In 1996, Camille Parmesan published a paper in Nature magazine that supposedly was the first documentation that animal species (in this case Edith’s Checkerspot Butterflies) were shifting there range because of presumably anthropogenic climate changes. Parmesan told the New York Times, “I cannot say that climate warming has caused the shift; what I can say is that it is exactly what is predicted by global warming scenarios…”

Parmesan went on to look at additional species and her work, and other studies like hers that document shifting species ranges as the climate warms, are treated as “blockbusters” when the appear, most often in the world’s most prestigious scientific journals such as Science and Nature. These are accompanied by press releases and widespread media coverage that undoubtedly reverberates with the (mock?) horror of environmentalists worldwide. In fact, some studies have even taken the shifting-range-is-bad concept a step further, projecting that a quarter to a third of all the world’s species will be extinct in 50 years. The lead author of one such study published in Nature magazine, British University of Leeds’ Chris Thomas, told the Washington Post, “We’re not talking about the occasional extinction—we’re talking about 1.25 million species. It’s a massive number.”

Time and time again we at World Climate Report counter that the earth’s climate is normally quite variable, and if the earth’s plants and animals were not able to shift their behaviors and viable ranges there would be quite a few less of them on the world today (a category that probably includes the species homo sapiens as well). So plants and animals responding to climate change is hardly unexpected or catastrophic—what would be potentially catastrophic would be the exact opposite situation, that is, if plants and animals were not shifting as the climate varied.

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Guest Commentary

Joel Schwartz
Visiting Fellow
American Enterprise Institute

Growing plants absorb some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human burning of fossil fuels for energy. However, according to a new study in the journal Nature, ground-level ozone (AKA “smog”) will rise during the 21st Century and stunt plant growth. This will reduce CO2 uptake by vegetation, exacerbating CO2-induced greenhouse warming.

The study, which was performed by Stephen Sitch and colleagues from England’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change Research, is based on computer modeling of current and future ozone levels. To project future emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, Sitch et al. relied upon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) A2 scenario. The scenario includes projections of population, economic activity, energy use, and other factors that determined future emissions.

Unfortunately, comparison of Sitch et al.’s model results with actual trends in ozone and ozone-forming pollutants show that their study has nothing to do with reality.

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An article has appeared in the recent issue of Global Change Biology entitled “Little evidence for climate effects on local-scale structure and dynamics of California kelp forest communities.” Is this a mistake, a joke, or some kind of hoax? Did the authors, reviewers, and editors of this outstanding journal not get the message that global warming is destroying ocean ecosystems throughout the world? Everything on land and under the sea is enormously and negatively impacted by ongoing climate change related to the buildup of greenhouse gases – right?

Think again.

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The time of year has arrived for you begin to assess how much progress you are making in your New Year’s Resolutions. Been spending time at the gym? Losing weight? Quit smoking? Believe it or not, it is possible that the increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) just might be helping you achieve the latter. Read more to see how (as to the two former, you’re on your own).

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Over the past 20 years, approximately 5,000 articles have been published in major scientific journals showing how plants benefit from higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) with or without elevated temperatures. As CO2 concentration increases, plants substantially increase the rate of photosynthesis, rate of growth above and below ground, the water use efficiency, the production of fruit and seeds, and resistance to a variety of stresses. Critics of this positive response to elevated CO2 claim that many of these experiments are conducted in highly controlled laboratory conditions that may have little in common with what is happening in the real world. Outdoor experiments are also conducted, but in most cases, in something far less than “real-world” conditions. In the special case of forests, researchers must create clever experiments to overcome the obvious problems of waiting around a few decades or centuries to see the outcome of an experiment.

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Like many of you, we have a Christmas tree here decorated with candy canes with a cute little coal train running around the base. The smell of pine is terrific and we are looking forward to eating the candy canes after the holidays. We are all planning a great holiday season and we are looking forward to a bright future. We hope you and your family share our optimism during this fun time of the year.

Today, we will turn out attention to the state of affairs for the tree and the candy canes, and we searched the literature for any updates on how pine trees and sugar cane will fare in a world of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Given that the literature contains literally thousands of articles on the positive effects of elevated CO2 on plants, we were optimistic that recent material could be found. Of course, three articles were located within minutes dealing with elevated CO2, pine trees, and sugarcane.

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A newly-released report (available here) details the results of a 2005 workshop jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanagraphic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) on ocean acidification. Oceans are projected to become slightly more acidic because of increased absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This could affect coral reefs and other marine organism that produce calcium carbonate for their skeletons. Acid dissolves carbonate.

Generally, the report concludes that 1) the world’s oceans will acidify over the 21st century, and 2) that marine calcifying organisms (including corals and coral reefs) will be greatly harmed.

Heard this before. With regard to global warming, simply substitute any object (oceans, pandas, humans) and add the words “greatly harmed.” Amazing, though, that the planet has warmed for 100 years and human life expectancies have doubled, isn’t it?

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“Scientific research based on fact—not ideology.” That’s what Democratic hopeful John Kerry is promising. But there are some pertinent facts about global warming that Kerry will probably ignore.

Kerry has recently attacked President Bush’s record on science, including his actions on the issue of climate change. He accuses Bush of underplaying the threats climate change poses and the role humans play in it, and ignoring the scientific consensus on the issue.

Yet if Kerry his true to his word, it will only be a matter of time before Kerry stands alongside the President on the issue of anthropogenic climate change—for scientific facts stand in stark contrast to the climate-change-is-catastrophic ideology.
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Coral bleaching, long considered an indicator of demise, creates an opportunity for reefs to adapt by creating a new symbiotic relationship with different, and better-adapted, algae.

Delicate coral reefs, bleaching their way to death in the wake of a warmer ocean. Paints a vivid picture, doesn’t it?

In fact, the false paradigm of the Fragility of Nature is perhaps the greatest misconception foisted upon the public in the last 40 years. Just ask any 9th grade science student, and he’ll happily spew forth dogma about “small environmental changes upsetting the delicate balance between ecosystems.”

But any scientist who believes in basic evolutionary principles (that should cover about 99% or more of all scientists, right?) knows that uber-sensitivity in a species is the recipe for extinction. Most of the species around today have stood the test of time–they’ve adapted strategies that allow them to survive a wide variety of extreme conditions.

For environmental scaremongers, the inherent problem with global warming is that it happens far too slowly. This gives species plenty of time to adapt. In many cases, this simply involves moving to a warmer/cooler/wetter/drier locale. Of course, that’s also the reason why no one has ever produced a major non-fiction motion picture about global warming: Who wants to watch a movie about 200 years of gradual climate change?

Which brings us to our main topic for today: The supposed demise of tropical coral reefs as evidenced by coral bleaching. This is a major concern for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, no doubt because of Arizona’s extensive coastline. In his global warming floor debate on October 30, 2003, McCain worried about the destruction of “70% of the heat-sensitive coral reefs in the world due to increases in water temperatures——[that] place reef fisheries in jeopardy. I don’t know what happens when the beginning of the food chain disappears.”

Corals are a perfect candidate for global warming hyperbole: They collectively house a cute animal (tropical fish, which are the koala bear of oceania), they can’t relocate so adaptation is tougher, and they seem to respond to small increases in water temperature by a very strange adaptive strategy–death.

But as you might suspect, the real story is a lot more complicated. Corals have a symbiotic relationship with certain photosynthetic algae in the genus Symbiodinium. The algae get nutrients from the corals and the corals acquire photosynthetic products from the algae. There are different groups (or clades) of Symbiodinium that vary genetically and that can benefit corals in different ways.

When bleaching occurs, corals essentially reject the Symbiodinium and thus lose their color. One of several potential causes of coral bleaching is high water temperatures. After bleaching occurs, large numbers of corals die. So it may seem that bleaching is not a very good evolutionary strategy.

But some corals manage to survive these bleaching events, which allows them to acquire new Symbiodinium that are potentially better adapted to their new environment (the parallels to divorce and second marriage are far too obvious, so we needn’t go there).

In a paper that appeared in Nature three years ago, Andrew Baker proposed that bleaching may be an excellent strategy employed by corals that sacrifices short-term benefits for longer-term gains. That line of thinking would account for corals surviving for millions of years through much harsher climate changes than those that have been experienced over the last few decades.

Now, two new papers in Science add further evidence that corals must not be as “fragile” as certain senators might hope. Cynthia Lewis and Mary Coffroth of SUNY-Buffalo bleached Caribbean corals and exposed them to certain Symbiodinium genotypes for six weeks. The corals not only re-established symbiotic relationships with the algae, but in some cases they changed algae species, giving the corals a unique opportunity to select symbionts based upon the environmental conditions.

The second Science paper, by Angela Little and two coauthors from Townsville, Australia, looked at changing symbiotic relationships over the lifetime of the corals. They found that young juvenile corals tended to interact with different Symbiodinium strains than did adults, which “suggests that there maybe ‘active’ selection by the host to maximize symbiont effectiveness that varies with differences in physiological requirements between juvenile and adult corals.”

So death is not the corals’ only response to change. The ability of corals to shuffle symbionts is an effective adaptive strategy for dealing with environmental changes, such as changes water temperatures and light levels.

Add these two studies to a growing case file in support of the resiliency (rather than the fragility) of Nature. While coral bleaching appears to be mass suicide to uninformed senators, it could actually be an excellent adaptive strategy that has allowed the species to survive for millions of years.

References:

Little, A.F., M.J.H. van Oppen, and B.L. Willis, 2004. Flexibility in algal endosymbioses shapes growth in reef corals. Science, 304, 1492–1494.

Lewis, C.L., and M.A. Coffroth, 2004. The acquisition of exogenous algal symbionts by an octocoral after bleaching. Science, 304, 1490–1492.

Baker, A.C., 2001. Reef corals bleach to survive change. Nature, 411, 765 –766.

Human-induced climate change is not leading to mass species extinctions, nor should it in the future.

On March 29, 2004, a pair of Congressional briefings exposed the bad science currently being published on climate change and mass extinction. Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and senior fellow in environmental studies at Cato Institute,

Michaels examined the plethora of recent claims concerning anthropogenic climate change and its possible link to past, present, and future species shifts and extinctions. Michaels’ overarching conclusions? 1.) Climate affects species distribution. 2.) Plants and animals adapt, evolve, or perish under changes in climate. 3.) That process may be slowed or accelerated by human activities. 4.) Little evidence exists to suggest anthropogenic climate change is leading to mass extinctions, nor should in the future.
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