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Collapsing Rainforest Ecosystems

October 30, 2018

Collapsing Rainforest Ecosystems

Photo Source A.Davey | CC BY 2.0

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report on the status of arthropods in rainforests (Bradford C. Lister and Andres Garcia, Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1722477115).

The report’s shocking analysis discovered a collapsing food web in tropical rainforests. Oh please! Can ecological news get any worse than this?

Biologists Brad Lister and Andres Garcia of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México returned to Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Rainforest after 40 years, and what they found blew them away. The abundance of insects, and arthropods in general, declined by as much as 60-fold and average temps had risen by 2°C over the past four decades. According to the scientists, global warming is impacting the rainforest with distinctive gusto.

According to Lister: “It was just a collapse in the insect community. A really dramatic change… The insect populations in the Luquillo forest are crashing.” (Source: Climate-Driven Crash in a Rainforest Food Web, Every Day Matters, Oct. 22, 2018).

It doesn’t get much worse than “crashing” of ecosystem support systems, i.e., insects and arthropods in general, which are in the phylum Euarthropoda, inclusive of insects, arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans. This equates to a loss of basic structures of biosphere life forces.

The research team believes they are already seeing today what the recent IPCC report predicted for climate change in 2040. In their words: “It’s a harbinger of a global unraveling of natural systems.”

“The central question addressed by our research is why simultaneous, long-term declines in arthropods, lizards, frogs, and birds have occurred over the past four decades in the relatively undisturbed rainforests of northeastern Puerto Rico.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

In-depth: the scientific challenge of extreme weather attribution

March 16, 2016

In-depth: the scientific challenge of extreme weather attribution

Lightning strikes across the deserts skies near Stateline NV

© Gene Blevins/LA Daily News

Working out whether human activity is supercharging extreme events, such as floods, storms, droughts and heatwaves, is one of the youngest branches of climate science. But it’s moving at breakneck pace.

So much so, that the US National Academy of Sciences has fast-tracked a report, published today, taking stock of the science and where it’s heading.

Event attribution is the field of science that asks if extreme weather around the world would look any different if we could replay the last 200 years or so, without human-caused greenhouse gases.

Today’s report is an overview, rather than a showcase for new results. And at about 150 pages long, it’s not a light read. But its weightiness is apt for a topic that has come to underpin climate conversations everywhere from flooding in the UK to climate change adaptation.

Carbon Brief has been speaking to key scientists in the world of attribution about how far the science has come, experimenting with communicating the nuances, and the thorny issue of making results public at lightning speed, often before peer review.

One thing is for sure, Dr Heidi Cullen, chief scientist at Climate Central and a contributor to today’s report, tells Carbon Brief:

“The days of saying no single weather event can be linked to climate change are over. For many extreme weather events, the link is now strong.”

‘A universal talking point’

Storms, droughts, heavy rain, heatwaves and other extreme weather events are of huge interest to society because of their often disastrous consequences for people and property.

As Prof Ted Shepherd, professor of climate science at the University of Reading in the UK, explains in a recent commentary in the journal Current Climate Change Reports:

“Just as weather is a topic of daily conversation, extreme weather events…provide a universal talking point.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Power Kills: the Real Reason the NRC Canceled It’s Nuclear Site Cancer Study

September 22, 2015

Nuclear Power Kills: the Real Reason the NRC Canceled It’s Nuclear Site Cancer Study

diablocanyon

Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.

After spending some $1.5 million and more than five years on developing strategies to answer the question of increases of cancer near nuclear facilities, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last week reported that they would not continue with the process. They would knock it on the head [1].

This poisoned chalice has been passed between the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the NRC since 2009 when public and political pressure was brought to bear on the USNRC to update a 1990 study of the issue, a study which was widely seen by the public to be a whitewash.

The NCR quickly passed the unwelcome task up to the NAS. It requested that the NAS provide an assessment of cancer risks in populations living ‘near’ the NRC-licenced nuclear facilities that utilize and process Uranium. This included 104 operating nuclear reactors in 31 States and 13 fuel cycle facilities in operation in 10 States.

The NRC request was to be carried out by NAS in two phases. Phase 1 was a scoping study to inform design of the study to be begun in Phase 2 and to recommend the best organisation to carry out the work.

The Phase 1 report was finished in May 2012. The best ‘state of the art’ methods were listed and the job of carrying out the actual study, a pilot study, was sent to: Guess who? The NRC. The poisoned chalice was back home. The NRC was now in a corner: what could they do?

If you don’t like the truth … suppress it

The committee sat for three years thinking about this during which time more and more evidence emerged that if it actually carried out the pilot study, it would find something bad. It had to escape. It did. It cancelled it. The reason given was that it would cost $8 million just to do the pilot study of cancer near the seven sites NAS had selected in its 600 page Phase 1 report. [2]

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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