Meet the Bark Beetles

In the last decade, tiny forest-dwelling beetles have wiped out pine trees on millions of acres in the Canadian and American West, including Southern California. The rest of the state has been largely spared, but forest ecologists say that's likely to change.

Learn why in this piece I reported for KQED's Climate Watch.

Climate Change

Yikes! I've been away from this blog a really long time. I do have an excuse. A mountain lion ate my lap top.

Okay, seriously, I was single mom all this summer. Then I was drowning in real work (as opposed to this blog, which is just me making unpaid work for myself).

Anyway, among the projects keeping me from chattering is a new mini-gig contributing to ClimateWatch, produced by bay area NPR-station KQED. In radio reports and on it's execellent blog, ClimateWatch covers the science, politics and personal stories of global warming from a California perspective.

My first post for the ClimateWatch blog is a Q&A with David Nahai, former GM of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

I've just returned from the annual Society of Environmental Journalists Conference, held this year in Missoula, Montana. Nobel-laureate Steve Running offered a sobering overview of warming in that state over the last 40+ years: average temps up 1-2 degrees F, snow melting a couple weeks earlier, and aridification (stronger atmospheric evaporation) even though the precipitation is the same. The result, already: increased wildfires, bark beetles killing many conifers, and less water in streams in summer.

Michael Gibson of Trout Unlimited told us lower stream flows and warmer water is prompting the state to shut down trout fishing in August to protect fish. In the next 30 years, he expects trout to lose 5-30% of their Montana habitat.

I'd like to end on a cheery note, but, sorry, not this time.

The Future of Forests

I was delighted when Emily Green asked me to interview Ronald Lanner for her website Chance of Rain. I adore his beautiful book "Conifers of California" (Cachuma Press). Of course, I proceeded to propose a really depressing topic: how global warming might effect California's forests. It wasn't a cheery conversation, but, if you care about trees and the animals that live amongst them, you should give it a look.

IS: Several studies have found animal species are shifting their ranges northward and upslope in response to warming. Are we seeing changes in conifer distribution?

RL: It’s hard to know for sure. Unless you do a controlled experiment over long period of time, you’ll not get definitive answer, but there are strong indications. At high elevation, where lodgepole pinegrows, it has, for a good number of years, been invading meadows. And mountain hemlock has also done that in the Sierra. It’s believed that ponderosa pinehas had an increasing mortality rate at its lower elevation and is tending to do best at higher elevations.

The discussion continues on Chance of Rain.

Lives in the Balance

An article in the prestigious science journal Nature this week includes a sobering graphic. In it, the earth is sliced into nine wedges representing planetary systems such as climate, fresh water, ocean chemistry, biodiversity, changes in land use, and the nitrogen cycle. Three of them are very red, indicating humans have already interfered with the climate, biodiversity, and nitrogen cycles sufficiently to potentially threaten our own survival on the planet. In terms of biodiversity, the graphic illustrates what conservation biologists have been saying for some time: Humans are causing other species to wink out at a rate 100 to 1,000 times higher than what the fossil record indicates as a natural baseline.

The authors note that Homo sapiens evolved and thrived during an unusually stable period in the earth's history, a 10,000 year increment called the Holocene. "Such stability may now be under threat," the scientists say. Human activities could "push the Earth system outside the stable environmental state of the Holocene, with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world."

Click here for a summary of the paper. 

Note that "ocean acidification" refers to the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the oceans. The burning of fossil fuels is altering the chemistry of the seas, turning them more acid.

Climate Change in California

CALIFORNIA'S CHANGING CLIMATE
From my Series on Global Warming in California
(aired Fall 2006)

To many Californians, the Sierra Nevada is a special, even sacred place. It helped inspire the American preservation movement. Today, millions of people flock to its national parks, perhaps lured by the idea of wild nature, untrammeled by man. But as humans alter the world’s atmosphere, changes are a foot in Sierra parks. KPCC’s Ilsa Setziol hiked to treeline in Yosemite to bring us the second report in our series on global warming in California.

SETZIOL: Natural forces sculpted the land we know as Yosemite, over millions of years, into some of the planet’s most dramatic scenery. Glaciers cut into granite; snow-fed rivers carved out canyons. The glaciers have retreated, but snow fields continue to shape the Sierra. On a Summer day, Jan Van Wagtendonk of the U.S. Geological Survey leads me up Parker Pass on the eastside of the park.
(creek sound, with birds)

WAGTENDONK: Look at all the lupine and onions there along the stream.
It’s still spring up here. Here it is midAugust andtheflowers are in full bloom. ..It’s nice to be able to come up here and experience spring all over again.

SETZIOL: Fed by slowly melting snowfields, creeks here rush and gurgle in the summer. They water meadows, and sustain amphibians, and other animals through the dry season.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about what will happen with human-induced climate change. But one of the surest projections is loss of snow. Climate researchers say by the middle of this century the Sierra snow pack could decrease by roughly a third. Jan Van Wagtendonk says that could be a big problem.

WAGTENDONK: Much of the vegetation … depends on that snow melt. Mostly in the upper montane zone, for metering out of the water, through early summer, allows the red fir forest to sustain themselves. If all that shifts to rain and the rain goes downhill in the wintertime, they’ll be much less water available.

(sound of walking)
SETZIOL: As we climb from 9 to 10 to 11,000 feet, we discuss global warming projections for Western forests: larger fires…the possibility of new diseases moving up the mountains as they warm…stress on animals.

WAGTENDONK: the mountain yellow-legged frog would be affected dramatically if the streams dry up sooner.

SETZIOL: Then the forest falls away, and we emerge onto a pass between rocky peaks. Twisted vegetation, stunted by wind and cold, clings to thin soil. Reclining under a vast blue sky, snowfields bask in the sun.

WAGTENDONK: I never cease to be amazed. Always in awe of the grandeur.
(call of nutcracker)

SETZIOL: A trio of Clark’s nutcrackers perches in some white bark pines.

SETZIOL: so he’s gleening the seeds.
WAGTENDONK: out of the cone. He’s cleaning the pitch off his bark.

(bird sound under)
SETZIOL: The bird and the tree depend on each other. The nutcracker lives off the pine’s seeds. To store them for winter, the bird caches them in the ground, planting some seeds that otherwise would have remained locked in cones, or eaten by squirrels. Van Wagtendonk says global warming threatens both species in the Sierra.

WAGTENDONK: The white bark pine is very sensitive to summer heat. If the climate continued to be too warm over long extended period of time, they would be squeezed of the top. The way the white bark pine goes will be the way the Clark’s Nutcracker will have to go.

SETZIOL: Along with polar animals, species that live on the tops of mountains are most at risk from warming. Scientists are already documenting changes. (Although it’s unclear how much of current warming can be attributed to human activities instead of natural variability.) Jim Patten of UC Berkeley discovered some Sierra mammals have moved their ranges upslope more than a thousand feet in the last century. It’s a harbinger of how nature will respond to human-induced warming. A cute little cousin of the rabbit, the American pika, is losing ground. Scientists think it’s because it can’t tolerate warmer summers.

PATTEN: If it is indeed responding directly to temperature. That is an animal that’s going to get pushed off the crest of the Sierras. You get up to 14,000 feet and there’s no place to go. They’ll go extinct in the Sierras, and they’ll go extinct through out most of their range in the lower 48 in the US.

SETZIOL: Also at risk says Jim Patten: the alpine chipmunk.

PATTEN: It’s limited to the central sierra, it doesn’t occur outside the Yosemite, Sequoia Kings area. And so once it’s gone. It’s extinct forever.

(wind sound)
SETZIOL: At the top of Parker Pass the wind careens through gaps in the granite. Jan Van Wagendonk of the US Geological Survey rests at the lip of a turquoise lake.

WAGTENDONK: We’re at parker pass lake, a glacial tarn. Right at the point where the glaciers came through this area…And the snow is still here. Beautiful, beautiful day.

SETZIOL: Reluctantly, we turn to go. Van Wagtendonk tells me Yosemite’s climate has shifted cooler, warmer, drier, over hundreds of thousands of years. So, I ask him…why worry about global warming?

WAGTENDONK: I don’t want to be responsible for it. No! These ecosystems evolved over time without our intervention, we don’t want to make it worse for them one way or another.

SETZIOL: We descend. Past the chattering nutcrackers…down into the rustling pines…along the edges of meadows…and across creeks of steady, flowing, waters from above.
(bird and creek sound)

From Yosemite National Park, Ilsa Setziol, 89.3, KPCC

Find the audio and the rest of the series on the KPCC News Specials page.

Recommended Reading: The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Montly Press)