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Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.

The U.S. Geological Survey and University of Montana study not only showed that the abundance of deciduous trees and their associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined over the last 22 years as snowpack has declined, but it also experimentally demonstrated that declining snowfall indirectly affects plants and birds by enabling more winter browsing by elk. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.

via Dramatic links found between climate change, elk, plants, and birds.

Leading demographers, including those at the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau, are projecting that world population will peak at 9.5 billion to 10 billion later this century, and then gradually decline as poorer countries develop. But what if those projections are too optimistic? What if population continues to soar, as it has in recent decades, and the world becomes home to 12 billion or even 16 billion people by 2100, as a high-end U.N. estimate has projected? Such an outcome would clearly have enormous social and environmental implications, including placing enormous stress on the world’s food and water resources, spurring further loss of wildlands and biodiversity, and hastening the degradation of the natural systems that support life on Earth.

The real possibility of fertility decline stopping before the two-children level is reached requires demographers, policy makers, and environmentalists to seriously consider that population growth in the coming century will come in at the high end of demographic projections. The U.N.’s middle-of-the-road assumption for sub-Saharan Africa — that fertility rates will drop to three children per woman and population will reach 2 billion by 2050 — seem unrealistically low to me. More likely is the U.N.’s high-end projection that sub-Saharan Africa’s population will climb to 2.2 billion by 2050 and then continue to 4.8 billion by 2100. The dire consequences of such an increase are difficult to ponder. If sub-Saharan Africa is having trouble feeding and providing water to 880 million people today, what will the region be like in 90 years if the population increases fivefold — particularly if, as projected, temperatures rise by at least 3.6 degrees F, worsening droughts?

via What if population grows faster than the experts project? | 7 billion: What to expect when you’re expanding—a special series | Grist.

1,252 people were arrested at a climate protest in front of the White House.

The largest environmental civil disobedience in decades concluded at the White House this morning with organizers pledging to escalate a nationwide campaign to push President Obama to deny the permit for a new tar sands oil pipeline.

“Given yesterday’s baffling cave on ozone standards, the need for a fighting environmental movement has never been more clear,” said Bill McKibben, who spearheaded the protest. “That movement is being born right here in front of the White House and reverberating around the country.”

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has become the most important environmental decision facing President Obama before the 2012 election and sparked nationwide opposition, from Nebraska ranchers to former Obama campaigners. A petition with 617,428 names [including mine] opposing the pipeline will be delivered to the White House today.

Over the course of the two-week sit-in 1,252 people were arrested, including top climate scientists, landowners from Texas and Nebraska, former Obama for America staffers, First Nations leaders from Canada, and notable individuals including Bill McKibben, former White House official Gus Speth, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, actor Daryl Hannah, filmmaker Josh Fox, and author Naomi Klein.

via A Climate Movement Is Born: Ozone Decision Spikes Total Arrests to 1,252 at White House Pipeline Protest | ThinkProgress.

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) collecting pollen. Photo: Jon Sullivan

The disastrous decline in bees that pollinate most of the world’s food crops will continue unless humans profoundly change their ways, warns a United Nations report released today. More than a dozen factors are linked to the worldwide loss of bees, from the disappearance of flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the global spread of pests, air pollution and climate change.

New kinds of virulent fungal pathogens that can be deadly to bees and other pollinators are now showing up worldwide, migrating from one region to another due to shipments linked to globalization and rapidly growing international trade, the report finds. Read the rest of this entry »

Catastrophic drought is on the near-term horizon for the capital city of Bolivia, according to new research into the historical ecology of the Andes. If temperatures rise more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) above those of modern times, parts of Peru and Bolivia will become a desert-like setting.

Climatologist Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology led a research team investigating a 370,000-year record of climate and vegetation change in Andean ecosystems.

The scientists used fossilized pollen trapped in the sediments of Lake Titicaca, which sits on the border of Peru and Bolivia.

They found that during two of the last three interglacial periods, which occurred between 130,000-115,0000 years ago and 330,000-320,000 years ago, Lake Titicaca shrank by as much as 85 percent.

Adjacent shrubby grasslands were replaced by desert.

In each case, a steady warming occurred that caused trees to migrate upslope, just as they are doing today.

However, as the climate kept warming, the system suddenly flipped from woodland to desert.

“The evidence is clear that there was a sudden change to a much drier state,” said Bush.

via Catastrophic drought looms for capital city of Bolivia.

Doug Stanhope: Voice of America – ABORTION IS GREEN.

Well, duh.

via YouTube – Doug Stanhope: Voice of America – ABORTION IS GREEN.

The world’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made last month the warmest March on record, according to federal government scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.

Taken separately, average ocean temperatures were the warmest for any March and the global land surface was the fourth warmest for any March on record.

Additionally, the planet has seen the fourth warmest January through March period on record, NOAA analysts conclude.

Arctic sea ice covered an average of 5.8 million square miles (15.1 million square kilometers) during March. This is 4.1 percent below the 1979-2000 average expanse, and the fifth-smallest March coverage since records began in 1979.

Ice coverage traditionally reaches its maximum in March, and NOAA scientists observed that this was the 17th consecutive March with below-average Arctic sea ice coverage.

Melanie Fitzpatrick, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the recent data are part of an overarching trend.

“The continuing warming trend of temperatures worldwide explodes the global cooling myth contrarians have been peddling for the past several years,” Fitzpatrick said.

“While we can’t draw strong conclusions from a single month, we know that global warming will bring more record-breaking temperatures in the future. Hot months are just a harbinger of a future that could include more heat waves, more droughts, and species extinctions as animals attempt to migrate to colder areas and run out of habitat,” she said.

“The good news is that the degree to which global warming affects our economy and environment is ultimately up to us,” Fitzpatrick said. “If we significantly reduce emissions, we can avoid the worst effects of climate change.”

via Global Temperatures Last Month Broke Heat Records for March.

A World Without Ice by Henry Pollack

Henry Pollack is a venerable scientist with a thousand stories to share. He’s been doing ice science for over 40 years. He’s also been explaining what he does, and the implications of what he and his colleagues have learned, for nearly as long. All of that experience makes A World Without Ice a great introduction to climate science.

Pollack doesn’t bother to tackle the climate change deniers head on. At this stage of the game, there’s really no point. Although surveys inform us that Americans remain stubbornly pig-headed about the subject, the rest of us are innovating and positioning ourselves to capitalize on the inevitably growing demand for greener, cleaner technology. For example, roughly thirty percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the buildings we live and work in. Reducing emissions from buildings (either by building new ones right or by retrofitting existing ones) not only lowers our overall carbon footprint but lowers utility bills, as well. So the deniers can fume all they want; they’ll modify their tune soon enough when their wallets are empty. Read the rest of this entry »

Climate is not weather and the group that seizes the story first is bound to control it best and longest. A sad but true rule of PR.

A panel of eminent U.S. and European scientists has confirmed the widespread scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is warming due to human activities, but said they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news of an error in a major climate report and hacked researcher e-mails.

In a symposium Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Science, AAAS, the scientific leaders acknowledged errors in a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and possibly impolitic email exchanges by East Anglian University climate researchers.

But they expressed shock at the political effects of the disclosures and said the impact was far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate.

via Top Scientists Affirm Consensus on Global Warming.

They expressed shock? Shock!? Sheeze…. Scientists and children….

A new bike wheel from the folks at MIT turns a regular bike into a hydrib e-bike. Called the Copenhagen Wheel, it was unveiled at COP15 on Dec. 15.

Smart, responsive and elegant, the Copenhagen Wheel is a new emblem for urban mobility. It transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. The Copenhagen Wheel allows you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time.

Controlled through your smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a natural extension of your everyday life. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you. As you cycle, the wheel’s sensing unit is also capturing your effort level and information about your surroundings, including road conditions, carbon monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity. Access this data through your phone or the web and use it to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve your exercise goals or to meet up with friends on the go. You can also share your data with friends, or with your city – anonymously if you wish – thereby contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.

How freekin cool is that? Want me one!