3 July 2016, Climate News Network, Fences snare wildlife fleeing warming climate. As border fences proliferate across Europe and elsewhere, humans face mounting risks – and so does wildlife fleeing the impacts of climate change. The world is becoming sadly familiar with the sight of thousands of desperate refugees – escaping bombing and violence in countries like Syria – being pressed against border fences erected to separate countries in Europe and further afield. Less recognised is the effect these thousands of kilometres of newly-installed border fencing is often having on wildlife. But climate change does not recognise borders, and nor do the birds or animals migrating across their territories. A study by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research estimates that between 25,000 and 30,000 kilometres of fences and walls now run along the borders of various countries in Europe and Central Asia. Much of this is of very recent construction and has led to what the researchers describe as “a dramatic reduction in the permeability of borders for wildlife, as well as people.” Driven further Changes in climate, including rising temperatures and an increase in flash flooding and droughts, mean that wild creatures in many regions are forced to roam ever-larger ranges to find food and water. The study says the fences are a significant threat: “The long-term consequences are a low viability of wildlife populations, and a reduction in their ability to respond to climate change.” Read More here
Category Archives: Ecosystem Stress
30 June 2016, NASA. Why a half-degree temperature rise is a big deal. The Paris Agreement, which delegates from 196 countries hammered out in December 2015, calls for holding the ongoing rise in global average temperature to “well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels,” while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” How much difference could that half-degree of wiggle room (or 0.9 degree on the Fahrenheit scale) possibly make in the real world? Quite a bit, it appears. The European Geosciences Union published a study in April 2016 that examined the impact of a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. a 2.0 C temperature increase by the end of the century, given what we know so far about how climate works. It found that the jump from 1.5 to 2 degrees—a third more of an increase—raises the impact by about that same fraction, very roughly, on most of the phenomena the study covered. Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater. But in some cases, that extra increase in temperature makes things much more dire. At 1.5 C, the study found that tropical coral reefs stand a chance of adapting and reversing a portion of their die-off in the last half of the century. But at 2 C, the chance of recovery vanishes. Tropical corals are virtually wiped out by the year 2100. Read More here
29 June 2016, NASA, NASA maps California drought effects on Sierra trees. A new map created with measurements from an airborne instrument developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, reveals the devastating effect of California’s ongoing drought on Sierra Nevada conifer forests. The map will be used to help the U.S. Forest Service assess and respond to the impacts of increased tree mortality caused by the drought, particularly where wildlands meet urban areas within the Sierra National Forest. After several years of extreme drought, the highly stressed conifers (trees that produce cones and are usually green year-round) of the Sierra Nevada are now more susceptible to bark beetles (Dendroctonus spp.). While bark beetles killing trees in the Sierra Nevada is a natural phenomenon, the scale of mortality in the last couple of years is far greater than previously observed. The U.S. Forest Service is using recent airborne spectroscopic measurements from NASA’s Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) instrument aboard NASA’s ER-2 aircraft, together with new advanced algorithms, to quantify this impact over this large region of rugged terrain. The high-altitude ER-2 aircraft is based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, California. Read More here
4 June 2016, Climate News Network, Warming turns northern tundra green. Rising temperatures are creating longer Arctic growing seasons and increasing the risk of carbon escaping into the atmosphere from the thawing permafrost. The northern edge of North America is getting steadily greener. In the most detailed study so far of plant growth across Alaska and Canada, scientists say that about a third of the land cover now looks less like tundra, and more like a warmer ecosystem. The researchers report in the Journal of Remote Sensing that examination of 87,000 images captured by the NASA Landsat satellite reveals that Alaska, Quebec and other regions became greener between 1984 and 2012. Landsat, a project also backed by the US Geological Survey (USGS), provides the longest space-based record of land vegetation in existence. Growing in size “The greening trend was unmistakable,” the scientists report. In Canada, northern forests tended to become greener, although if anything they declined in Alaska. Overall, 29.4% of the region became greener, and only 2.9% declined. The Arctic is the fastest-warming region of the northern hemisphere, with longer growing seasons and thawing permafrost. The scientists saw grassy tundra convert to shrubland, and shrubs grow in size and density, and such changes will inevitably start to play into water, energy and carbon cycles. Read More here