CAP/CCCC Reading Room

Click here for CAP/CCCC References

Last update: 13 January 2010

These recent articles concern climate and climate change issues of interest to California Applications Program (CAP) and/or California Climate Change Center (CCCC) participants.

• Climate Change in the West -- AGU Fall 09 meeting blog
  A battery of eight talks starting at 8 a.m. and covering none less but the serious topic of climate change in the western United States can leave one a little shell-shocked. But the speakers' broad reviews of the science helped catch generalists up to speed and provided at least some hopeful news. Michael Dettinger, a hydrologist with both the US Geological Survey and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD in La Jolla, Calif., kicked off the session with an overview of predictions for temperature and precipitation-related changes in the West. Thirteen climate models unanimously predict a rise in temperatures over the next century. The good news for California: due to its marine climate its temperature rise is projected to be less than that of other states. The bad news: California's hydrology and water supply is highly sensitive to even slight changes in warmth, because it depends on snowpack. Small changes in temperature may cause snow to melt sooner, exacerbating winter floods and summer droughts.
  (AGU, December 2009)
• California's sinking delta
  Efforts are under way to reverse the deterioration of a major water source, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California, which is sinking. Dennis Baldocchi often drives past the ruins of his grandmother's house on Sherman Island, in northern California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Flooding gutted the house when the island's levee broke 40 years ago. Today, grass grows through the floors and chickens wander through. To Dr. Baldocchi, the slanting hulk whispers an unsettling truth: The land that his family farmed for three generations is sinking farther below sea level each year.
  (The Christian Science Monitor, December 2009)
• Google offers a graphic glimpse of how climate change might affect California
  Researchers and policymakers have long rued that it's hard to illustrate the perils of global warming when its most serious impacts won't be visible for decades. But thanks to the state Natural Resources Agency and Google, a graphic view of climate change's potential effect on California -- based on scientific modeling -- is now just a mouse-click away. Do you want to know if global warming will wipe out the Sierra snowpack before your great-great-grandchildren hit college?
  (Los Angeles Times, December 2009)
• State braces for fourth year of drought
  State water officials offered up their bleakest annual water supply prediction ever Tuesday in what amounts to an early warning about the coming year. Customers of the State Water Project, the state's largest water distribution system, were told they may get as little as 5 percent of their requested Delta water supply next year. That figure assumes very dry conditions, however, and the number is almost certain to improve. Last year, the state warned agencies early on to plan for 15 percent of their supply but eventually increased the number to 40 percent.
  (Contra Costa Times, December 2009)
• Climate scientist James Hansen hopes summit will fail
  A leading scientist acclaimed as the grandfather of global warming has denounced the Copenhagen summit on climate change next week as a farce. James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Insitute for Space Studies, told The Times that he planned to boycott the UN conference because it was seeking a counter-productive agreement to limit emissions through a "cap and trade" system.
  (TimesOnline, December 2009)
• Climate change will burn Yosemite
  Wild fires within California's world famous Yosemite National Park are set to become more frequent and severe due to climate change. New research has unpicked how this may happen; and it is not just that warming temperatures directly trigger more fires. They will also reduce the amount of snow that covers the forest in winter. That lack of snow will then allow lightening strikes to trigger more fires, which burn more intensely. "People already expect more ignitions from hotter summers," says Dr James Lutz of the University of Washington at Seattle, US, one of the study's authors. That is because predicted higher temperatures will make vegetation more flammable and allow larger fires to take hold.
  (BBC Earth News, November 2009)
• Global warming blamed for aspen die-off across the West
  By Nicholas Riccardi
  From the hillsides of extinct volcanoes in Arizona to the jagged peaks of Idaho, aspen trees are falling by the tens of thousands, the latest example of how climate change is dramatically altering the American West. Starting seven years ago, foresters noticed massive aspen die-offs caused by parasitical insects, one of them so rare it is hardly even written about in scientific literature. But with warming temperatures and the effects of a brutal drought still lingering, the parasites are flourishing at the expense of the tree, beloved for its slender branches and heart-shaped leaves that turn a brilliant yellow in autumn. What foresters have termed Sudden Aspen Decline affects more than just aesthetics. Aspen trees provide a rich habitat for birds, elk, deer and other animals. The grasses that sprout under them -- up to 2,000 pounds per acre -- hold water that is needed by metropolitan areas. The trees do not burn easily and create natural firebreaks in forests already ravaged by the pine bark beetle -- another parasite that is thriving because of global warming.
  (The Los Angeles Times, October 2009)
• Puget Sound area emerging as wine region, thanks to warmer climate
  Tom Miller rolls his metal stool down the row inch by inch, his long, leathery fingers pushing through the vines to clip grapes off by the bunch. It's an early autumn morning at the top of the Olympic Peninsula, and Miller is doing something climate scientists believe would have been difficult, if not impossible, 50 years ago: harvesting grapes to make wine that people actually want to buy. No matter whether they realize it, researchers say, Miller and a small explosion of new Western Washington wine-grape growers appear to be capitalizing on small climate shifts that are reshaping the global wine-growing map.
  (The Seattle Times, October 2009)
• Climate change and warfare -- Cool heads or heated conflicts?
  The starkest views of climate change paint war as a looming threat. The idea that violence will erupt as drought and rising sea levels displace people from their homes is, in part, why the Nobel prize for peace was awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. Yet a newly published study analysing the historical connection between war and climate throws into question the assumption that rising temperatures and violence go hand in hand.
  (The Economist, October 2009)
• Both of the World's Ice Sheets May Be Shrinking Faster and Faster
  The two great ice sheets - Greenland's and Antarctica's - have had plenty of press lately, what with galloping glaciers and whole lakes of meltwater plunging into ice holes in minutes. Surveys of ice-sheet volume made from planes and satellites have quantified these losses, but those assessments have been spotty in time, space, or both. Shrinkage accelerated from the 1990s into the 2000s, but researchers couldn't be sure what would come next. Now the latest analysis of the most comprehensive, essentially continuous monitoring of the ice sheets shows that the losses have not eased in the past few years. More ominously, losses from both Greenland and Antarctica appear to have accelerated during the past 7 years.
  (Science Magazine, October 2009)
• Monsoons and Meltdowns
  What do periods of weak low-latitude rainfall have to do with the meltdown of great ice sheets? Cheng et al. show that this counterintuitive association contains a hot clue about the much-debated causes of the ice age cycles that end every 100,000 years or so in a collapse of the great Northern Hemisphere ice sheets (a glacial termination). Understanding this collapse is relevant to human affairs both past and future, because the collapse typically causes a subsequent period of unusual climatic stability and warmth (an interglacial period), exemplified by the past 11,700 years of relatively stable climate in which human agriculture and civilization have flourished.
  (Science Magazine, October 2009)
• Hijacked by climate change?
  By Richard Black: As the UN climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, exhortations that "we must get a deal" and warnings that climate change is "the greatest challenge we face as a species" are to be heard in virtually every political forum. But if you look back to the latest definitive check on the planet's environmental health - the Global Environment Outlook (Geo-4), published by the UN two years ago - what emerges is a picture of decline that goes way, way beyond climate change. Species are going extinct at perhaps 1,000 times the normal rate, as key habitats such as forests, wetlands and coral reefs are plundered for human infrastructure.
  (BBC News, August 2009)
• Beetles, wildfire: Double threat in warming world
  From Charles J. Hanley (AP) reporting in Haines Junction, Yukon Territory: A veil of smoke settled over the forest in the shadow of the St. Elias Mountains, in a wilderness whose spruce trees stood tall and gray, a deathly gray even in the greenest heart of a Yukon summer. "As far as the eye can see, it's all infested," forester Rob Legare said, looking out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley. Beetles and fire, twin plagues, are consuming northern forests in what scientists say is a preview of the future, in a century growing warmer, as the land grows drier, trees grow weaker and pests, abetted by milder winters, grow stronger. Dying, burning forests would then only add to the warming. It's here in the sub-Arctic and Arctic — in Alaska, across Siberia, in northernmost Europe, and in the Yukon and elsewhere in northern Canada — that Earth's climate is changing most rapidly. While average temperatures globally rose 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century, the far north experienced warming at twice that rate or greater.
  (AP, August 2009)
• Ocean Temperatures Are Highest on Record
  Average temperatures of waters at the ocean surface in July were the highest ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The agency said the average sea surface temperature was 1.06 degrees higher than the 20th-century average of 61.5 degrees.
  (The New York Times, August 2009)
• Pachauri's call for 350ppm is breakthrough moment for climate movement
  Rajendra Pachauri is the U.N.'s top climate scientist. He leads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which every five years produces the authoritative assessment of climate science. Its last report, in 2007, helped set the target of 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a target that many environmental groups and national governments have adopted as their goal for Copenhagen. As many of you know, that number is out of date. When Jim Hansen and other scientists looked at phenomena like the Arctic ice melt of the last two summers, they produced new data demonstrating that 350 ppm is the bottom line. But it's been hard to get that news out to the powers that be. So today it comes as enormous and welcome news that Pachauri, from his New Delhi office, said that 350 was the number.
  (Guardian, August 2009)
• Rising Ocean Acidity Erodes Alaska's Fisheries
  The Arctic's increased vulnerability to climate change is not limited to higher temperatures and melting permafrost. New research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks suggests Arctic oceans are particularly susceptible to acidification, with potentially dire consequences to Alaska's rich crab and salmon fisheries. "Everything is acting in unison on the environment - it's not just the ice loss or the warming or the acidification," said UAF chemical oceanographer Jeremy Mathis. "The Arctic is taking a multilateral hit."
  (Scientific American, August 2009)
• As Arctic Ocean warms, megatonnes of methane bubble up
  It's been predicted for years, and now it's happening. Deep in the Arctic Ocean, water warmed by climate change is forcing the release of methane from beneath the sea floor. Over 250 plumes of gas have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor to the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway. The bubbles are mostly methane, which is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide.
  (NewScientist, August 2009)
• Bubblin' plume
  An oceanographic survey has discovered a 1,400-meter-tall plume rising from the seafloor off the coast of California. Water samples taken at the site, about 32 kilometers northwest of Cape Mendocino, indicate that the feature isn't mineral-rich water spewing from a hydrothermal vent, but researchers aren't yet sure exactly what the feature is made of.
  (ScienceNews, August 2009)
• Climatic Changes Lead to Declining Winter Chill for Fruit and Nut Trees in California during 1950-2099
  Winter chill is one of the defining characteristics of a location's suitability for the production of many tree crops. This academic article from PLoS ONE investigates observed historic and projected future changes in winter chill in California, quantified by two different chilling models (chilling hours and dynamic model).
• How the climate bill hits your wallet
  Lawmakers are set to debate a sweeping energy bill Friday (June 26, 2009). This is how it may affect you. Cutting greenhouse gases -- Reducing greenhouse gases is the main aim of the sweeping energy bill currently up for debate in the House. An 80% reduction is what most scientists say is needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Putting the nation on track to meet this goal by 2050 will cost the average American household $175 a year by 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Under the bill, polluters would have to pay to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, something they currently do for free. Plus, the amount they can emit would decline each year. (CNN, June 2009)
• High human impact ocean areas along US West Coast revealed
  Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the ocean off the West Coast of the United States. "Every single spot of the ocean along the West Coast," said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "is affected by 10 to 15 different human activities annually." (e! Science News, May 2009)
• Yosemite's largest trees vanishing
  Climate change appears to be taking its toll on the oldest and largest firs and pines in California's Yosemite National Park, research said. The number of large-diameter trees fell by 24 percent between the 1930s and 1990s in all types of forests in Yosemite, said James Lutz of the University of Washington in Seattle. (TerraDaily, May 2009)
• Climate change, water shortages conspire to create 21st century Dust Bowl
  Dust storms accelerated by a warming climate have covered the Rocky Mountains with dirt whose heat-trapping properties have caused snowpacks to melt weeks earlier than normal, worrying officials in Colorado about drastic water shortages by late summer. Snowpacks from the San Juan Mountains to the Front Range have either completely melted or will be gone within the next two weeks, said Tom Painter, director of the Snow Optics Laboratory at the University of Utah and a leading expert on snowmelt. The rapid melting is linked to a spate of intense dust storms that kick up dirt and sand that in turn are deposited on snow-topped mountains. The dust darkens the snow, allowing the surface to absorb more heat from the sun. This warms the snow -- and the air above it -- significantly, studies show. (The New York Times, May 2009)
• North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020
  From the Climate Progress Blog: The north pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: "It's like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely". It's the ice thickness, stupid. The Arctic ice cover, which has endured for at least 100,000 years, will be all but gone within a decade according to a volume-based projection by a leading British scientist, the BBC reports. At the same time, "a gruelling 73-day" survey of sea-ice thickness found "the average thickness of the sea ice was 1.774 m" [5.8 feet]. One surveyor said the data "seems to suggest it was almost all first-year ice." (Climate Progress Blog, May 2009)
• Newsletter of the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) - April 2009
  Click above for the 56 page newsletter on Global Change in Mountain Regions from The Mountain Research Initiative (MRI). This newsletter (published twice a year) is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It covers a wide range of subjects, activities and scientific communications. 8 science articles are available, covering topics including a report on a high altitude interdisciplinary field campaign, a forest dynamics network and incorporating climate change projections into watershed management. (MRI News, April 2009)
• Adventures of Junior Raindrop (1948) -- TeacherTube Video
  This 7.5 minute clip features animation of Junior Raindrop and his involvement in the water cycle. Film segments are included showing how human activities (timber, ranch, fire) can alter the landscape so rain can have a devastating effect. (TeacherTube, March 2009)
• David Rutledge: Hubbert's Peak, the Coal Question, and Climate Change
  A 52-minute video of David Rutledge, Caltech's Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering, presenting a Watson Lecture called "Hubbert's Peak, the Coal Question, and Climate Change." Rutledge discussed whether oil, natural gas, and coal resources will be sufficient in the future, and explained efforts to predict the changes in climate that will result from consuming these fossil fuels. (Caltech Today Streaming Theater, March 2009)
• Climate researchers seek citizen scientists
  Valerie Hilt's yard brims with hollyhocks, hellebores and hyacinths. But it's her lilac bush that landed the Port Angeles great-grandmother in the annals of science. For 35 springs, Hilt has logged the date when the first leaf unfurls on the 20-foot-tall shrub. She also takes note of the first fragrant blossom and other milestones, like peak bloom. "It doesn't take any great amount of time," she said. "I'm always outside looking around anyway." Hilt, 70, is one of the last remaining lilac watchers in a network that once included 2,500 volunteers across the Western U.S. Their handwritten postcards grew into a powerful database that researchers have used to document how rising temperatures are hastening the onset of spring. (The Seattle Times, March 2009)
• 4 Top Science Advisers Are Named by Obama
  In his selection of four top scientific advisers, President-elect Barack Obama has signaled what are likely to be significant changes in policies governing global warming, ocean protections and stem cell research. "It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology," Mr. Obama said in a radio address on Saturday, when he announced the appointments. John P. Holdren, a physicist and environmental policy professor at Harvard, will serve as the president's science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist from Oregon State University, will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which overseas ocean and atmospheric studies and performs much of the government's research on global warming. (The New York Times, December 2008)
• Has the Arctic melt passed the point of no return?
  Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen. Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover. The Arctic is considered one of the most sensitive regions in terms of climate change and its transition to another climatic state will have a direct impact on other parts of the northern hemisphere, as well more indirect effects around the world. (The Independent, December 2008)
• Too late? Why scientists say we should expect the worst
  As ministers and officials gather in Poznan one year ahead of the Copenhagen summit on global warming, the second part of a major series looks at the crucial issue of targets
  At a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University this summer, climate scientist Kevin Anderson stood before his expert audience and contemplated a strange feeling. He wanted to be wrong. Many of those in the room who knew what he was about to say felt the same. His conclusions had already caused a stir in scientific and political circles. Even committed green campaigners said the implications left them terrified.
  Anderson, an expert at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, was about to send the gloomiest dispatch yet from the frontline of the war against climate change.
  Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control - far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.
  "As an academic I wanted to be told that it was a very good piece of work and that the conclusions were sound," Anderson said. "But as a human being I desperately wanted someone to point out a mistake, and to tell me we had got it completely wrong."
  Nobody did. The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence as Anderson pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and "dangerously misguided" at worst.
  (The Guardian, December 2008)
• Gwynne Dyer: Four harsh truths about climate change (commentary)
  About two years ago, I realized that militaries in various countries were starting to do climate-change scenarios in-house-scenarios that started with the scientific predictions about rising temperatures, falling crop yields, and other physical effects, and then examined what that would do to politics and strategy. The scenarios predicted failed states proliferating because governments couldn't feed their people; waves of climate refugees washing up against the borders of more fortunate countries; and even wars between countries that share rivers. So I started interviewing everybody I could get access to, not only senior military people but scientists, diplomats, and politicians.
  (Straight.com, December 2008)
• California bulks up defenses against tide of global warming
  California is building a second line of defense against global warming, one that will prepare the state for a harsher environment while the other continues to cut climate-changing emissions. The two-front approach acknowledges that rising sea levels, bigger floods, greater loss of species and other harsh effects of warming are inevitable, if not already occurring - no matter the state's success in slashing greenhouse gases.
  (The Sacramento Bee, November 2008)