A message from John Cooper, past president of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, and Steve Williams, executive director of the Wildlife Management Institute and past director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Welcome to Beyond Seasons’ End, a site designed exclusively for wildlife and fisheries professionals confronting the threat of global climate change. The site is a response to comments from many of you calling for an electronic work space that (more…)

The draft of the National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy is available for review and comment until March 5.  A collaborative effort among  federal, state, and tribal partners with input from many other diverse groups from across the nation, the strategy proposes a unified approach for reducing the negative impacts of climate change on fish, wildlife, plants, and the natural systems upon which they depend.

Hunters and anglers may be first to notice fish and wildlife responses to climate change. Photo: AFWA

Seeking to establish a nation-wide framework  for conserving fish, wildlife and ecosystem functions in a changing climate, the draft document

• summarizes the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on various ecosystems
• sets seven goals for immediate and future actions to protect natural resources
• suggests ways that government, conservation organizations and private stakeholders can integrate and implement the strategy

Public workshops will be held at several locations around the country as well as on line to promote discussion of the draft strategy. Comments may be submitted on line.

Media reports from December’s U.N.-sponsored talks on climate change in Durban frequently describe it as accomplishing little, as an overall failure to solve climate issues on an international level. Yet other observers claim the conference produced a package of agreements  “essential for any hope of a meaningful contribution to mitigation and adaptation to climate change out of this forum, but it also avoided a disaster that would have sent this process back to where it started in 1992.”

Andrew Light, director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University and a fellow at Center for American Progress, continues his analysis of the achievements of Durban by citing six key changes in the design of international climate agreements:

•  The Kyoto Protocol and its component parts will continue.
•  The Green Climate Fund, along with it other components of the Cancun Agreements like the new Clean Technology Center and Network  is no longer simply a concept but is now a reality.
• There is now a work plan in place to bridge the gap between parties’ unilateral pledges to reduce their emissions by 2020 and the actions needed to realize a path to limiting temperature rise to 2 degree Celsius.
• Durban resulted in a process to produce a legal instrument to replace both the Cancun Agreements and the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.
• Durban tore down the firewall between developed and developing countries. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “The deal … ends  this differentiation between the developed and the developing [countries] in terms of what we all have to do to meet this global challenge.”
• By requiring the new Durban Platform to produce a legal agreement that applies to all parties equally, the obstacle of a 1997 U.S. Senate resolution rejecting consideration of a climate treaty that divided responsibilities between developed and developing countries was overcome.

Linked to climate change, trend is expected to continue

As of the first of December , 12 billion-dollar weather disasters  had occurred in the U.S. in 2011, breaking any single year’s record for costly floods, droughts, wildfires, windstorms, blizzards and tornadoes.  The number of disasters in 2011 could climb higher as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) continues to collect data from two storms it has not yet declared breaking the billion-dollar damage mark, the October Northeast snowstorm and Tropical Storm Lee. The 12 storms cost 646 people their lives.

At least some of the increases in the number and intensity of natural disasters is attributable to climate change, according to NOAA’s chief, Jan Luchenco. Speaking at the meeting  of the American Geophysical Union this fall, Lubchenco warned, “What we are seeing this year is not just an anomalous year, but a harbinger of things to come for at least a subset of those extreme events that we are tallying.”  

The reinsurer Munich Re estimates the aggregate damage caused by the 12 disasters totals $52 billion. And this company, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, asserts there is a connection between the increase in natural disasters and climate change: “The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change.”

Well known climatologist Kenneth Trenberth explains that the increasing intensity of storms is linked to  warmer air holding a greater amount of water vapor. Compared to 30 years ago, there is about a 4 percent increase in atmospheric moisture, supplying storm systems with additional energy.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels jumped last year by 564 million tons, the largest absolute increase ever recorded. The degree of annual increase, nearly 6 percent, was greater than any since 2003, signaling that the drop in emissions caused by the recent world-wide economic recession would not be sustained.

Scientists contributing to the report issued by the Global Carbon Project  do not think 2010’s extraordinary growth in emissions will persist. Rather, they expect yearly growth to be around 3 percent – close to triple the growth rate in the 1990s.

Due largely to the aggressive building of coal-fired electrical plants, China emerged as the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases. Its emissions increased by 10.4 percent in 2010, compared to 4 percent in the U.S. Together the two countries account for 50 percent of the overall increase in greenhouse gases. In contrast, other industrialized countries which were signatories of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol have reduced their emissions overall, achieving the targeted reduction in emissions of about 8 percent below 1990 levels.

The 2010 level of emissions push the forecast for future temperature averages beyond the worst-case scenarios of earlier projections. Climate scientists cite the inability to curb the rise in emissions, let alone the failure to halt emissions, as surely increasing the difficulty, if not guaranteeing the impossibility, of forestalling drastic changes in the climate in the coming decades.

The Global Carbon Project was formed in 2001 to assist the international science community in establishing a common, mutually agreed-upon knowledge base to support policy debate and actions to slow the rate of increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

So the Earth warms a few degrees before the end of the century; so what. The Earth has adapted to dramatic climate changes over the billion-years course of its existence; in all likelihood it will adapt again. However, from the immediate and human perspective, these are three of the innumerable reasons that humans of the early twenty-first century could justify drastically curbing the continued accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases. 

Impacts on global fisheries:

With pollution, habitat degradation and other human-caused conditions already compromising their resiliency, many marine species will be challenged to adapt to climate-change induced rising water temperatures and alterations in the oceans’ chemical cycling. Fisheries’ abundance and distribution will shift, affecting the availability of seafood for consumption and the revenue of fish-dependent economies. From a study published in the journal Nature, the following chart presents a broad synopsis of the likely effects of climate change on global fisheries.   

Surprise! Another feedback cycle to calculate in climate change projections:

Alaskan landscape of thawing permafrost. Satellite image: USGS.

Rapidly rising temperatures in northern latitudes are accelerating the thawing of permafrost. Ground thawed for the first time in eons is releasing greenhouse gases from decayed plants that have been frozen and trapped for tens of thousands of years. This new source of greenhouse gases accelerates warming, which speeds the melting of permafrost, which releases more gases and amplifies warming … It is a feedback cycle largely overlooked in climate change projections.

Permafrost Carbon Research Network scientists estimate that previously permanently frozen ground up to 10 feet deep could soften and thaw, becoming a bigger factor in the global warming equation than the cutting of forests. Authors of a report issued in Nature calculate that the released gases would increase the speed of warming 20 to 30 percent above the rate produced by fossil fuel emissions alone. Analysis of the network’s findings suggest that global warming is likely to be worse than expected, according to Jay Zwally, a NASA polar scientist who wasn’t part of the study.

More heat + less water = reduced yields: how will the world respond?

Food or fuel? Photo: NRCS

For years scientists have expressed concern over the long-term effects a warmerclimate would have on the water cycle – on seasonal rains and snow-pack melt and water-table levels – and the consequences of such change on the world’s agricultural production.  But crop researchers at American universities are saying that high temperatures themselves pose a danger, disrupting botanical processes such as pollination and shrinking the output of many crops and vegetables. 

According to Gerald Nelson, an economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute, “With temperatures rising, we are going to have trouble maintaining the yields of crops that we already have.”  It is estimated  that for every one degree Celsius that temperature rises above a grain crop’s optimum, yield declines by 10 percent. 

As climate change increasingly affects food security, food, in the words of Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute,  becomes the hidden driver of world politics. Brown cites  twin causes of food insecurity: population growth and climate change. He advocates integrating world agricultural policy with energy, population and water policies and cautions, “ If we cannot produce higher crop yields with less water and conserve fertile soils, many agricultural areas will cease to be viable … If we cannot move at wartime speed to stabilize the climate, we may not be able to avoid runaway food prices. If we cannot accelerate the shift to smaller families and stabilize the world population sooner rather than later, the ranks of the hungry will almost certainly continue to expand. The time to act is now …”

Only in 2007, with unusual climatic conditions hastening its reduction, did sea ice dwindle more severely than in 2011. According to NASA, average ice extent for September 2011 was 1.78 million square miles, nearly a million square miles below the 1979-2000 average.

For the past five years, ice extent for the month of September has been the lowest in satellite records. This year, climatic conditions were similar, but not as extreme, as those in 2007, when ice extent reached its minimum. This year, temperatures in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas were near average, although north of Greenland and in Canadian Archipelago, conditions were even warmer than in 2007. Data indicate above normal temperatures on the surface of the Arctic Ocean in 2011, although temperature anomalies were not as extreme as in 2007.

Ice remains younger, thinner

Data on ice age show that coverage of the oldest, thickest ice types (ice four years or older) has declined over the past 28 years. First- and second-year ice made up 80% of the ice cover in the Arctic Basin in March 2011, compared to 55% on average from 1980 to 2000.

As in recent years, northern shipping routes opened up this summer. Both the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route were open for a period during September.

Causing sea-level rise, melting Arctic ice affects coastal economies world-wide. Photo: US Coast Guard

How much economic damage is done by one ton of carbon dioxide emissions? A group of economists argues that the government’s estimate of $21 per gallon omits risks associated with climate change and downplays the impact of current emissions on future generations.

The analysis offered by E-3, a 200-member network of economists, considers these factors and significantly raises the social cost of carbon – the estimated price of economic damage caused by carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. The network’s analysis identified four major uncertainties that the government’s estimate failed to adequately consider:

• the sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gases
• the level of economic damages expected at low temperatures during the early stages of global warming
• the level of damages expected under higher temperature or catastrophic climate change scenarios
• the appropriate way to value future costs and benefits of climate change

                Potential consequences of these climatic uncertainties include sea-level rise, increased frequency and intensity of weather events, changes in agricultural productivity and the availability of fresh water, all of which have economic impacts.

Using DICE, the best known of the models used by the government’s working group, E-3 incorporated these uncertainties, developed 16 possible scenarios and projected the social cost of carbon to be between $28 and $893 per ton.

An accurate assessment of the social cost of carbon is necessary for reliable cost-benefit analyses on which policy and regulations are based.

E-3 (Economics for Equity & Environment) is a national network of economists developing and applying economic arguments for active protection of human health and the natural environment.