous sea-level rise is something we cannot avoid unless global temperatures go down again,” he said in a statement. “Thus we can be absolutely certain that we need to adapt. Sea-level rise might be slow on time scales on which we elect governments, but it is inevitable and therefore highly relevant for almost everything we build along our coastlines, for many generations to come.”
Antarctica’s penguins could benefit from proposals to create huge international marine preserves in their ‘hood.
Plans to protect more than 1.5 million square miles of ocean around Antarctica are getting serious consideration this week — and that could be a big benefit for whales, seals, birds, fish, krill, and other wildlife in the region.
The idea is akin to creating a vast national park, except that it would be an international park. And it would be larger than most nations. And it would be entirely soggy.
On July 16, the members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) — 24 nations and the European Union — will vote on two proposals for marine reserves, each one bigger in size than the state of Alaska. A U.S.-New Zealand one would set aside roughly 876,000 square miles in and around the frozen Ross Sea, a home for penguin nurseries and source of nutrients throughout the Pacific Ocean. A second European and Australian one would set aside a more than 700,000-square-mile string of protected marine reserves around Eastern Antarctica.
NPR has more, including a comparison to another big U.S. state:
“The total size of the marine protected area we are proposing is roughly 3 1/2 times the size of Texas,” says Ambassador Mike Moore, the former prime minister of New Zealand, who was talking up the joint U.S.-New Zealand proposal in Washington this spring. “So to misquote the vice president of the United States, ‘this is a big deal.’” …
But because these two areas are in international waters, creating marine preserves will require consensus from all of the nations in the pact known as CCAMLR …
When the group met to discuss the issue last fall, it couldn’t reach agreement. Russia, China and Ukraine were concerned about losing fishing rights in these seas. But they agreed to [a] meeting in Germany to try again.
The biggest obstacle is Russia, which has expressed resistance to these reserves. It is joined by Ukraine, China, Japan and South Korea. Their hope is to manage fishing in the Antarctic much as it is managed elsewhere, with limits and restrictions. But the state of fisheries around the globe makes it clear that the most effective antidote to declining fish populations is the creation of totally protected marine reserves.
The Obama administration has expressed strong support for the idea of such protections in Antarctica, and many delegates to the Bremerhaven meeting are hopeful that sooner or later the Russians and other opponents can be brought on board. But when it comes to protecting ecosystems, sooner or later often means later, which often means too late. The time to protect the Antarctic Ocean is now.
Here’s hoping that these five reluctant countries, all of which are located in the Northern Hemisphere, don’t continue to pour cold water over proposals that could help stabilize the world’s fish stocks — and protect one of the world’s last big wild areas.
The federal agency — which sells power from the dams on the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers — is in the middle of construction of a 28-mile, more than $200 million transmission line. Construction started right about when Zornes bought the property — and he soon received a letter from the agency informing him the BPA was about to cross the river and replace a tower near the cave. The new tower would be taller, wider and require blasting to construct — which he feared would destroy the cave and its ancient art.
Bonneville has committed to moving the tower 20 feet farther north of the cave with its prehistoric rock art. But it will be a bigger, higher tower — 243 feet tall, compared with the 190-foot-tall tower near the cave today, with 22 lines instead of three. The new tower also has a much larger and taller footing, and requires controlled blasting to set it in the basalt cliffs above the river.
