[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Is It Warm in Here? - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[Ian]

There is an old saying among biologists that "As frogs go, so goes the world."  That is, frogs are the "front line" living creature with respect to changes in both their local biosphere and the global biosphere, and are thus unusually accurate gauges of changes in climate, etc.

With this in mind, the following is a recent NYT article which is perfectly in line with Bill's post:

January 12, 2006

Frog Killer Is Linked to Global Warming 
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Scientists studying a fast-dwindling genus of colorful harlequin frogs on misty mountainsides in Central and South America are reporting today that global warming is combining with a spreading fungus to kill off many species.

The researchers implicate global warming, as opposed to local variations in temperature or other conditions. Their conclusion is based on their finding that patterns of fungus outbreaks and extinctions in widely dispersed patches of habitat were synchronized in a way that could not be explained by chance.

If the analysis holds up, it will be the first to link recent climate changes to the spread of a fungus lethal to frogs and salamanders and their kin. The chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has devastated amphibian communities in many parts of the world over the last several decades.

But experts on amphibian disease and ecology are divided over the finding, which is being published today in the journal Nature. Several scientists criticized the paper yesterday, saying it glossed over significant sources of uncertainty; others said it was important evidence that warming caused by humans was already harming wildlife. Climate scientists have linked most of the recent rise in the earth's average temperature to the buildup of greenhouse emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes. 

The new study was led by J. Alan Pounds, the resident biologist at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica. In an accompanying commentary, two scientists not involved in the research say it provides "compelling evidence" that warming caused by human activity was already disrupting ecology. 

"The frogs are sending an alarm call to all concerned about the future of biodiversity and the need to protect the greatest of all open-access resources - the atmosphere," write the scientists, Andy Dobson, a Princeton University ecologist, and Andrew R. Blaustein, a zoologist at Oregon State University. 

More than 110 species of brightly colored harlequin frogs, in the genus Atelopus, once lived near streams in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, but about two-thirds of them have vanished since the 1980's. 

A leading suspect is the chytrid fungus, which in recent decades has killed amphibians from deserts to lowland tropical forests to mountainsides. It is not clear whether the fungus has been spread around the world by human trade in amphibians or whether it has laid largely undetected and has only recently erupted.

Paradoxically, the fungus thrives best in cooler conditions, challenging the theory that global warming is at fault. But Dr. Pounds and his team, in studying trends in temperature and disease around the American tropics, found patterns that they say explain the situation. 

Because warming increases evaporation, it can create clouds that tend to make days cooler by blocking sunlight, and make nights warmer by trapping heat. In an interview, Dr. Pounds said those conditions could have created favorable conditions for the spread of the chytrid fungus. 

He said that because the seeming extinctions had occurred in lockstep over dispersed field sites, they were hard to attribute to anything other than the broad warming trend that scientists have linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

But some experts who have read the paper said they were troubled by definitive statements like "Our study sheds light on the amphibian-decline mystery by showing that large-scale warming is a key factor." 

Cynthia Carey, an amphibian disease expert at the University of Colorado, said that while both climate and amphibian die-offs were serious problems, this particular paper failed to offer anything beyond circumstantial evidence.

"It is difficult to prove cause and effect on the ground where multiple factors interact in complex ways," she said.

Stephen H. Schneider, a climate expert at Stanford, who has worked with Dr. Pounds on other studies and consulted on this one, acknowledged that uncertainties remained but said the work was significant. 

"It's like anything else that's complex," he said. "When you're in the early phases of learning you look for multiple lines of argument, and when they converge with basic theory, you increase your confidence in a connection."

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: William Swiggard 
  To: mb-civic 
  Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2006 5:52 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] MUST READ: Is It Warm in Here? - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed


  Is It Warm in Here?
  We Could Be Ignoring the Biggest Story in Our History

  By David Ignatius
  Wednesday, January 18, 2006; A17


  One of the puzzles if you're in the news business is figuring out what's "news." The fate of your local football team certainly fits the definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about changes in the migratory patterns of butterflies?

  Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects of global climate change -- but that isn't news, by most people's measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in the Arctic. We can't see these changes in our personal lives, and in that sense, they are abstractions. So they don't grab us the way a plane crash would -- even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet. And because they're not "news," the environmental changes don't prompt action, at least not in the United States.

  What got me thinking about the recondite life rhythms of the planet, and not the 24-hour news cycle, was a recent conversation with a scientist named Thomas E. Lovejoy, who heads the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. When I first met Lovejoy nearly 20 years ago, he was trying to get journalists like me to pay attention to the changes in the climate and biological diversity of the Amazon. He is still trying, but he's beginning to wonder if it's too late.

  Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon's ecosystem may be irreversible. Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the tropical forests are beginning to dry out. They burn more easily, and, in the continuous feedback loops of their ecosystem, these drier forests return less moisture to the atmosphere, which means even less rain. When the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too.

  "When do you wreck it as a system?" Lovejoy wonders. "It's like going up to the edge of a cliff, not really knowing where it is. Common sense says you shouldn't discover where the edge is by passing over it, but that's what we're doing with deforestation and climate change."

  Lovejoy first went to the Amazon 40 years ago as a young scientist of 23. It was a boundless wilderness, the size of the continental United States, but at that time it had just 2 million people and one main road. He has returned more than a hundred times, assembling over the years a mental time-lapse photograph of how this forest primeval has been affected by man. The population has increased tenfold, and the wilderness is now laced with roads, new settlements and economic progress. The forest itself, impossibly rich and lush when Lovejoy first saw it, is changing.

  For Lovejoy, who co-edited a pioneering 1992 book, "Global Warming and Biological Diversity," there is a deep sense of frustration. A crisis he and other scientists first sensed more than two decades ago is drifting toward us in what seems like slow motion, but fast enough that it may be impossible to mitigate the damage.

  The best reporting of the non-news of climate change has come from Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker. Her three-part series last spring lucidly explained the harbingers of potential disaster: a shrinking of Arctic sea ice by 250 million acres since 1979; a thawing of the permafrost for what appears to be the first time in 120,000 years; a steady warming of Earth's surface temperature; changes in rainfall patterns that could presage severe droughts of the sort that destroyed ancient civilizations. This month she published a new piece, "Butterfly Lessons," that looked at how these delicate creatures are moving into new habitats as the planet warms. Her real point was that all life, from microorganisms to human beings, will have to adapt, and in ways that could be dangerous and destabilizing.

  So many of the things that pass for news don't matter in any ultimate sense. But if people such as Lovejoy and Kolbert are right, we are all but ignoring the biggest story in the history of humankind. Kolbert concluded her series last year with this shattering thought: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." She's right. The failure of the United States to get serious about climate change is unforgivable, a human folly beyond imagining.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011700895.html?nav=hcmodule



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