The heat is on

The cover story in the Economist magazine this week is global warming. The subhead says it all:

The uncertainty surrounding climate change argues for action, not inaction. America should lead the way.

Global warming, a serious environmental issue (perhaps the environmental issue of our time) is also a really nice way to link together the different subjects and lectures in Bio1B: Evolution; plants and ecology.

From the always entertaining Wikipedia:
In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer is travelling by air in first class and says "Look at me, I'm reading The Economist. Did you know Indonesia is at a crossroads?" Four days later, with its customary dry wit, The Economist alluded to the quote, and published an article about Indonesia referring to the "crossroads".

Anemic Phytoplankton

In the science journal Nature this week is a disturbing report that not only are phytoplankton in the tropical pacific limited by the levels of nitrate and iron in the water, but we have been consistently overestimating how much carbon dioxide they have been taking up because they produce a pigment complex that isn't chlorophyll but shows up just as green in satellite images. Doh!

CNR smorgasbord

A selection of items gleaned from the CNR website. The first concerns some of the long lived gymnosperms I mentioned today.

From an article in the SF Chronicle last week entitled Performing high-altitude research on global warming:

The famous bristlecones have endured countless challenges over the millennia, yet always seem to muster one more burst of life when spring warms the rocky dolomitic soil. Growing seasons may expand and shrink, but the trees carry on, their growth rings faithfully recording the bad years alongside the good.

From the CNR Breakthroughs magazine is a nice description of an ambitious program to catalogue the DNA of all the species on an entire island - the South Pacific island of Moorea, home to UC Berkeley's Richard B. Gump South Pacific Research station.

Also in the magazine is an article about the Exploring California Biodiversity program which sends Berkeley graduate students to teach in four Bay Area schools. I mention it here because they also involve undergraduates in the program. If you think you might be interested in teaching, or just want to gain some practical experience it is a tremendous opportunity. Check out their website and contact Betsy Mitchell if you are interested (it may be too late for the coming year, but it never hurts to ask).

Fertilizing the Oceans

The image to the left shows a satellite image of a 150km long phytoplankton bloom created during the 2002 Southern Ocean Iron (Fe) Experiment (SOFex). The arced distribution is due to oceanic currents and the bloom appeared only six weeks after the initial fertilization.

The fertilization involved adding iron to surface waters in two patches, each 15 kilometers on a side, so that the concentration of this micronutrient reached about 50 parts per trillion, increasing the natural level by about two orders of magnitude.

Each of these blooms consumed over 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide, but the crucial question is whether this carbon dioxide would be returned to the atmosphere, or would sink into deep waters as the phytoplankton died. One of the factors that determines which will occur is what type of organisms form the bloom. Diatoms, for example, are relatively heavy and sink easily. But the abundance of diatoms may be limited by silica as well as iron.

The results were published in the journal Science in 2004 and were reported on quite widely by the press. Here is a nice report by the Sciencedaily website.

Global warming threatens Californian wine industry

When we talked about species distributions I mentioned that one of the reasons for studying distributions was that many would be changing due to the effects of global warming. Well, a paper in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at how climate change might affect the areas suitable for wine production in the US. Grapevines are very susceptible to high temperatures and typical global warming scenarios lead to a reduction of the areas suitable for premium wine by up to 81%. This could obviously have significant consequences for the Californian economy.

The story has been picked up by the The San Francisco Chronicle and New Scientist Magazine, amongst others.