Surging Seas

Climate Central has a new project, Surging Seas, an interactive map that shows the threat from sea level rise and storm surge to all 3,000+ coastal towns, cities, counties and states in the Lower 48 of the US. I don't know of a similar map for Canada. If you do, please leave a comment with the relevant info.

Here's a write up about the research behind the map from the Washington Post:

Nearly 4 million people across the United States, from Los Angeles to much of the East Coast, live in homes more prone to flooding from rising seas fueled by global warming, according to a new method of looking at flood risk published in two scientific papers.

The cities that have the most people living within three feet (one meter) of high tide — the projected sea level rise by the year 2100 made by many scientists and computer models — are in Florida, Louisiana, and New York. New York City, often not thought of as a city prone to flooding, has 141,000 people at risk, which is second only to New Orleans’ 284,000. The two big Southeast Florida counties, Miami-Dade and Broward, have 312,000 people at risk combined.

All told, 3.7 million people live in homes within three feet of high tide. More than 500 US cities have at least 10 percent of the population at increased risk, the studies said.

“Southeast Florida is definitely the highest density of population that’s really on low coastal land that’s really most at risk,” said lead author Ben Strauss, a scientist at Climate Central. Climate Central is a New Jersey-based group of scientists and journalists who do research about climate change.

The studies look at people who live in homes within three feet of high tide, whereas old studies looked just at elevation above sea level, according to work published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research and an accompanying report by Climate Central. That’s an important distinction because using high tide is more accurate for flooding impacts, said study co-author Jonathan Overpeck, a scientist at the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment. And when the new way of looking at risk is factored in, the outlook looks worse, Overpeck said.

“It’s shocking to see how large the impacts could be, particularly in southern Florida and Louisiana, but much of the coastal U.S. will share in the serious pain,” Overpeck said.

And it’s not just residents of coastal areas who will be hurt by this, said Sharlene Leurig, a senior manager for the insurance program at Ceres, a Boston-based investment network. Most coastal areas get flood insurance from the federal program and with more flooding, the program will have to spend more and that will come out of all taxpayers’ wallets, she said.

Sea level has already risen about 8 inches since 1880 because warmer waters expand, Strauss said. In addition to the basic physics of ever-warming water expanding, scientist say hotter climate will cause some melting of glaciers in Greenland and western Antarctica that would then cause seas to rise even more.
Flooding from Hurricane Irene last year illustrated how vulnerable coastal places such as Manhattan are with a combination of storms and sea level rise, Strauss said.

Using data from the latest census, Climate Central also has developed an interactive system that allows people to check their risk by entering a ZIP code.

Sea level rise experts at the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration who weren’t part of the studies said the results make sense and were done by experts in the field.
“All low elevation places in the many urban areas along the coast will become more vulnerable,” said S. Jeffress Williams, scientist emeritus for the USGS, who wasn’t part of the studies. He pointed to Boston, New York City, Norfolk, Va., New Orleans, Charleston, S.C., Miami and Washington and its Virginia suburbs. “More people and infrastructure will be at increasing risk of flooding.”

When The Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts

Here's a follow up to the previous post about climate change and war as threat multipliers; a link to a 2011 Webby nominated 16-minute video "When the Water Ends" produced by Yale Environment 360.

Here's a description of the video's content.

For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.

These herdsmen have long been accustomed to adapting to a changing environment. But in recent years, they have faced challenges unlike any in living memory: As temperatures in the region have risen and water supplies have dwindled, the pastoralists have had to range more widely in search of suitable water and land. That search has brought tribal groups in Ethiopia and Kenya in increasing conflict, as pastoral communities kill each other over water and grass.

“When the Water Ends” tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.” But the story recounted in “When the Water Ends” is not only about climate change. It’s also about how deforestation and land degradation — due in large part to population pressures — are exacting a toll on impoverished farmers and nomads as the earth grows ever more barren.

More Fracking News

A few days ago I noted the glee attending shale gas in the exploration community -- it's not just in North America, it's all over the world!!! To date, most of the controversy surrounding fracking -- the process used to release gas from shale formations -- has centered on water quality issues. No more.

A recent report by Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, concludes that the carbon footprint of unconventional gas production from shale is worse for the climate than burning coal. His analysis, to be published later this week in Climatic Change Letters, found that somewhere from 3.6 percent to 7.9 percent of methane, the chief component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas (72 times as potent as carbon dioxide according to IPCC), is leaking into the atmosphere at various points along the shale gas production life cycle. As the graph below shows, this makes natural gas from shale the least desirable fuel of the bunch, at least in terms of its impact on the climate.

Not surprisingly, given the stampede to shale gas in the industry, Howarth's report is being refuted in detail before it is even public. See, in particular, this discussion at Energy in Depth.

Additional information on the debate is available here.

Keith Kloor has also weighed in on the debate over at his Frontier Earth blog.

How Much Is Left? The Limits of Earth's Resources

The September issue of Scientific American (Scientific American 303, 74 - 81 2010
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0910-74) includes a graphically rich summary of information about the availability of natural resources and various other environmental matters. For those who don't have access to the magazine, there is also a interactive version (see below). While the information is the same, I didn't find the interface to be particularly user friendly. Yes .... the interactive version is right here. But, really, you might want to have a look at the good old print version (or its pdf cousin) :+) There are also a variety of related articles and web resources.



What's Left?Powered by Ergo:Ux

Hermaphroditic frogs, hip-hop science & corporate culture

In 1997 UC Berkley endocrinologist Tyrone Hayes was contracted by a subsidiary of Syngenta corporation to do research on the widely used agricultural chemical atrazine. Not surprisingly, the company wasn't pleased when Hayes concluded that the chemical might affect male reproductive development in frogs. Prevented by the terms of the contract from publishing the results, Hayes waited for the contract to expire, repeated an expanded version of the research he had done under contract and published the results. Thus began what has become a decade long battle between Hayes and Syngenta.

Hayes, who has always admitted to wearing two hats -- that of objective scientist and that of impassioned activist -- has long been recognized as a character. As in the clip below, he frequently peppers his academic talks with a rap delivery.



It turns out, however, that his hip-hop style has a bit of a gangsta flavor. For years Hayes has been sending rap emails with what is being described as lewd and inappropriate comments to various Syngenta employees. Now, in an attempt to discredit Hayes and his research, Syngenta has released the documents and actively worked to construct an ethical controversy.

Atrazine has been banned in the EU and, with the EPA re-re-restudying its allow-ability in the US, Syngenta seems to have shot off both barrels; attacking both Hayes and his research. It seems that the blood sport of American politics is beginning to affect its science as well.

For those interested in more, a brief clip of an academic talk by Hayes is below and here are links to the legal complaint against Hayes, the emails he sent, articles questioning the ethics of his actions in Nature and Science, and an article outlining the early history of the relationship between Hayes and Syngenta (which dates back to 1997) can be found here.

The Sociology of Resilience: Panarchy and Post-Katrina

Our planet is faced with an array of ecological crises—in particular, peak oil, climate change, and fresh water scarcity. Scientists have begun in earnest to examine the impacts of these crises on natural and social systems, and how these systems respond. The ability of a system to respond to and survive crisis has come to be known as “resilience.” There are many theories of resilience, but one that has attained great influence recently is the resilience theory of Canadian ecologist Buzz Holling and his coauthor, Lance Gunderson. Resilience theory is part of their monumental work on cycles of transformation in natural systems called Panarchy. Their theory of resilience was developed out of detailed research on the life cycles of forests (including New Brusnwick) and other ecosystems. In Panarchy, they attempt to apply these theories of transformation and resilience to human social systems, in particular, the ability of social systems to respond to environmental crises.

My early study of this work raised questions for me as a social scientist. In the course of their research, Holling and Gunderson had to admit that human social systems were different from natural systems; social systems didn’t neatly fit the model. So they developed a set of “exceptional conditions” for social systems to explain how human systems responded differently. But what I found particularly troublesome was that their theory of resilience seemed to be completely antithetical to the way we experience the human condition. Panarchy’s theory of resilience states that in third stage of transformation, the ecosystem breaks down, collapses, and in the process, releases all the biological “wealth” that was stored during the “wealth-building” and “conservation” (first and second) stages. During the collapse stage, the system’s raw materials, nutrients and species are freed from their former links to the ecosystem. According to Panarchy, it is in the collapse stage that the system obtains its maximum resilience to ecological crises. In the final stage, the materials and species released by collapse can be recombined, new niches are built, and new species, formerly suppressed under the old system, can become the new dominant species.

I found this concept of resilience a little troubling, especially when applied to human social systems. I immediately thought of Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the greatest ecological catastrophe in U.S. history. It was an ecological catastrophe, not just an environmental one, because it was caused by the combined forces and failures of both the natural system (climate change, hurricanes), and the human systems (systemic poverty, racism and a lack of preparedness to respond to disaster). To this day I can still remember the horror of seeing poor people of color drowning in the floods, stranded on roof-tops, imprisoned in hellish conditions in the Superdome, thirsty, hungry, searching for their families, for clean water, food, and a way out. To this day, I can still see the images of families walking down abandoned highways, carrying their few belongings, walking, walking toward they didn’t know where, trying to find a safe place to rest.

I had to ask myself, “is this maximum resilience?” Here you have a perfect test-case: complete collapse of both the natural and human social systems, and yet they these people did not seem to be “resilient” in the sense of "surviving.” More than 1400 people died in the storm. Half a million people left New Orleans and the affected Gulf region, the largest migration in U.S. history. Two years after the hurricane, only one-third of the City's population returned or remained in the area.(1.) Most of the evacuees never returned, and were forced to find homes in other cities and states. Not much is known about the fate of people who were forced to leave and resettle elsewhere, but one thing is certain: they left with little more than the clothes on their backs. Poor, traumatized, unemployed, bereft of connections and support from their former communities, how did they possess the resilience necessary to rebuild their lives? How is it possible that they would eventually be better off than before the crisis? Is this resilience?

These are the questions and concerns that led me to conduct research on the concept of resilience. I am not trying to discredit or debunk Hollings and Gunderson's theory, or Panarchy, because I think there is much in the theory that does work and is highly applicable to human social systems. But there also remains much in the theory that needs to be tested against the realities of the human condition. Human social systems are different from natural ecosystems, and thus we need to develop a sociological theory of resilience that accounts for that difference. And certainly I hope that research into the resilience of human social systems will yield knowledge and strategies that will help us face the many ecological crises ahead.

1. Source: NARAYAN SASTRY: Tracing the Effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Population of New Orleans: The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2007/RAND_WR483.pdf