Satellite image of Jamestown (Photo: NASA)

From Green Right Now Reports

More than $200 million in spending and 4,000 Virginia jobs supported by the six million visitors each year to Jamestown, Chincoteague and Shenandoah National Park are at risk if climate change remains on its current path, according to a major new report issued this week by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Among the possible changes: a loss of Chincoteague’s beach, the complete flooding by higher tidal waters of historic Jamestown Island – site of the continent’s original English settlement in 1607 – and the decline of the brilliant fall colors of Shenandoah National Park.

The report details the wide range of impacts from higher temperatures, rising water levels and stronger hurricanes on Jamestown, which is a part of Colonial National Historical Park, Shenandoah National Park and Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

Jamestown is where America’s colonial history began, with the first permanent European settlement in what became the original colonies and then the United States. It also is where representative democracy in America began.

Chincoteague NWR on the southern end of Assateague Island on Virginia’s Atlantic coast has more than 14,000 acres of beach, forest, and marsh habitats that are home to a wide variety of migratory birds, plants, and other animals. Located just 70 miles from Washington, D.C., Shenandoah NP is a crown jewel of the United States’ national park system.

Higher seas resulting from human-caused climate change threaten Jamestown and Chincoteague NWR. Globally, three feet or more of sea-level rise is now believed to be most plausible by century’s end. Because the land along Virginia’s coastlines is naturally subsiding, the local rise of seas and tidal waters will be even greater than the global average. The report identifies such possible outcomes as the flooding of “virtually all of Jamestown Island” and “‘nothing less than a wholesale transformation’” of Chincoteague after sea-level rise of about three to four and a half feet by this century’s end.

Before Jamestown and much of Chincoteague may be inundated by higher water levels, key historical, archaeological, and natural resources could be destroyed or damaged by storm surges and erosion resulting from stronger hurricanes and coastal storms. At risk is the original Jamestown Fort of 1607, a corner of which has already been lost to erosion by the James River. The barrier island containing Chincoteague is at very high risk of fragmentation by the natural forces of winds and waves, augmented by unnaturally higher seas and stronger storms resulting from human-caused climate change.

Also threatened by erosion could be resources at the Yorktown battlefield, which like Jamestown is part of Colonial NHP. One key site at risk is Redoubt 10, on the edge of a cliff along a stretch of the York River that has suffered erosion over the years. This was the scene of a key battle won by Revolutionary forces under the command of Colonel Alexander Hamilton, part of the decisive final offense that led to the surrender a few days later of the British army at Yorktown, effectively ending the Revolutionary War. The nearby Moore House, at which the terms of surrender were arranged, is also potentially exposed to shoreline erosion.

The famous fall colors of the Shenandoah are at risk due to the projected invasion of less colorful pine and other trees considered to be more Southern.

Wild horses at Chincoteague National Wildlife refuge.

Higher temperatures are expected at all three sites. Jamestown and Chincoteague could be 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and Shenandoah 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, under one scenario. According to the report: “With the region’s largest temperature increases projected for the summer, intolerable heat may become a real problem (for would-be visitors) at Jamestown and perhaps Chincoteague.”

Extreme weather in the form of major downpours and more flooding could transform Shenandoah NHP. The amount of rain falling in heavy storms increased by 20 percent over the past century, and scientists believe there is at least a 90 percent likelihood that heavy downpours will become even more frequent and intense, causing more flooding. Shenandoah, with its steep mountain terrain, is particularly vulnerable to slope failure and debris flows during severe storms, as illustrated by a June 1995 storm in which about two feet of rain fell in a few hours, causing a mountainside slope in the park to give way, sending trees and boulders the size of houses tumbling downhill.

A review ordered by the United Nations has determined that the global panel on climate change needs to “fundamentally reform” how it functions in the wake of errors in a key report that damaged the group’s credibility leading up to last year’s Copenhagen climate summit.

The review was conducted by the InterAcademy Council, which groups 15 leading science academies. It came about after the “Climategate” scandal erupted in the face of errors and lack of documentation found in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 study, which suggested that carbon emissions from burning coal, gas and oil were already hurting the planet.

The review recommends an overhaul of the position of Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC. Just before the Copenhagen summit, the IPCC was rocked by a scandal involving leaked emails which critics say showed that the group had skewed data.

“I think the errors made did dent the credibility of the process — there’s no question about it,” said Harold Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University who led the review.

“Trust is something you have to earn every year. We think what we recommended will help.”

One part of the 938-page IPCC report said that Himalayan glaciers which provide water to a billion people in Asia could be lost by 2035 — an assessment later traced to a magazine article. The IPCC has admitted that the Himalayan glacier reference was wrong, but says its core conclusions about climate change are sound.

The review said the glacier reference showed that the IPCC — driven by a “confirmation bias” to prove ideas — did not pay close enough attention to dissenting viewpoints.

“There were a number of reviewers who pointed out that this didn’t seem quite right to them and that just was not followed through,” Shapiro said.

The UN review added that guidelines on source material for the IPCC were “too vague” and called for specific language  and enforcement on what types of literature are acceptable.

Pachauri, an Indian scientist, has come under criticism for having a vested interest because of business dealings with carbon trading companies. The review recommended creating a more permanent and professional position of IPCC chair, changing the current part-time arrangement. It also said that the chair tenure — two terms of six years each — is too long.

“Formal qualifications for the chair and all other bureau members need to be developed, as should a rigorous conflict-of-interest policy to be applied to senior IPCC leadership” and authors, the review said.

Greenpeace welcomed the review and cited severe weather this year — including Pakistan’s massive floods and Russia’s worst-ever heat wave — as evidence of global warming.

“Despite the muckraking and crude attempts to undermine the findings of the IPCC, the scientific consensus is clear, climate change represents a serious threat to the future of the environment and humanity,” the organization said.

The possible next big thing in the battle against climate change sounds like something straight out of science fiction. “Dry water” may be an effective new way to absorb and store carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

That was the finding of a group of scientists at the 240^th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, who added that the substance might also be a greener way to produce hundreds of consumer products and even store and transport potentially harmful industrial materials.

“There’s nothing else quite like it,” said Ben Carter, Ph.D., researcher for study leader Professor Andrew Cooper. “Hopefully, we may see ‘dry water’ making waves in the future.”

The substance in question became known as “dry water” because it consists of 95 percent water and yet appears as a dry powder. Each particle contains a water droplet surrounded by modified silica, the stuff that makes up ordinary beach sand. The silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into liquid. The resulting powder can absorb gases, which chemically combine with the water molecules to form what chemists term a hydrate.

Dry water was discovered in 1968 and first received attention for its potential use in cosmetics. Now, the substance seems to have real possibilities as a storage material for gases, including carbon dioxide. In laboratory-scale research, Cooper and co-workers found that dry water absorbed over three times as much carbon dioxide as ordinary, uncombined water and silica.

In previous studies, Cooper and colleagues demonstrated that dry water is also useful for storing methane, a component of natural gas, and may help expand its use as a future energy source. In particular, they hope that engineers can use the powder to collect and transport stranded deposits of natural gas. The powder could also provide a safer, more convenient way to store methane fuel for use in vehicles powered by natural gas.

From Green Right Now Reports

Global plant productivity that once was on the rise with warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline because of regional drought according to a new study of NASA satellite data.

Plant productivity is a measure of the rate of the photosynthesis process that green plants use to convert solar energy, carbon dioxide and water to sugar, oxygen and eventually plant tissue. Compared with a 6 percent increase in plant productivity during the 1980s and 1990s, the decline observed over the last decade is only 1 percent.

The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels and the global carbon cycle.

Researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana in Missoula discovered the global shift from an analysis of NASA satellite data. The discovery comes from an analysis of plant productivity data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite, combined with other growing season climate data, including temperature, solar radiation and water.

“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” Running said in a statement.

Previous research found land plant productivity was on the rise. A 2003 paper in the journal Science led by scientist Ramakrishna Nemani, now a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., showed the 6 percent increase in global terrestrial plant productivity between 1982 and 1999. The increase was traced to nearly two decades of temperature, solar radiation and water availability conditions, influenced by climate change, that were favorable for plant growth.

Setting out to update that analysis, Zhao and Running said they expected to see similar results as global average temperatures continued to climb. Instead, they found the negative impact of regional drought overwhelmed the positive influence of a longer growing season, driving down global plant productivity between 2000 and 2009. The team published its findings Thursday in Science.

“This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth,” Running said.

Zhao and Running’s analysis showed that since 2000, high-latitude Northern Hemisphere ecosystems have continued to benefit from warmer temperatures and a longer growing season. But that effect was offset by warming-associated drought that limited growth in the Southern Hemisphere, resulting in a net global loss of land productivity.

“This past decade’s net decline in terrestrial productivity illustrates that a complex interplay between temperature, rainfall, cloudiness, and carbon dioxide, probably in combination with other factors such as nutrients and land management, will determine future patterns and trends in productivity,” Diane Wickland, program manager of the Terrestrial Ecology research program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

Researchers want to continue monitoring these trends in the future because plant productivity is linked to shifting levels of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and stresses on plant growth that could challenge food production.

“Even if the declining trend of the past decade does not continue, managing forests and crop lands for multiple benefits to include food production, biofuel harvest, and carbon storage may become exceedingly challenging in light of the possible impacts of such decadal-scale changes,” Wickland said.

Looking for a little bit of positive environmental news amid the floods, record temperatures and out-of-control fires? According to German renewable energy institute IWR, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell 1.3 percent in 2009 to 31.3 billion tons, the first year-to-year decline in the past decade.

The institute identified the global economic crisis and increased investment in renewable energies for the slight decline.

IWR director Norbert Allnoch also noted a shift in the roster of the main culprits. While Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States showed emissions reductions, increased output in Asia and the Middle East erased much of the overall improvement.

“The energy-induced CO2 output in China in 2009 due to its economic growth has grown to a level now that is as high as that of the U.S. and Russia combined,” Allnoch said.

China in 2009 was the top polluter with 7.43 billion tons (up from 6.81 billion in 2008). Next came the U.S. (5.95 billion, down from 6.37 billion in ’08). Russia, India and Japan rounded out the top five.

Global CO2 emissions were still 37 percent above those in 1990, the basis year for the Kyoto Climate Protocol.

Concerns that fires ripping through forests already polluted by Chernobyl fallout could launch dangerous amounts of radioactivity into the air are unwarranted, scientists say, adding that real health risks are very small.

“Of the total radioactivity in the area, much less than one percent of it will be remobilized,” said Jim Smith, an expert on Chernobyl and a specialist in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Britain’s University of Portsmouth.

Radioactive contamination in the area has substantially diminished in the almost two and a half decades since explosions at Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 caused the world’s worst civil nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986.

“Most of the radioactivity is in the soil, which will not be affected by the fires, and only a small proportion is in the vegetation,” Smith said. “And only a very small proportion of that will get re-suspended in the smoke from the fires.”

Portsmouth’s Smith and Stig Husin, an analyst in emergency preparedness at the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, said the main threat from the fires both locally and nationally in Russia was the choking smoke from forest and peat fires, and the smog which is clouding the air in Moscow — all of which can cause lung and heart problems.

Husin said those living near the Chernobyl-contaminated areas where fires have been reported would be wise to protect themselves by staying inside or wearing masks.

“Naturally it would be good if you are living close to the fires to protect yourself from the smoke itself. If you do protect yourself then naturally you protect yourself from the radioactive substances that may be in the smoke.”

Antarctic sea ice is increasing slightly.

From Green Right Now Reports

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology report that, while Arctic sea ice clearly is on the wane, the Antarctic sea extent currently is increasing slightly.

In the face of an overall warming trend, how can this be? The group offered an explanation in a paper appearing in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

“We wanted to understand this apparent paradox so that we can better understand what might happen to the Antarctic sea ice in the coming century with increased greenhouse warming,” said Jiping Liu, a research scientist in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Currently, warming conditions accelerate the hydrological cycle, creating more precipitation in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, mostly in the form of snow. The snow stabilizes the upper ocean and insulates it from the ocean heat below, reducing the amount of melting occurring below the sea ice. (Snow also has a tendency to reflect atmospheric heat away from the sea ice, which reduces melting from above.)

Now, the bad news: Climate models predict that greenhouse gases will continue to increase, resulting in sea ice melting at a faster rate from both above and below. Increased warming will also result in a reduced level of snowfall, but more rain.

“Our finding raises some interesting possibilities about what we might see in the future. We may see, on a time scale of decades, a switch in the Antarctic, where the sea ice extent begins to decrease,” said Judith A. Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.