Already 80% of the world’s maple syrup is produced in Quebec and by 2100, global climate change may have driven the range of the sugar maple out of the United States altogether. This video features New Hampshire maple sugar producer Martha Carlson, who is also a Ph.D. student at University of New Hampshire researching the impact of global climate change on sugar maples.
This map shows the increase over the average temperature across the United States for the month of December 2011. According to the Blue Hill Observatory, last month was the second-warmest on record for the Boston area, and 2011 the fifth-warmest year overall.
NOAA says that we are in the midst of a La Niña cycle, but sort of a weak one. La Niña weather usually means more snow for us, but the predictions indicate that the Northeast will be spared a repeat of last year’s string of blizzards.
And now over to Chet with the sports!
The map above shows the parts of the Northeast Atlantic that are the primary bottom-fishing areas (map via NEAFC.org). This Fast Company article reports that in addition to the drastic declines in fish stocks due to overfishing, climate change is having a dramatic effect on stocks as well, although not entirely a negative one. The warming of the ocean has led to an increase in populations of fish species that prefer warmer water, such as hake and dab, even as cold-water species such as cod and haddock have plummeted. The spread of warmer water has also led the warm-water fish into areas where they were not previously found, meaning that Scandinavian fish production might actually increase. Cod and haddock stocks have seen some small improvements in the last few years due to intense regulation of fishing, but the climate changes are likely to mitigate any significant increase.
The Top Ten Hottest Years Since Meteorological Records Have Been Kept:
Noticing a trend? No? Maybe this NY Times infographic might help:
The first six months of 2010 have already cinched this year taking the #1 spot on this list.
You might like the NYT article that graph came from. It’s actually about how Congress and the Obama Administration are avoiding bringing up the climate bill that desperately needs passing. This Orion Magazine article by author Bill McKibben is even a little more pointed.
And for the denialists among you, a different Top Ten List: Ten Key Indicators That Global Warming is Undeniable. Stick that in your teabag and drink it.
For the last couple of weeks, our weather here in Eastern Massachusetts has veered back and forth between temperatures in the 50s and the 80s, sometimes even on the same day. Back in March, we were hit with a trio of huge rain storms that caused “100-year” flooding, but which would have been paralyzing blizzards had the traditional colder temperatures of that time of year been in effect. Those of us who suffer from tree pollen allergies can attest that allergy season this year started early and has gone hard.
But, of course, as the Republicans of Maine point out, global climate change is nothing but a conspiracy of government and big business.
This article in The Economist by John Parker considers the blurring of the transitions between the four seasons as the entire globe gets and stays warmer and how it shows itself especially in the tropical climates, where seasonal variation was even more pronounced than here in the north and is felt even more strongly in its disruption of natural cycles in agriculture and among the flora and fauna.
You may know the factoid that New York City and Rome sit at approximately the same latitude (40° N for New York, 41° N for Rome), yet Rome’s climate is warm year-round, while New York’s is temperate, and that this is the effect of the Gulf Stream, which is the primary engine that keeps Europe from turning into one big glacier. You may also know that one of the favorite doomsday bugaboos of panic-mongers everywhere is that the Gulf Stream is in danger of simply stopping at any moment, plunging the world into calamity. There was even a cheesy disaster movie about this scenario a few years ago.
Now, according to this BBC story, scientists have collected enough data to determine that there’s no apparent slowing down of the Gulf Stream whatsoever. Data collected over the last decade or so shows only minor seasonal variations and not any pattern of significant slowdown of the current, but scientists are a bit surprised at just how much variability they do see.
But don’t despair, there’s still that giant rock shear tidal wave that is sure to kill us all any day now.
More link dumpage:
MSNBC reports that the Discovery Channel says it has remastered all of the NASA film footage from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space flights in high-definition video, and that NASA will make the videos available to the public for free at its archives. The story doesn’t say whether that includes online access, but the films have been incorporated into a six-hour series that will run on the Discovery Channel in June, so get your TiVo ready.
Contrary to popular belief, people do not use only 10% of their brains (unless, of course, they are Republicans). PsyBlog, a British blog about topics in psychology, offers this list of Top Ten Brain Myths that most of us have at one time or another heard and/or accepted as fact. You might be surprised at one or two of them.
eSkeptic, the website of Skeptic Magazine, has this feature article from environmental engineering expert Dr. Tapio Schneider entitled “How We Know Global Warming Is Real”. Recommend this to your disbelieving right-wing friends and associates, but don’t expect them to pay much attention because it includes things like facts and figures that most of them think are “pretend”.
Concerned about the proliferation of RFID tags in everything from passports to grocery packaging? I am. Luckily, the always-enterprising folks at Instructables.com have devised a fool-proof method for neutralizing RFID tags: smash them with a hammer. It causes the least-visible cosmetic damage to those flat RFIDs that are in your passport or on your credit card, so that The Man won’t tase you, bro when he thinks you’ve tampered with it.
Geeks everywhere are limbering up their salivary glands for the expected release of the 3G iPhone in June, but the suits at Research In Motion (R.I.M.), which makes the Blackberry (the favorite toy of gadget-head biz-wizzes everywhere), are none too pleased. This NYT article from a couple of weeks ago explains how Steverino has decided to aim for the enterprise market, and how his Reality Distortion Field may be strong enough to push the Crackberry out of the briefcase of every road warrior in America.
Lastly, joe of the eponymous bookofjoe.com tells us that those crazy youngsters have figured out another totally cool thing you can do with Google Maps and “smart mobs”: find stolen cars faster than Lojack.
Last weekend, The Presumptive Nominee made more than a few waves by saying that there was a link between childhood vaccines and autism, even though research has shown that there is no link. In fact, recent research suggests genetic causes and heightened awareness resulting in better diagnoses. But, then, Republicans seem to have a very different idea about scientific research in the first place.
Emboldened by their battle-scarred Champion, right-wingers everywhere have decided to go public with their bizarro world scenarios. The Wall Street Journal told us yesterday not to worry about “Peak Oil” and climbing petroleum prices, there’s plenty of oil to go around.
The Drudge Report wants you to know that global warming is just a myth — he links this article which claims that the colder-than-usual January temperatures “wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years” (though I will note that the author of this article says DailyTech.com has erroneously interpreted the data).
And Discover Magazine doesn’t want you to think you should be one iota less terrified of the H5N1 virus just because hardly anybody has died of it after three years of dire warnings.
In related news, Paris Hilton just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and green monkeys are flying out of my butt!
Methane hydrates are a sort of "frozen" version of methane gas that gets trapped mainly along coastlines (and also in permafrost). Apparently vast deposits of methane hydrate (also called "methane claths") are to be found along the coasts of China and India, and both countries are very eager to exploit the resource to meet their increasing energy demands. There are also substantial deposits along both coasts of North America, which could reduce the U.S.’s reliance on imported natural gas and meet its increasing demand as well.
There are several significant issues, though, that need to be addressed. One significant concern is that as global warming increases, the methane could be released through natural processes at such a high concentration as to accelerate the warming trend to a point that would be nearly impossible for people and animals to adapt to. The methane would rise to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, so it’s not that the air would become unbreathable, but rather that the heat-trapping potential of methane is so much higher than carbon dioxide that we might all roast to death in a few short years. There’s also the concern that human efforts to extract the methane would destabilize the large deposits and also cause the same result. But even if the methane doesn’t escape directly, the emissions from burning the methane would also have a significant impact on warming, contributing more CO2 to the air.
The Chinese in particular do not want to hear these warnings, as they stand to reap tremendous short-term benefits from extracting the methane for their own use, and so plans are already underway to begin such operations. That Der Spiegel link talks about a German firm that has designed a way to extract the methane by pumping carbon dioxide into the lattices; the "ice" can absorb even more CO2 than methane, ironically, but then if that "ice" melts from increased climatic warming, all that carbon dioxide gets released, too. Either way, it seems to have waaaay too much risk.
Yes, you can buy tomatoes in the supermarket in January, or any other month of the year, but what you get isn’t much of a tomato. That’s because it comes from who-knows-where, having been picked while green and hard as a rock, then sprayed with ethylene gas to make it turn red in color, even though it’s nowhere near ripe. Then it’s shipped half-way around the world to food wholesalers, who sell the produce to your supermarkets, having first sold all the better-quality stuff to high-end greengrocers and restaurants.
That’s all going to come to an end within the next twenty years or so, as Al Gore’s inconvenient truths come home to roost. The spectacle of the supermarket produce section will simply evaporate as it becomes prohibitively expensive to manage perishable foods the way we have for the last 60-75 years or so. We’ll be back to buying tomatoes only in season, in vastly reduced quantities, and probably only from very local sources. Which, quite honestly, is not entirely a bad thing when you think about it. The unfortunate part is that those of us who have learned to enjoy fresh foods that simply can’t be produced in a given geography will have to unlearn those tastes or else secure significant fortunes to be able to buy them.
Of course, most of us already have access to farm stands and other local growers, and anyone who knows better already takes advantage of those opportunities to enjoy locally-grown fresh foods. As we are forced to shift back to relying on those providers, though, they won’t be entirely able to meet the demand. Nor is everyone likely to chuck their jobs and go back to being farmers themselves. So this is a good time to be finding a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program near you. CSAs range in scope from community gardens to whole farms and produce all sorts of food, keeping some for personal use and selling some in the marketplace. Many urban dwellers in the Boston area already take advantage of CSAs to get fresh local produce, but the time has come for public awareness about CSAs to grown exponentially and for people to begin thinking about where their food is going to come from a few years down the line. The Local Harvest website linked previously has this locator page that can help you find a CSA in your area. Many CSAs are already popular and you sometimes have to sign up well before spring if you want to be able to get the produce, so this is a good time to have a look if you’re at all interested.
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