Hurricane Irma, warm oceans, and expanding the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale

Back in 2011, I wrote about the current five-category hurricane system that the US uses (known as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale), noting that the foundational logic of the scale was based on structural engineering questions:

a former NOAA hurricane center administrator and co-inventor of the SSHS that, "there is no reason for a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale because it is designed to measure the potential damage of a hurricane to manmade structures. If the wind speed of the hurricane is above 155 mph (249 km/h), then the damage to a building will be 'serious no matter how well it's engineered'."

The current scale tops out at a "Category 5," which is any sustained wind speed above 155 mph. However, if one uses the threshold values for Categories 1 through 5 to develop a regression equation, it is possible to extend this relationship ever outward. Specifically, a revised category scale would be something like this:

Category 1: <95mph
Category 2: 96-110mph
Category 3: 111-130mph
Category 4: 131-150mph
Category 5: 151-175mph
Category 6: 176-205mph
Category 7: 206-235mph

Back in 2011, Hurricane Camille had sustained wind speeds of 175 mph, which is what prompted me to write that post. Currently, Hurricane Irma is reported as having sustained wind speeds of 185 mph, making it the strongest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. However, based on the current hurricane scale, both Camille and Irma are classified as Category 5, even though Irma is obviously far stronger than Camille (which was - itself - a massive hurricane).

Indeed, the current system is fundamentally limited and fundamentally limiting, since one loses any sense of comparative scale once you enter "Category 5." And what would it hurt to look at adding a "Category 6," especially if warming waters are known to lead to stronger and more sustained hurricanes? Indeed, with warming oceans, hurricanes that will reach sustained wind speeds between 175 and 205 mph will not be theoretical. Indeed, Hurricane Irma is proof-positive that such hurricanes can and will form.

But so what? Why would that matter?

Well, in the US, the SSHS is a widely known and used shorthand for hurricane strength. It's something that people latch on to when discussing preparedness measures and when making comparisons against past events. But if the maximum scale is effectively open-ended, the designation "Category 5" will be shared by a hurricane with wind speeds of 155 mph and another with winds speeds of 185 mph (like Hurricane Irma). And the simple fact is that wind speeds of 185 mph are fundamentally different than wind speeds of 155 mph, and placing both in the same open-ended category will not help with making short-hand comparisons that would be equivalent to comparing a Category 4 hurricane against a Category 3 hurricane.

The way we categorize natural phenomena is important, since it structures the way that we view and respond to the world, and if we continue to use a hurricane classification system whose comparative utility declines into a future that is expected to have stronger hurricanes, that can impact the type of public response given to future storms.

Super-typhoon Soudelor and a need for new hurricane & typhoon metrics

Super typhoon Soudelor is hitting sustained wind speeds of up to 178 miles per hour! That totally blows the Beaufort scale out of the water, and also leaves the Saffir-Simpson scale well behind, too.

There are two reasons why these scales are not too useful:

1. They all have maximum values,
2. The maximum values are tied with technologically based assumptions and purposes.

The Beaufort scale maxes out at "Hurricane force" winds that are anything of 72.9 mph or greater, and this maximum was set based on the technological limitations of shipping, for which the scale was developed. The idea was that anything greater than a category 12 was effectively as dangerous to ships as the winds at 72.9 mph, and so there was no reason for ship captains to worry about categories larger than 12.

The Saffir-Simpson scale maxes out at "Category 5 hurricane" winds that are anything of 157 mph or greater, and this maximum was set based on the technological limitations of building construction in the 1950s US. The idea was that anything greater than a Category 5 was effectively going to blow apart any building, and so there was no reason for having higher categories (despite an increasing number of buildings with the capacity to withstand 157mph and higher winds).

It's that "or greater" part that really is troubling to me. Why? Because it means that a hurricane with sustained winds of 157 mph is classified as a "Category 5" hurricane... right along with a super typhoon like Soudelor, which is reaching wind speeds of almost 180 mph.

Back in 2011, I noted that the scale for the Saffir-Simpson scale was somewhat linear, up to Category 5; but if we took that linear scale and extended it, we would be able to include a Category 6 (and even Category 7) type of storm:

Category 1: <95mph
Category 2: 96-110mph
Category 3: 111-130mph
Category 4: 131-150mph
Category 5: 151-175mph
Category 6: 176-205mph
Category 7: 206-235mph

Under this extended classification, Super typhoon Soudelor is a Category 6; one of only a few in recorded history, but potentially one of a growing number in a future with global warming.

Similarly, the Beaufort scale can be extended beyond the category 12. The Beaufort Scale progresses along an x-squared rate (Excel comes up with the equation: y = 0.4952x^2 + 5.2857x + 0.0382), giving us:

Beaufort Number
0: <7mph
1: 0.8-3.4mph
2: 3.5-7.4mph
3: 7.5-12.2mph
4: 12.3-17.8mph
5: 17.9-24.1mph
6: 24.2-31.0mph
7: 31.1-38.4mph
8: 38.5-46.4mph
9: 46.5-54.7mph
10: 54.8-63.6mph

11: 63.7-72.9mph
12: 73.0-83.7mph
13: 83.8-94.7mph
14: 94.8-106.3mph
15: 106.4-118.5mph
16: 118.6-131.3mph
17: 131.4-144.8mph
18: 144.9-158.8mph
19: 158.9-173.5mph
20: 173.6-188.8mph

Under this classification, Super typhoon Soudelor has a Beaufort number of 20! This is very different from just classifying it as a 12, solely because 12 arbitrarily is the largest value on the Beaufort scale.


Why worry?
Back in 2011, I wrote up a short extension of a 2005 paper in Nature, that indicated that the total number of hurricanes has been remaining the same, but that the strength of the hurricanes has been growing stronger. This means that there are a lower number of Category 1, 2, and 3 hurricanes now than in the past, but the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has increased:

What is being measured here is storm intensity by proxy of hurricane Category. However, such a measure will not show the entire picture if Category 5 remains anything over 157mph, since this open-ended category definition would mask the rising intensity of hurricanes that is shown in the graph.

While this might seem an academic point, another way to think about this is to ask why the Richter scale doesn't have a maximum value? After all, if the Saffir-Simpson scale was built around the idea that structures wouldn't be able to sustain a force of a Category 5 hurricane, then why shouldn't the Richter scale max out at 7.0? And if the idea that the Richter scale should max out at an arbitrary number (like 7.0) sounds ludicrous, then why accept the idea that Category 5 in Saffir-Simpson (and Category 12 in Beaufort) are the maximum of the scale?

Especially in a future where the numbers of increasingly intensive hurricanes is only going to increase as the numbers of "lesser" hurricanes decrease?

Ruminations on miscegenation

Recently, there was a Heritage Foundation study that a liberalized immigration policy would cost the United States $6.3 trillion. The Colbert Report did a good job of explaining why the context of the Heritage Foundation's report is just ... huh?

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

Over at The Dish, Andrew Sullivan started up a series of posts - "Is Race Only A Social Construct?", and the posts (in usual Sullivan style) have been thought-provoking.

In the most recent installment - "Racists Love Race Science" - Sullivan concludes the post with this:

I cannot analyze myself – but I’m sure I am affected by my history on this. One part, as I’ve written before, is that my entire education was made possible by an IQ test at age eleven, which gave me entrance to what Americans would call a magnet school. I owe a lot to that test – and it was initiated by the left. Today’s liberals forget that testing IQ was once a leftwing idea. It was designed to rescue the poor from the trap of poverty by giving bright kids from poor backgrounds a swift entry to the British elite. That was the left of the 1940s – and you can look up Keynes and eugenics for further insight into how socialist this idea was in origin. Another part was, indeed, the reaction to my convening a debate on “The Bell Curve” at TNR, in the best-selling issue in that magazine’s history. I saw how some liberals really do not believe in free debate where race is concerned.

But I do not believe that critics of the whole project are fueled by groupthink or emotion alone. There’s a very solid case against race as anything meaningful in our culture, and an even stronger case that in the process of constant miscegenation, we are rendering the whole idea of race moot. I sure hope so. There’s also a strong argument that IQ is of extremely limited use – and, in fact, misses a whole range of intelligences that are often more important to our lives and cultures as humans.

I just refuse to wish the data away. The data shocked me when I first read it, and shocks me still.

As a person who grew up - like Sullivan - in a cultural milieu different from the United States, the structures of "race" were rather puzzling to me when I found myself "back" in the US in 1999. The subsequent fourteen years have given me perspective on the issue, but it continues to remain somewhat of a "foreign" perspective than my own, and I find that I don't have as strong or as deep a sense of (the American construction of) race. However, I do fully recognize that I am the product of miscegenation: a White parent and an Asian parent, and I see no problem with that.

I also sense that there is - in my generation and the ones following mine - less knee-jerk animosity or revulsion to the idea of being mixed-race. After all, it's not my "fault" that my parents didn't live up to someone else's idea about racial purity; I can't change my racial past anymore than anyone else. Being mixed race is - therefore - a moot point when it comes to the concepts of racial purity. I didn't ask to be born this way; I'm not asking to be different; if you can't deal with it, tough cookies.

Of course, the increasing presence of mixed-race (aka "hapa") people - I hope - seriously call into question the very concept of miscegenation, since it presumes that there are distinctions of race that can be made in the first place. However, if I'm half-Asian/half-White, and I get married to a halfie, then are my wife and I engaging in miscegenation, too? In an absolutist sense, the answer is yes: mixed-race individuals who procreate with mixed-race individuals are - by definition - mixing races. However, in the social contexts in which the term is used, the answer is far murkier.

The history of the term "miscegenation" revolves around ideas of racial identity and racial purity. Indeed, it is a relatively recent word, being coined in the US in 1863, in a pamphlet entitled "Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro", as part of a political hoax to discredit Lincoln and his party by ascribing ideas of mixing the races (only seen as "white" and "negro" at the time; never mind that there were Asians and Native Americans around), which was seen by many Whites as disgusting. This animus of disgust - along with the associated idea of maintaining racial purity - has continued to be associated with the term. Indeed, even after the Civil War, there were laws made to make miscegenation illegal in certain states, and these were maintained through almost 100 years, until the SCOTUS decision in Loving v Virginia. Even after, though, the social taboo of miscegenation continued.

However, for my generation and for those following me, the idea that you could marry someone you love and want to spend your life with is not so strange, even if it means marrying outside your "race" or social class (or both). Of course, there are still some hold-outs (especially among the social conservatives), and a "good" example of this was the reaction among mostly White, mostly conservative, mostly Republican supporters of John Boehner to the marriage of his daughter to a black Jamaican who sported a respectable mane of dreadlocks. To say that the responses from the conservative base were all happy felicitations for the newlywed couple (i.e., the standard, polite, and well-meaning response) would be missing the mark. Indeed the Daily Mail had to stop any further commenting and expunged the existing comments. However, over at the New York Daily News, the comments by these readers were FAR from generous. Looking at the first dozen, we get a few prominently racist comments (and more were found throughout the comments section):

Michelle837 days ago
so many beautiful women ending up with human vomit on legs these days...

norman west7 days ago
she is just another white woman who went black except for who her father is.....she did this to hurt someone....most probably herself....she loathes who she is and despises her life and lifestyle....this is a real psycho that is laying a trip on her family and laying this nap head....with a 14 inch pipe for certain.......

HoChin7 days ago
Dominic doesn't look like he has a whit of education I bet the bride puffs the pipe as well.

Jon Player7 days ago
Boehner is actually darker than him lol

Based on the tone of these comments, it's pretty clear (to me) that they were fueled by anti-miscegenation, racial purity, and social maintenance sentiments. But what about their future children (presuming that they have any)? What sense does the idea of "racial purity" have when you are not at all "pure" and see no problem with it? What happens when more and more Americans are less and less "pure"? The number of mixed-race individuals in the US is growing; according to the US Census Bureau, it grew by three-and-a-half times in the last decade, and in some places - especially in West-Coast cities (and Hawaii), mixed-race Americans make up significant portions of the population.

... so what will "racial politics" look like among a group of people who aren't a single race? Will social pressures (either overt or covert) pressure mixed race citizens to "choose sides" in the dirty politics of racial hatred and bigotry? Will a refusal to do so mean that we are left out completely? Will it be possible to create a "we-don't-care-about-your-single-race-politics" bloc that tries to move thing away from (at minimum) a discussion of "race-is-white-and-black-only" into the realm of increased nuance and understanding that will become our future?

Furthermore, what will "miscegenation" mean to groups of children for whom mixed-race is the norm? When the population of mixed-race individuals tops 50%, will "racially pure" families become the ones who are strange and unnatural? Will there be pressures going the other way; to push more-pure people to meet, date, and marry more-pure people from another mixed-race grouping? Or will people just stop caring about using race as a predominant way to group people? After all, into what stereotypical race-based category would you a "1/2 filipino, 1/2 scottish/german/english" young girl, a "hawaiian, chinese, english, irish, puerto rican" woman, a "half white (irish/german/swedish/italian), half asian (cambodian/thai/chinese)" little boy, a chinese, english, irish, and fijian man, or any person like me and those on the Hapa Project?

Cool website: Sustainable China

I just came across the Sustainable China website today. While the title of the site may - for people like me - evoke images of ecosystem sustainability, of industrial sustainability, or of economic sustainability and the dystopic landscape that we (in natural resource management) often hear about, this site is actually filled with issues regarding how Chinese people in different regions of mainland China and Taiwan are associating themselves with ideas of sustainability. In other words, instead of doom-and-gloom reporting about the terrible smog in Beijing (or dead pigs floating through Shanghai, algae growth choking bays, mine tailings poisoning the waters of countless villages, day-long traffic jams, drying rivers, etc., etc.), this blog talks about how local and regional culture shapes how people interact with their landscape.

The most recent story -

green spirituality and the limits to modernityhttp://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/06/26/green-spirituality-limits-modernity/

- ties the sustainability mission to the rise and return of spirituality in the country:

In China, the quest for a sustainable future is mirrored in the “back to the future” rise of religions. For sure this is a complex phenomenon: people pray to the gods for wealth and happiness, not for a lower ecological footprint. But at the same time, Chinese religions send messages about reducing desire, non-violence to living beings, harmony with nature, and the value of balance and moderation.

In another story - religious diversity and ecological sustainability - the author posts his defense of why we - outside China - need to change our view of what a modern China is and how a modern China thinks of itself:

it is necessary to resist the simplistic construction of “New China” as exclusively “secular”, “modern”, or “materialistic.” The resurgence of religious expression in contemporary China, the attention paid to minority nationalities throughout China’s diverse environmental contexts, and the resuscitation of Confucius as supreme icon of Chinese culture together compel us to pay attention to the cultural and religious diversity of contemporary China. Doing so leads us to question the binary taxonomies of tradition / modernity, sacred / secular, rural / urban, religion / science that inform the ideology of mo- dernity, and to pay particular attention to the way their attendant ideologies and narratives serve to construct and authorize particular views of nature and environment.

I have to say that this sort of website is really useful in helping non-native scholars and activists for sustainability understand how to think of the China/Taiwan region and its people. One mantra for (ecological) sustainability is, "Think globally, act locally," and one of the most important parts of being able to accomplish the second part is to divest yourself of your previous assumptions (especially in a rapidly changing part of the world) and invest strongly in information that best informs you about the root causes and motivations of the people that you are trying to reach.

I have, myself, been interested in trying to learn what the social and personal motivations are for people entering the area of natural resource conservation. We aren't all hippy tree-huggers and we aren't also all hunters and fishers (nor do we all get along). Our personal stories are all different, but I imagine that most US citizens likely share some similar themes. Getting to those themes - especially as we move further from the environmental movement of the 1970s, when the major themes of environmentalism in the US emerged - is going to be important in maintaining relevance in natural resource conservation efforts within the US; the activists of Earth Day 1970 are (if they are still alive) 43 years older now, and their university-age counterparts were born as much as 25 years after that first Earth Day. Understanding how to connect and keep relevant the message of environmentalism and (now) sustainability will require connecting it to robust existing social structures, and I believe this is already happening.

However, that is merely "acting locally" within the context of the United States. In an increasingly globalized world that is increasingly less willing to just take social policy that we foist upon them, and one that is moving ever faster toward inescapable effects of climate change, an important aspect of creating "buy-in" to the ideas of sustainability is to learn what the cultural resonances are between the goals of sustainability and already existing social institutions. Scholars like James Miller are doing this work in China and Taiwan. Similarly motivated scholars are working on this question in various parts of the world, too.

... and I think that it's a good thing that they're doing.

Getting Rid of Only the Penny vs. All "Cents"

Canada recently stopped issuing pennies, and likely will phase out accepting pennies. Last year, I wrote about why pennies might be a good thing to get rid of in the US, too. Recently, an episode on the BBC World Service made me wonder when all "cent" coins should be gotten rid of. They were asking people what the smallest denomination coin they used to buy something was, and this was immediately after being made aware of the fact that the Zimbabwean 5 cent coin was next to useless and rarely (if ever) encountered, but that the 20 cent could still be used to buy "a bunch of spinach" at the market.

This reminded me of the Hungarian filler. When I moved to Hungary in 1994, there were still fillers used in circulation, but even at that time inflation made them next to useless as a means of transaction. Sure, you might find something that would give change in filler, but you generally had to go well out of Budapest to find a place like that. In my case, I ended up with a small tin filled with tin fillers. (Pun intended.) I remember there being a 50 filler, a 20 filler, and the really occasional 10 filler. (The 2 filler and 5 filler had already been discontinued in 1992, two years before I moved to Budapest, and the 1 filler was never even used after 1939.) What got rid of the filler? The answer is the same as what has effectively done away with the Zimbabwean 5 cent piece and the Canadian penny: inflation.

However, unlike Zimbabwe and Canada, Hungary got rid of the entirety of its decimal coinage. After 1999, the Forint no longer had any decimalized coinage, and the idea of 1/2 Forint - something that was real and actually meant something in the mid-1990s suddenly (in 1999) no longer meant anything at all. This quick trip down memory lane brought me to realize that the same thing happened to Japan after World War II (both times characterized by hyperinflation). I remember my mother showing me a box of old coins from before World War II, complete with sen coins intermixed with yen bills of 500 yen and less.

Good luck finding sen coins today (or even many Japanese who even remember them). And the loss is no longer felt as a tragic one or even an economic one. Indeed, the Japanese may well be considering the value of continuing with 1 yen coins...

Of course, all of this could be done away with if we moved to a completely digitalized currency system. In a completely digital currency system, the somewhat arbitrary nature of being limited to only 100 cents would go away. Why let gas stations get away with always taking 0.9 cents for every gallon they sell? at $X.999? Why let banks pocket the remainder of the interest that has accrued (but remains) below 1 cent? Why let companies keep all the less-than-one-cent portions of salaries? Why allow the government(s) to collect on all the taxes below 1 cent?

Why? Why? Why?

Is it because we don't think of the value of money less than 1 cent to be worth out consideration? If that's true, then why worry about the value of money less than 5 cents or less than 10 cents? After all, almost nothing can be had in much of today's United States at a value of 9 cents or less. And if you're going to make the argument that we should keep the penny, you are effectively also making an argument for giving away all money accrued at values less than that penny. (Or maybe you're just making an argument from emotional, nostalgic, hamburgers-used-to-cost-a-nickel days of the childhoods of people born in the 1940s.)

12/12/12 1212: A good opportunity to look at date/time notation

This is the last day for another 88 years and 20 days until we will get to the next DD/MM/YY combination that will be all the same (i.e., 01/01/[21]01). (And I've scheduled this to post at 12:12, which really takes the biscuit for "clocking in" to the current - and dominant - mode of time-keeping on the planet.)

Kinda sad, I s'pose. Still, I was able to live during a period of time that I was able to see so many "calendrical" and astronomical events. ... and remember them, too. Heh.

One nice thing about days like this is that I don't have to worry about what date notation convention to present the numbers in. Should I use the US date convention (month/day/year), the most-of-Europe date convention (day/month/year), or the Japanese date convention (year/month/day)?

I much prefer the year/month/day convention, especially when I have multiple drafts or versions of a document or project; it allows for automatic sorting of the title to display both the evolution of the file as well as present, in explicit notation, the date when the file was last saved. This is in contrast to some people who prefer to use notation like "v2," "v3" etc., which can become cumbersome (after all, how much change is necessary to indicate a new version?) or even the massively cumbersome notation of "new" and "newer", which usually devolves into some sort of hybrid of relative notations (e.g., "new2" or "new2_newer").

Some people might say that the European date and time notation (day/month/year) makes the most sense, since the time increments are increasing from left to right. This is usually used as an extension of the argument that the United States' conventions for measurement are quite arbitrary, antiquated, and confusing:

 
However, the expectation of left-to-right being equivalent to small-to-big is a normative assumption that has no more logical basis than saying that left-to-right is equivalent to big-to-small. (Similarly, it may be more simple to think in terms of base-ten - as one does with metric - but that choice is also arbitrary, and we could just think in terms of 360; which is also an arbitrary choice. But along that line of questioning madness lies!) Furthermore, the European version of annotation creates large problems of file sorting by name, since the same 28 days (or 30 days if you don't consider February to be important) will be recycled 12 times within a year, meaning that a file that is being worked on for more than one month will encounter sorting confusion:

01012002 = 1 Jan 2002

01022001 = 1 Feb 2001

01032001 = 1 Mar 2001

02022001 = 2 Feb 2001

Here, 2 February 2001 should come before 1 March 2001, since dates in January do come before dates in February. Furthermore, 1 January 2002 should be at the bottom of this list, since 2002 comes after all dates in 2001. These problems go away when you use the Japanese date reporting format:

20010101 = 2001 Feb 1

20010102 = 2001 Feb 2

20010201 = 2001 Mar 1

20020101 =2002 Jan 1

See? No problems.

Earlier today, a friend of mine wrote:

I don't get this 12-12-12 hype. Unless I've somehow time-traveled, we're neither in the year 12 and Jesus is alive, nor are we in 1212 and the crusades are in full swing. 20th of December this year is a lot more interesting to me, if we're talking symmetrical dates.

I couldn't help but respond with this comment:

Heh. Presumably, you'd also be especially interested at 8:12 PM. However, that only works if you're using European date convention of 20-12-2012 20:12. If you're using the Japanese date convention, December 20 would be: 2012-12-20, which is kinda palindromic, but not really.

Once you recognize that date notation is culturally biased and somewhat arbitrary (especially once you consider the various standardization changes that happened to date notation and calendar format that occurred even prior to the standardization that was the Julian calendar in addition to the later restandardization that left us with the Gregorian calendar), then the allowance of letting people get rid of the "20" in front of the "12" makes today kind of fun.

In the end, I recognize that this loosening of the rules for date notation may not be as much fun as having access to a time machine might be, but I'm not one to really wish to travel back to the years 12 (don't know enough Latin) or 1212 (don't want to be burned as a heretic or infidel), and if we did have a time machine the calculations that we'd have to make to ensure that we actually get to that era's notation of a repetitive date value would also take a bit of the romanticism out of the whole thing. 

Anyway... enough proselyzation about date numbering formats; today is one of the twelve that come about every century that make such discussions meaningless - at least for those singular days.

Looking to the future, here's to hoping that in 100 years from today, 12/12/2112, we won't have completely gone and screwed ourselves over, thanks to our evolutionarily stone-age brains being unable to adequately comprehend the intricacies of an increasingly complex, interconnected, non-linear system that is what we call "existence." Hopefully, too, Doraemon will actually be created in September of that year!

Saturday Omphaolskepsis: They aren't the oldest trees in the world, but...

In reading through my news items for today, I came across an article describing the fragility old trees in a changing climate:

A report by three of the world's leading ecologists in today's issue of the journal Science warns of an alarming increase in deathrates among trees 100-300 years old in many of the world's forests, woodlands, savannahs, farming areas and even in cities.

The reason behind this increased rate of die-off among old trees? Well, it's not only because the trees are reaching the end of their lives (some trees can live for several centuries, after all), but because the environments in which these trees live are changing. And why is this happening? Well:

"According to one popular theory, trees get a double-whammy when the thermometer rises. "During the day, their photosynthesis shuts down when it gets too warm, and at night they use more energy because their metabolic rate increases, much as a reptile's would do when it gets warmer." With less energy being produced in warmer years and more being consumed just to survive, there is less energy available for growth. "This hypothesis, if correct, means tropical forests could shrink over time," Professor Laurance said. "The largest, oldest trees would progressively die off and tend not to be replaced. Alarmingly, this might trigger a positive feedback that could destabilize the climate: as older trees die, forests would release some of their stored carbon into the atmosphere, prompting a vicious circle of further warming, forest shrinkage and carbon emissions."

In Saginaw Forest, we don't think of the trees as being particularly "old" - at least I doubt that many people think of Saginaw Forest as some sort of primeval wood, but it's important to remember that some of the trees on the property have joined the century club, having been planted waaay back in 1904. And these trees are dying off, although whether it's due to being planted too close or due to physiological exacerbations caused by climate stress (since many of these old Saginaw Forest trees are actually native to more northerly regions of the state), I can't say.

Still, it's something to think about when you're walking through the forest, recalling (in some deep recess of your mind) that you are walking through a forested landscape that - while not a "natural" forest - is in the range of 60-100+ years old. It's still a relatively "new" forest in that way, having not "matured" to be dominated by the climax community that we would have experienced way back in the early 1800s: a hardwood forest of oak, maple, and beech. It may also be sobering to recall that - thanks to climate change and the changed driving forces that our new and future climate have on the local ecology - Saginaw Forest will not be changing to resemble that 1800s forest of Southeast Michigan so much as a forest that would have been more typical of central Ohio.

In sum - and to bring it back to the topic of the paper - the century-plus old trees on the northern side of the property will likely die faster now than they would have if the climate hadn't changed, that those trees will also be more quickly releasing their stored carbon into the atmosphere, and that those reaches of the property are on a destined path toward a climax forest that would have been more recognizable around the Columbus, OH of 1800 than the Ann Arbor, MI of that same time.

SSM update: 15.86% of the US lives in states where SSM is legal

Thanks to the 2012 election, three states voted to allow Same-Sex Marriage (SSM): Maine (reversing a 2009 referendum), Maryland, and Washington. This brings the total to 9 states and the District of Columbia (DC) that allow SSM. The total population of people living in this area (using numbers from the 2010 census) is 48,955,409, which amounts to 15.86% of the national population now living in states where equality stretches to same-sex couples in terms of legal rights and protections of marriage. (Yeah... I'm not talking about what religions choose to do with prosecuting their beliefs upon the adherents to their faiths.)

What's interesting is that Minnesota voted down an amendment to deny SSM. There is also increasing discussion about allowing SSM there, as well as in California, Illinois, and New Jersey. If these four states were to all end up allowing SSM, then the number of people living in such states would more than double, rising to 113,135,816, or 36.64% of the population.

More interesting still is that the states of Nevada, Oregon, and Wisconsin are eying the allowance for "civil unions" for same-sex couples. If we count these states' populations into the total of places where - for purely governmental purposes of guaranteeing and protecting rights and benefits - same-sex couples would have the rights as heterosexual couples, this would represent 125,354,427 people or 40.60% of the population.

These projections of potential allowances for SSM and civil unions are not my own conjectures - they're from the Economist:

This could mean that - by the next presidential election in 2016 - just slightly more than 40% of the US population could be living in a state where state-sanctioned and state-participatory discrimination against same-sex individuals' right to have a state-recognized, state-protected, and state-guaranteed marriage (or civil union). But a recent poll in Michigan is something that is raising the possibility that it could well be more than 40.60%:

A recent survey found that 56 percent of the state's residents support gay marriage while 39 percent oppose it. Two years ago, 48 percent supported gay marriage and 51 percent were opposed.

The walls seem to be tumbling down ... at least away from the Deep South. And if Michigan's shift on this position - along with the shifts seen in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Oregon, California, and Maine - is anything to go by, it's likely that the shifting position on gay marriage rights is shifting in the same direction in other states that share some of Michigan's demographic and political leanings: Ohio and Pennsylvania.

If (and that's a big "if") both Ohio and Pennsylvania were to vote to allow SSM or civil unions by 2016, then that could bring the total population living in such states to 159,476,950, or 51.65% of the nation's population (and - of course - if other states vote the same way, then that number can only climb).

Still, let's not assume that all our eggs will hatch, or that all the chicks even grow into chickens. Let's sit down and actually be really friggin' happy that we now have 15.86% of the population living in a state where SSM-rights have been granted. Let's be even more happy that the public tide has turned to much that public referenda are now granting these rights.

As people come to recognize that same-sex couples aren't the monsters that paranoid traditionalists want to make them out to be, there will be more positive shifts in opinion. As people come to recognize that same-sex individuals are among their friends, their colleagues, and their families, there will be more positive shifts in opinion. As people come to recognize that same-sex marriage does not destroy heterosexual marriages, there will be more positive shifts in opinion.As people come to recognize that same-sex partnerships are often about love, commitment, and raising families in a safe and caring environment, there will be more positive shifts in opinion. And, as people come to recognize that the growing number of states that allow same-sex marriages and unions are not turning into burning pits of Hell, that pedophilia is not going rampant, or that divorce rates of heterosexual couples is not increasing, there will be more positive shifts in opinion.

Thursday Thoughts: Regional Regional impacts due to Arctic melting: The future doesn't look anything like the past

Out of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, there is a brief on the potential future impacts of climate change on the region. (Well, the statements are about Wisconsin, but the impacted areas are definitely not going to stop at the Wisconsin state line.)

Vavrus, an expert on the arctic climate, says the dramatic melting trend is due to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere warming the planet. He says natural variability may have accelerated the loss of ice in recent years, and he adds that the far north has physical characteristics that make it more sensitive to warming than other parts of the globe.

For one, he explains, snow and ice that normally cover the region reflect most incoming solar radiation back to space, but increased melting exposes land or ocean water that absorb more solar energy and accelerate any warming trend.

In addition, the lowest layer of the atmosphere in the Arctic is thin and prone to temperature inversions that hold warmer air near the ground, promoting even more melting as the region warms.

Vavrus says the Arctic is likely to continue to see pronounced downward trends in sea ice, snow cover, glacier extent, and permafrost. He says that will have major impacts on both natural ecosystems and human communities in the northernmost latitudes.

But the impacts of a warming Arctic could also be felt far beyond the region, including in the Midwest, according to research conducted by Vavrus and his colleague Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last spring.

"We believe that the winds aloft at the level of the jet stream will weaken and lead to slower-moving and 'wavier' atmospheric circulation patterns," he explains. "Such a change would favor more extreme weather events in middle latitudes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and—ironically—cold snaps."

What this means is that we can expect more weather patterns like what we saw this year: warmer winters, warmer springs, warmer summers, less rain on average, more rain in concentrated events, sudden cold snaps; you know: nothing like it used to be.

For Saginaw Forest, this will mean continued take-over by vines, continued lowering of the lake level, accelerated death of pine species, and rapid changes in the plant communities (as well as the insect, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds that live in the forest). Furthermore, if lake levels get any lower than they are now, the near-shore habitat will be completely out of the water, severely limiting the available area for the fish currently in the lake to spawn, thus potentially causing a decline in the total number of fish in the lake.

... good times.

Is Michigan to Become the "Buckeye State"?

Living through this summer of far-hotter-than-normal days in Ann Arbor - home to the University of Michigan Wolverines - and working in environmental and natural resource management, I am thinking about the on-the-ground effects of climate change more than often. (Maybe more than is healthy.)

I hope for rain. I hope for cool winds. I hope for clouds even.

We get heavy sun that heats up asphalt, withers trees, and browns the grass. We get hot gusts of dry wind that buffet you into sweat-stained submission. We get few clouds, and those we get rarely carry rain for us.

It's the largest drought area ever declared, but some people are wondering if this is a forecast of things to come, or even the new normal. However, people from Mississippi River managers to Michigan cherry crop farmers to almost anyone paying attention in much of the country is recognizing that there is a massive drought happening and that weather has gone haywire (unless you happen to be Newton Leroy Gingrich).

And these are just the things that are happening right now. For University of Michigan fans, things could well get much worse.

According to research done in 2007 by Daniel McKenney and colleagues, the Ohio buckeye - which is the state tree of Ohio as well as the mascot to Ohio State University - will be shifting northward over the next 100 years. This means they will be shifting into Michigan, moving fromcurrent distributionand possibly into Michigan (according to the CSIROmk35 A1B prediction model)

This will turn Michigan into the new "Buckeye State" (and buckeyes have been growing quite happily in Saginaw Forest for a few years now), which might well get a lot of Michigan (and Michigan State) fans quite angry about the whole thing, and maybe start to think of climate change as something real. Yes, it's a strange way to introduce people to the effects of climate change, but many people have visceral attachments to sports, and for many people this includes university sports (even if they never attended that particular university).

What might make this an even greater blow for University of Michigan fans is that the last known wolverine living in the state died in 2011. With the death of the wolverine - the UofM mascot - and the encroachment of their largest rival's mascot onto home territory, could there be some sort of climate change education and action that come out of this?

While part of this is written as tongue-in-cheek, another part of me is trying to think of ways to get people latched onto simple fact that climate change is not just happening right now, but has been happening for decades already; that the time to act is not tomorrow, but yesterday; and that the fact we haven't done a lot is only going to require us to work all the harder down the line.

Warming temperatures leading to additional lake complications?

This past winter, Third Sister Lake didn't get a complete freeze, and it was possible, as the spring approached, to see algae growing in some of the ice. In March, while we were experiencing temperatures normally part of June weather, I wrote about some of the possible impacts that such weather might bring if they become the norm. I also wrote about some of the possible impacts to Third Sister Lake that such warming might bring.

Well, add to all that one more impact brought on by warming: decreased lake turnover. In a new paper out in the journal Climate Change, Swiss scientists have shown how increased warming in Swiss lakes have decreased lake turnover, and this has brought about increased levels of Burgundy blood algae.

The paper's abstract states:

Anthropogenic-induced changes in nutrient ratios have increased the susceptibility of large temperate lakes to several effects of rising air temperatures and the resulting heating of water bodies¹. First, warming leads to stronger thermal stratification, thus impeding natural complete water turnover (holomixis), which compensates for oxygen deficits in the deep zones^{2, 3}. Second, increased water temperatures and nutrient concentrations can directly favour the growth of harmful algae^{4, 5, 6}. Thus, lake-restoration programmes have focused on reducing nutrients to limit toxic algal blooms⁷. Here we present evidence that the ubiquitous^{8, 9, 10} harmful cyanobacterium Planktothrix rubescens has become the dominant species in a large lake during the past four decades, although the phosphorus content of the ecosystem decreased fivefold. However, the nitrogen input was not diminished concomitantly, favouring this non-N₂-fixing cyanobacterium owing to increased N:P ratios¹⁰. P. rubescens contains gas vesicles that allow for buoyancy to accumulate within the depth of optimal irradiance¹¹. As the toxic cyanobacterium has low consumption by predators¹², water turnover represents the main mechanism of seasonal population control. Thus, unidirectional lake-restoration measures¹³ in parallel with recurrent absence of holomixis owing to lake warming may lead to similar undesired effects that have formerly emerged from fertilization.

This type of impact is problematic for Third Sister Lake, not because of Planktothrix (or because of other cyanobacteria, at least to my knowledge), but because Third Sister Lake is already a lake that doesn't completely turn over. From a 2001 paper by Bridgeman et al., the finding of lake stability (i.e., the resistance to turnover) in Third Sister Lake was that:

Salt-laden water entering Third Sister Lake [during the winter] from [the business lots to the southeast] could eventually lead to the formation of a chemocline. Large vertical gradients of salinity may potentially prolong stratification or altogether prevent mixing. ... If Third Sister Lake follows a similar pattern [to First and Second Sister Lakes], the contribution of a chloride gradient to stability would reach a maximum in March or April ... and the lake ... will remain [thermally stratified] until mid-November.

The paper also reported that - due to forest growth from 1904 - Third Sister Lake didn't fully turn over in the spring (i.e., following ice-out), even back in 1986. The authors of the 2001 paper concluded that:

Given that the lake is now more sheltered [than in earlier decades] and may require about 60% more wind energy to overcome a chlorine gradient, complete spring mixing, which was a common event at least into the 1940s and occurred occasionally until the early 1980s, is now probably rare.

And it's likely to remain rare if increased temperatures become the norm. (That is, unless a significant number of trees fall down, thus increasing the lake's wind exposure.)

Are vines growing faster?

Walking through Saginaw Forest this summer, I have noticed far more vine growth than I recall there being in previous years. Is this just my imagination? Confirmation bias? Or could it have something to do with the really warm winter that we had? (Too, could it have something to do with the differential rates of growth between vines and trees?)

What we know for sure is that the winter of 2011/2012 was a really warm one and March, May and June have been uncharacteristically warm, as well. There has also been less rainfall than usual.

Now, what I'm guessing at is that, since vines require less resources to maintain themselves and grow compared to trees, it seems possible to me that vines have been able to quickly take advantage of the warm spring and start their growth while also being able to continue growing during these more parched months. However, this is just a guess on my part.

What I know is that there are a lot of trees with vines growing on them; the vines themselves are very dense, and there's a lot of poison ivy, too. This radically warm winter, spring, and summer seem to correspond with the basic message of a 2006 paper by Mohan et al. Their abstract reads, in part:

Contact with poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) is one of the most widely reported ailments at poison centers in the United States, and this plant has been introduced throughout the world, where it occurs with other allergenic members of the cashew family (Anacardiaceae). ... Rising CO2 is potentially responsible for the increased vine abundance that is inhibiting forest regeneration and increasing tree mortality around the world. In this 6-year study at the Duke University Free-Air CO2 Enrichment experiment, we show that elevated atmospheric CO2 in an intact forest ecosystem increases photosynthesis, water use efficiency, growth, and population biomass of poison ivy. The CO2 growth stimulation exceeds that of most other woody species.
So, poison ivy is expected to be more abundant and a greater lover of the high CO2 future than trees. And this is likely also a cause for the increase vine abundance in general.

We heard news a few months back that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased past 400ppm, which doesn't correspond to the elevated CO2 chambers of Motan et al's study, but as the Motan paper discusses previous studies on increased CO2 and vine growth:

With an increase in CO2 concentration and a corresponding increase in photosynthesis, vines can allocate more photosynthate to additional photosynthetic tissue, because of a low allocation to support tissue relative to other woody growth forms (13, 14, 18, 19). Increasing abundance of woody vines is causing increased tree mortality and reduced tree regeneration in forests around the globe (18, 20–23), potentially resulting in shifts in community composition that may impact carbon cycling and biodiversity (23). Although it is unclear how elevated CO2 will affect the growth of vines in forest environments, the contemporary increase in woody vine abundance may be the result of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations (19, 23).

The Motan et al paper doesn't discuss the impacts of warmer winters, springs, and summers on poison ivy growth (nor on the growth of other vine species). However, I am going to guess that a large part of the vine growth this year is likely due to the ever increasing CO2 levels and have been exacerbated this year by the unnaturally warm seasons.

Population weight, public health, and environmental implications

I watched the following video



which brought up several points of concern:

1. The total adult population of the Earth weighs roughly 287 million metric tons (316 million US tons).
• This is about 1/2 of the total biomass of the world's cattle
• This is about 1/5 of the total biomass of the world's ants
2. The world's average adult body mass is 62 kg (137 lbs).
3. The North American average adult body mass is 80.7 kg (178 lbs).
4. If the world's adult population all had the same average mass as the North American average, it would be like adding 935 million people to the current world's population.

The video goes on to explain why this is problematic for environmental and public health concerns (starting from 1:14). The original article - "The Weight of Nations: An estimation of adult human biomass" - can be found at BMC Public Health.

Abstract (Background):

The energy requirement of species at each trophic level in an ecological pyramid is a function of the number of organisms and their average mass. Regarding human populations, although considerable attention is given to estimating the number of people, much less is given to estimating average mass, despite evidence that average body mass is increasing. We estimate global human biomass, its distribution by region and the proportion of biomass due to overweight and obesity.

Abstract (Results & Conclusions):

In 2005, global adult human biomass was approximately 287 million tonnes, of which 15 million tonnes were due to overweight (BMI > 25), a mass equivalent to that of 242 million people of average body mass (5% of global human biomass). Biomass due to obesity was 3.5 million tonnes, the mass equivalent of 56 million people of average body mass (1.2% of human biomass). North America has 6% of the world population but 34% of biomass due to obesity. Asia has 61% of the world population but 13% of biomass due to obesity. One tonne of human biomass corresponds to approximately 12 adults in North America and 17 adults in Asia. If all countries had the BMI distribution of the USA, the increase in human biomass of 58 million tonnes would be equivalent in mass to an extra 935 million people of average body mass, and have energy requirements equivalent to that of 473 million adults.

Increasing population fatness could have the same implications for world food energy demands as an extra half a billion people living on the earth.

I (idly) wonder if anyone has used this sort of data analysis for actual trophic food web analysis, much like one might do with various fish species (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here; see also "trophic food web" on the University of Michigan's dissertations, theses, and research publications site).

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Well, some of you know that you don't need introduction, since we are all living in the Anthropocene. What might (still) be staggering for some people (especially older people who didn't grow up with this reality so much in the forefront of their brains) is the rate and expanse of these impacts.

These include (but aren't limited to) deforestation, pollution, erosion, famine, migration, and climate change.

Warmer weather means more pollen

Just another reason to despise increased CO2 levels and increased warming: pollen. New research has tracked the increase in pollen count in Europe as under controlled CO2 conditions as well as tracking warmer weather patterns. From PhysOrg:

Lab experiments and a small number of open-air studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air can boost plant growth and subsequently pollen production. Warmer temperatures and invasive species are also leading to longer pollen seasons.

So, I guess that it will be a warm and hay-fevery world. And then we'll die from/as a result of fungal disease. Yay?

Just when we thought that it couldn't get worse...

... it likely will. According to a new study from Nature:

we're already heading for huge fungal damage to vital crops and ecosystems over the coming decades. If we don't do more to stop these diseases' spread, their impact could be devastating.

Awww... shoooooot.... So we'll have massive economic impacts due to the widespread death of crops. Could it get any worse? Well...

But the threat has gained a new urgency lately, and crops aren't the only thing at risk. More and more of these killer fungi are appearing, and they're increasingly attacking animals.

What!?!!?!

Emerging fungal epidemics already account for 72 per cent of extinctions from disease – more than bacteria and viruses put together. For instance, amphibians are being wiped out at an unprecedented rate by a deadly chytrid fungus that's been spread by the global animal trade; at least 500 species are thought to be at risk. Likewise, bats are being struck down by so-called White Nose Syndrome, which has spread all over North America since it was first spotted in 2006.

Yeah, but bats are icky and amphibians do what for us? I mean, it can't be that bad for humans, right?

In many cases there are direct consequences for humans. For example, bats eat insects that would otherwise attack crops; studies suggest White Nose Syndrome could end up costing farmers some $3.7 billion a year. But even organisms that aren't obviously useful to us will have unpleasant consequences somewhere down the line if they disappear.

"Ultimately you can't separate ecosystem health from human health – eventually, these birds will come home to roost," Fisher says, adding that the less diverse ecosystems become, the less they can stand up to sudden changes.

Oh yeah... it's an ecosystem that we live in. So, does that mean that we're also causing this to happen to everything (including us)? Yes, yes we are:

Fungal diseases are even making climate change worse; scientists estimate that the trees they've killed or damaged would otherwise have absorbed 230-580 megatonnes of CO2 – around 0.07 per cent of the total in the atmosphere.

And what's the solution for attempting to halt a kingdom of species that we know relatively little about, that can swap out parts of their genomes with other species in order to better adapt, that are almost impossible to get rid of once they've become established? Well, prevention's about the only thing that is likely to work:

Fisher says we need to start taking biosecurity far more seriously – cutting down the amount of living material we transport around the world, quarantining what we do transport far more rigorously, and doing more to stop the illegal trade in plants and animals. Eventually, breakthroughs in genetic diagnostic technology may make it possible to screen plants and animals for fungus or spores. But in the meantime, we need to do more to prevent outbreaks, and move quickly to control those that do happen before they get out of hand.

Of course, I'm sure that lots of people who want to increase world capital or develop markets are just going to be so behind this idea. Like I said: "Just when we thought that it couldn't get worse, it likely will."

Story from PhysOrg

Why some commentary from members of my parents' generation annoys me

This entry was sparked by the tenor of some commentary from members of my parents' generation about why members of my generation should be grateful to them for our good upbringing, instead of criticizing them for the structural problems that they perpetuate in society and in the physical world. The commentary was from people that I don't personally know, but it did remind me strongly of what I hear - both in person and in interviews - from older generations about the viewpoints and actions of my generation. Like any rant, it tends to be somewhat disjointed, but I did go through and try and correct for some of it, while also trying to revise some of the more angry parts. Here goes:

Geez, some older people are really taking intergenerational criticism personally and are completely missing the point when 30-somethings (or younger!) make this type of commentary. It's almost like they want us to be grateful that they cared for us, their children, which is a logical fallacy made into a double standard when the my generation says, "Hello, I'd like to have a career like most of your generation could aspire to when you were my age or younger. Why? Well, it's because I don't currently have a lot of social benefits and fewer career options the longer I wait. In comparison people who are my parents' age already have accumulated far more wealth than I will likely be able to, currently have guaranteed government health care, and are in a far more stable financial and social situation than me. They are also exhorting me to get a job and stop complaining. So... can I please have a career in which I can work for the next thirty years; which happens to be about 15 to 25 years longer than you are likely able to?"

Why is the argument of "children should be grateful to their parents" a non sequitur? Well, of course, non-abused children ought to be thankful that they weren't raised by abusive parents who did the absolute legally minimal requirements of childcare. However, being thankful for being loved, taken care of, and provided with opportunities is different than an obligation of thanks for being cared for lovingly. In fact, it is about as much of a non sequitur as that child saying that it is the parents that ought to be thankful to the child for being a good child in a family into which I didn't ask to be born. In other words, it's a logical fallacy, and to further state that a child's obligations to a parent extend to that child having a blanket obligation to not be critical of the parent or of the parents' generation as a whole is a mind-boggling logical failure. In short, we all have the right to criticize our parents. We all also have the right to criticize our parents' generation. If members of my parents' generation don't like our criticism, especially when they are well reasoned (although not always coolly delivered), then that's too bad, but basing that dislike for criticism on a logical fallacy is not only poor argumentation, it is also dishonest. Finally, it is - in this case - a non sequitur to make the argument that "children should be grateful to their parents" when the person in question is (A) an adult, who is (B) trying to be successful based on the rubrics of their parents' generation, but who is (C) systemically hampered from being able to reach success and is then (D) blamed for inaction against a scale of actions and outcomes that are no longer valid while (E) being told how selfish that person is for continuing to rely on their parents. Does anyone else see what's wrong with the situation, or is it just me?

I'm sorry that my parents' generation's pensions were negatively affected by the housing loans disaster and they were mostly wiped out. But you know what? Many among my parents' generation have pensions that they accumulated for 30+ years; I will never have that. I'm sorry that the 401(k)s of the members of my parents' generation aren't doing so well. But you know what? They have 401(k)s that have been invested in for 30+ years; I will never have that. I'm sorry that Social Security and Medicare don't cover all the medical needs of my parents' generation. But you know what? They have Social Security and they have Medicare; even if I were able to pay greatly into these programs, it is unlikely that they will be available to me in 30+ years. And you know what else they have? Accumulated wealth and a governmental system that is structurally set up to pay out more for them than for us.

What do a lot of 30-somethings and younger have? Jobs that don't have pension plans, very few opportunities to save money (i.e., to accumulate wealth), few jobs for which we can fully extend the abilities that our parents' generation's good upbringing has trained us for, and a future in which many of us will have serious inabilities to attempt to have a fraction of what our parents' generation had promised us, mostly because of the actions that our parents' and grandparents' generations have had in shaping the current world. For example, while it does matter what one's current environmental footprint is, what matters more in the next 100 years is the footprint of my parent's generation, and in the next 50 the footprint my grandparents' generation. The anthropogenic global warming that is expected to submerge most coastal cities and cause global economic hardship (at best) or catastrophe (at worst) is already baked into the system, and these impacts weren't caused by my generation.

Are we happy? No. Are we saying that the current social structure doesn't actually allow as many 30-somethings to fully actualize their potential (like what was available to the Boomers) is due (in a significant way) to the collective individual actions of Baby Boomers? Yup, because It. Is. What. Is. Happening. Does this recognition mean we should euthanize old people, divest them of all wealth, lock them up in retirement communities, etc? No, and any imprecation of that is flat out nonsensical and a plain attempt at obfuscation.

Let's all face it: we men and women who were born in the 1970s and 1980s are not children anymore. (Perhaps our parents might like us to still be children, but that's a different point altogether.) We do have the ability to form thoughts about complex social and global systems that perhaps our parents never had any reason to investigate. This ability is in a large part thanks to our parents' feeding us, clothing us, ensuring our education, providing the intellectual muscle to have large research universities that we would attend, and conducting the scientific and social research that we would then learn, among a vast array of other actions taken directly or indirectly to help us (i.e., my generation).

To those of my parents' generation who find all of this appalling and atrocious:

• Don't turn around and act all shocked when we state that we're not satisfied with what our learning, cognition, and investigation show us to be a problem for us and our children; one that you won't likely live to see.
• Don't get shocked when we explain, as one set of adults to another set of adults (admittedly in various tenor, style, and volume), why we aren't satisfied.
• Don't get petulantly passive-aggressive when we explain that the baby boomer generation - being the unique social feature that it is - causes many structural problems in the current setup of our society.
• Don't get righteously indignant and cast imprecations against us for being "uppity", for being "snotty", for being "entitled", for being "lazy", for being "unworthy", for being "uninformed", etc. These forms of address don't deal with the issues about which we are unhappy, and that attempt at distraction is also annoying. Stop it.

We aren't very happy, because we plainly see how structural conditions of current society are leading to untenable positions in our futures (not YOUR futures, but OUR futures; you won't likely be alive in 2050, that's just a plain - if hard - truth). One of those structural conditions is the baby boomer generation. Another - which intersects it at several points - is anthropogenic global warming. We caused neither but we will be (and are being) negatively affected directly by both, and the education that we have been given heightens and sharpens that understanding even more greatly. People of your generation might not like to hear that you have bequeathed us a world that is - in all likelihood - worse than the one you had and worse than the one you had promised us. However, petulant passive aggressive arguments based on non sequiturs is a piss-poor way of addressing a group of people who have the knowledge that the world won't be such a great place; it's even more of a piss-poor way of addressing a group of people who are simultaneously being told that they should just work harder (even though this no longer really makes much of a difference), be more responsible (even though we are being responsible with what we are able to be responsible over), be grateful (even though it's not really clear about why we should be grateful for inheriting a future world that's worse than what we started off with), and be happy to have it so easy (even though the people most affected by the recent recession were disproportionately people 30 years and under); it's a really piss-poor way of arguing about what is, ultimately, a demographic transition problem: your generation will continue to die off and my generation (and subsequent generations) will continue to live with negative legacies; and finally it's a piss-poor way of trying to deal with someone who's justifiably unhappy.

The winter that never came, and what it might mean

Well, I pointed out back in January that the winter - at least the version one could expect in Ann Arbor, MI - wasn't actually here. Then, through February, we waited for winter to come, and - other than a couple of dips in the temperature and some snow that lasted a couple of days - we continued to remain stubbornly above freezing on most days.

Now, in March, the trees are trying to catch up with the temperatures that closer to what is typical of late June than anything close to what we would expect in March, let alone April (we could reasonably expect 82F/28C temperatures in May, but they are historically rare). In short, the temperatures we are experiencing in Ann Arbor are presently CONSISTENTLY SHATTERING all historical measurements (all the days from March 14 through March 21, 2012 have broken the previous high-temperature record, and the current forecast expects that March 22 and 23 are also going to be record-breakers, which - if true - means that there will be nine full days of record-shattering temperatures).

"But it's not TOO hot," and, "I LOVE this kind of weather," I hear some people say. Well, true: temperatures of 70-80F are quite comfortable, and it's no surprise that we'd love the temperatures that we (likely) evolved to thrive in. Such high temperatures, do, however, bring drawbacks.

The insects are also loving it - I've been having mosquitoes in Saginaw Forest for the past two weeks, and the moths and mayflies are starting to emerge. The frogs, too, are quite happy, singing up a storm in the evenings, but their choruses are already starting to die down. I wonder how long the summer temperatures will hold this year: will we remain (relatively consistently) above 70F from now to late September? Will we again get up past 100F in July? Will we again have a rain-stressed year? (I also wonder if the weather will suddenly remember that it's only mid-March and dip back into the "average" temperature range of lows in the low-30s and highs in the mid-40s.)

I know that this isn't (necessarily) climate change upon us. It is (and has been) a bitterly cold winter in Europe, after all. However, if this year is anything to use to predict some likely occurrences in a warmer climatic future, then I hope that people are paying attention. What starts as "nice temperatures" turns into "bad weather" as the high level of heat energy in the atmosphere brings about earlier and more intense storms than what our experience has led us to expect. In the Ann Arbor region, this meant a tornado touching down in Dexter, combined with intense rain (over 1" of rain in 1 hour at Ann Arbor airport) and hail, which caused flooding in Ann Arbor (as both storm and sanitary sewers became flooded beyond capacity), massive erosion along rivers (as they "endeavored" to accommodate the massively increased flows of water), and felled trees (thus knocking out electricity for thousands as well as destroying more property).

Looking more regionally, we have seen the start of one of the earliest tornado seasons on record. According to MNN.com:

In the U.S., tornado season tends to move northward from late winter to mid-summer. In Southern states, tornado season is typically from March to May. In the Southern Plains, it lasts from May to early June. On the Gulf Coast, tornadoes occur most often during the spring. And in the Northern Plains, Northern states and upper Midwest, peak season is in June or July.

As of March 20st, the number of tornadoes in the US reached 285, which is almost tied for the most tornadoes on record by NOAA. (As a contrast, in a year that is at the 50th percentile, we wouldn't reach 285 tornadoes until roughly the end of April.) When looked at through the light of all the record temperatures, it's not too surprising that so many tornadoes are happening, but it's also very little consolation that warmer temperatures means better times.

Removing keystones and cornerstones from ecosystems

Within the field of conservation ecology, the concept of a "keystone species" is pretty central. It is based on ideas from ecology about inter-species interactions while drawing upon the visualization of a bridge's key-stone, representing the fundamentally important pinnacle stone of an arched structure. Appropriately - for the imagery - keystone species tend to be near or at the top of the "food chain"*; oftentimes being predators. The idea is that keystone species act as a limiting pressure on other species, diminishing the possibility of explosive growth (and eventual collapse) of a species in the system (as well as potential negative outcomes from such a boom and bust).

For example, wolves are considered to be a keystone species in many of the North American ecosystems, acting - alongside other large predators - as mediators in population growth among prey species, such as deer, by - to put it bluntly - killing them, which means that there are fewer fawns come springtime than if there were no wolves. This reduction from the potential deer population means that the existing deer will not likely be in such strong competition with each other to find food (and that their food sources will not be over-exploited). Conversely, if you remove wolves and other predators (and ban hunting or trapping), the deer population will boom for a few years, and then - as they outstrip their food source - will suffer massive starvation-induced die-offs. In short, it's the wolf population that keeps the ecosystem in "balance".

There is emerging a complementary concept of "cornerstone species", in which species that are low on the "food chain"* provide an essential and foundational role in the ecosystem. Although there is come question - at least in my mind - of whether this is yet another example of terrestrial systems appearing to be top-down mediated, while marine systems seem to be bottom-up mediated, I think that this concept has its own merits in understanding the functioning of ecosystems (both for pure science as well as for conservation goals).

In the linked press release, the researchers "analyzed the impact of removing seaweed and sessile animals, such as mussels and barnacles, from the rocky shores of Northeastern’s Marine Science Center in Nahant, Mass. The experiments were designed to mimic naturally occurring changes in biodiversity on rocky shores." They found that the removal of these relatively rare species caused "major declines in the abundance and diversity of animals, such as snails, crabs and other mobile animals".

It seems to me that we are finding that - not too surprisingly - that ecosystems are interactive and controlled by various links throughout, in linear and non-linear manners. If we can recognize this point about how ecosystems function, then it seems to me that our collective actions on the planet are randomly removing portions of the system without any real idea about what consequences will come about. If our ecosystems are like structures, we may well end up removing both the keystones that hold up the ceilings, but also the cornerstones that firm up the walls. This is why ecology should be studied as an applied science, to understand how our actions will have an impact upon everything else that is connected to them (and onward out from that connection, ultimately back to us).

We understand only dimly the course of impacts that removing a top predator has on an ecosystem. We understand, too, only dimly the impacts of removing a key producer has on an ecosystem. However, the total, linked effects of the removal of so many different things from so many different parts of so many different ecosystems as well as the introduction and cross-movement of so many other parts of ecosystems across into novel locations remains - as a whole - invisible. In other words, as much as we know of the direct impacts that wolves have on North American ecosystems, we remain ignorant of the indirect ecosystem impacts, and we know next to nothing about the direct and indirect impacts of species loss and species invasions across the globe.

Without keystones or cornerstones, a structure would have to be greatly simplified, making it prone to collapse at any perturbation. While I recognize that buildings are not ecosystems (nor vice versa), I think that the analogy holds; a greatly simplified ecosystem will be neither robust nor resilient, and our position within that ecosystem will become evermore imperiled. (And this will be in addition to habitat loss due to changed climate and sea level rise, with some projections of the latter as being up to 70ft.)

* "Food chain" is a term that has some scientific problems associated with it, since the recycling processes of decomposition don't fit well within the one-way concept. Interactions are better described along the lines of a "food web". However, that conceptualization also has problems associated with it.

Birds moving due to climate change, but perhaps not fast enough

Via PhysOrg:

Tropical birds are moving to higher elevations because of climate change, but they may not be moving fast enough, according to a new study by Duke University researchers.

The study, published Thursday in the peer-reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, finds that the birds aren't migrating as rapidly as scientists previously anticipated, based on recorded temperature increases.
The animals instead may be tracking changes in vegetation, which can only move slowly via seed dispersal.

This doesn't seem too surprising. If, after all, the birds are tied to specific types of plants due to their life cycle, then moving in such a way as to maximize only their climatic preference won't be useful; they'd be missing a key component of their life cycle. The process of species adapting to the effects of climate change are now being discussed and published in the scientific literature.

Evidence from temperate areas, such as North America and Europe, shows that many animal and plant species are adapting to climate change by migrating northward, breeding earlier or flowering earlier in response to rising temperatures.

Indeed, the USDA relatively recently changed its hardiness zone maps due to already changed climate conditions. But that's what's happening in the northern latitudes (and we can expect that analogous things are happening in southern latitudes. However, what is happening with habitat changes in the tropics?

"However, our understanding of the response of tropical birds to warming is still poor," said German Forero-Medina, a Ph.D. student at Duke's Nicholas School who is lead author of the new study. "Moving to the north doesn't help them, because tropical temperatures do not change very much with latitude. So moving up to higher elevations is the only way to go, but there are few historical data that can serve as baselines for comparison over time."

What is going on with tropical species at higher altitudes is important, Forero-Medina said, because about half of all birds species live 3,500 feet or more above sea level, and of these species, more than 80 percent may live within the tropics.

Oh, shit. What this is saying is that about 40% of all the bird species in the world are known to live in the tropical one at above 3,500 feet (~1,000 meters), which means that understanding how this group of species will adapt (or not) to climate change will be crucial when considering the vast diversity of bird species.

The biologists found that although the ranges of many bird species have shifted uphill since Terborgh's [ornithological observations in mountainous central Peru in the 1970s], the shifts fell short of what scientists had projected based on temperature increases over the four decades.

"This may be bad news," Pimm said. "Species may be damned if they move to higher elevations to keep cool and then simply run out of habitat. But, by staying put, they may have more habitat but they may overheat."

One thing that could also be limiting the species' movement is the physiological demands that change as an organism moves to a higher elevation. In addition, there is a problem of dispersal: how are birds and plants from tropical floodplains to find their way to a climate zone high enough to exist at all (especially if their lifecycles are somehow tied to being floodplain species)? Do we expect (and do we see) similar things happening with aquatic species? (I mean, I like birds, but that's not what I study.) I would expect that fishes might be able to move upstream, but they are going to encounter barriers (such as waterfalls) and changes in hydrology (moving from the 12th stream-order mouth of the Amazon to an 11th order tributary will be a major change in hydrology, and thus habitat).

Finally, the brief doesn't discuss the issue of crowding and crowding out. If, after all, all things are moving from lower elevations to higher elevations (and even if there aren't significant physiological effects to take into account with these movements) in order to maintain their climatic conditions, then one needs to recognize that the available amount of actual space diminishes, too (after all, there isn't going to be more room at 5,000 feet than at 3,500 feet), and the fragmentation of populations will increase (after all, not all members of a species will end up climbing the same mountain), which means that the ultimate survival of species will depend on a variety of conditions, including metapopulation dynamics (i.e., sharing gene flow between scattered populations). Too, some species will diminish to a point where inbreeding becomes deleterious or the amount of available habitat cannot support a minimum viable population. And these are only direct effects on species. Remember that there are going to be system-wide effects, too...