Recently in Climate Category

Since my beginning as a Post-Doc at the University of Maine's EML, I had several opportunities to travel to the west coast... not just to brag about how much more quaint and authentic New-England is, but mostly to share and do my work...  Today I'm back west once again, staying in the Friday Harbor Labs of the University of Washington.  This time is my first participation to a more focused and high-level workshop with seasoned oceanographers under the theme "Global Ocean Ecosystems and Climate".

But before the hardcore science begins, it's time for a short follow-up on a previous blog entry from Andy, while he was traveling this area a year ago.  Andy took an air-borne picture of the northwest part of San Juan Island (Henry Island's shape is unmistakable), and the actual route taken by my own ferry.  Andy is an accomplished oceanographer (and incidentally my boss), so please praise with me his instinctive analysis, in which he correctly guessed that the difference in surface waters' reflectance was caused by oily algae products.

The first picture below shows the intricate smooth and rough surface water features he talked about from a ferry's deck point of view.

The second, though a little blurred, shows what's in the slicks: algae washed off from the shore!

Add these two blog entries and you get the idea behind modern oceanography. Just replace the iPhone shot from a plane by a few $M satellite sensor and a couple of unreliable Canon PowerShot pictures with a few $100K scientific sampling cruise. Now you know how oceanographic knowledge is acquired and validated.  Next step, integrate everything and fill the gaps with models... Hey, that's what we happen to do in the EML!

 

Stay tuned for daily updates on this workshop (that's my resolve, for now...).

 

A fun part of being a grad student, is making bonds beyond the regular "have-to-share-the-same-open-area-office" friendship. The challenges to overcome are so tough, the emotions shared are so strong than you can never break those bonds. So last week was emotional for me, as I assisted to the Ph.D. thesis defence of my last two buddies from my grad school modeling lab.

Both worked on the Hudson Bay system, a very exciting environment to work on. It's the southernmost Arctic sea, a transition zone between the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean at the forefront of the impacts of the current global warming.

Pierre St-Laurent defended brilliantly the 17th of May his thesis entitled "Variabilité saisonnière et interannuelle des eaux douces dans les mers Arctiques : Le cas de la baie d'Hudson".

Pierre showed the audience how the fresh-water budget is regulated in the Hudson Bay. He tackled both liquid and solid (seasonal sea-ice) aspects of it. As an example of how great a tool is modeling in a well formed scientific mind, he first studied this issue with a realistic high resolution sea-ice / ocean 3-D circulation model of the Hudson Bay, developed in the numerical modeling lab of ISMER in Rimouski.

He then constructed an idealized system to sort out the relative importance of the various hydrological, atmospheric and oceanic forcing.

This allowed him to demonstrate for the first time the role of changing wind regimes in the periodic retention/expulsion of fresh water from the Hudson Bay towards the North-West Atlantic.

Pierre will soon lend his brain as a post-doc to the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA

(He's too modest to agree for me to tell you that there is a tenure track position attached at the end of his 3 years as post-doc).

Virginie Sibert defended not less brilliantly the 20th of May her thesis entitled "Modélisation de la variabilité saisonnière et de la sensibilité au climat des productions glacielle et pélagique de la baie d'Hudson".

Virginie managed to build a model of primary and secondary production within the sea-ice in Hudson Bay.

She coupled this to the ice compartment of the same high-resolution 3-D circulation model than Pierre. After characterizing the spatio-temporal patterns of this system, she coupled it further with an NPZD pelagic production model to have a complete picture of the primary production in the system.

View image

After a rigorous validation process which guaranteed a good confidence in the model results, she finally tested one of the IPCC scenario of climate change (A2) for the Hudson Bay system.

A nice outcome of her work is that the Hudson Bay system would not, for its most part, pass a tipping point yet. Primary production of both ice algea and phytoplankton would increase, even if their respective blooms would occur sooner in the season.

Virginie has already brought her talent and charm as a post-doc in the IFREMER lab of Brest, France.

Today, I just turned 31.

I was born in a world where the ratio of our Ecological Footprint (EF) to the Biocapacity (BC) of the planet was still below one, around 0.9 (Niccolucci et al. 2009). This simple metric means that I was born in a world where the total demand of humanity remained within the regenerative capacity of the Earth. The economic metaphor is probably timely nowadays: in 1979, we could still live on the dividends in the form of renewable flows of ecological resources and services, without touching the ecological capital. This is not the case anymore. Today, we are in a situation of serious ecological debt. This debt built up as the exponentially increasing human population and standard of life since the end of WWII consumed more and more natural resources which could not be compensated by the natural capacity of production of the ecosystems (I'm not even talking about non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels).

This situation of chronic ecological deficit led from the mid 80's to a depletion of the ecological capital, hampering its recuperation. For example, if some fish stocks are overexploited, the following year the marine ecosystems will be able to produce less fish, from which however it is still expected to replenish the stocks while sustaining our fisheries. Unfortunately, contrary to its economic counterpart, an ecological debt cannot be bailed out until we find another habitable planet.

So what do we do? Because humans are swarming and agitating more and more every day, we should agitate in the right direction. One out of several promising avenues has its roots in the very functioning of ecosystems. What if we get rid of the concept of waste ? Simple and feasible, according to the American designer McDonough and the German chemist Michael Braungart who elaborated a complete economic philosophy around the concept of "cradle to cradle", first put forth in the 70's. The idea is to design from the conception products that will circle again and again in the production lines. Out the plastic clips, in the stainless steel screws.

Use the type on the left (a great canadian design...), and not the incredibly dumb one-way head on the right, please !

Today, I enjoyed my birthday party with my two children. They were born at a time when the ecological debt we created was steadily increasing. Incidentally, we watched together "Happy Feet". It's a sign, when a popular kids movie depicts humans as aliens pillaging the ecosystem of Antarctica... My wish this year is to begin the journey toward a future where my kids will witness the ending of this movie coming true (Just watch it, it's a fair animated musical...).

The coolest part of the media experience has been watching the story spread around the world.  This is a testament to the global reach of the BBC as well as the global interest in carbon issues, especially in Europe.  As of 8:30 EST on 3/1, stories based on the BBC report have appeared in FranceSlovenia

Note:l my ambition to blog each day fizzled like a Portland (OR) rainstorm.  We'll try to add some additional reports from the meeting in the coming days. 

For me, the most memorable part of the meeting was being invited to do a press conference--something I've never done before.  I was invited to give a regular science talk in a session on the impact of climate change on marine ecosystems.  I thought I would use this as an opportunity to talk about some calculations I've done characterizing the carbon footprint of whaling (see this earlier post).  AGU, one of the societies that was running the meeting, thought the news media would be interested in this topic.

The hardest part was deciding to do it.  Since I hadn't presented my calculations to many other scientists, I was worried that there was something I was overlooking.  Visions of cold fusion were dancing in my head.  In the end, I decided to go for it.  To prepare, I organized a mock press conference at GMRI, with my colleagues acting as journalists.  This was extremely helpful.  At the conference, I spoke for about 15 min:

and then took questions.  In addition to the reporters in the room, there were a couple joining on the phone.  I then spoke with several reporters one-on-one, including the BBC:

The BBC story was online by 11PM (PST) last night, and by this morning, it had been translated into Hungarian, Slovenian, and Italian (I didn't know I was fluent in Italian).  Here are some links to a few of the stories, if you're interested in reading more.  All in all, a really fun experience.

BBC

Environmental Research Web

Discovery News

The meeting officially starts tomorrow (Sunday) night, so why did I fly out on Friday?     Science has always relied on communication and collaboration--hence, the need for conferences.  Oceanography is an inherently interdisciplinary field, but it is very hard to get truly interdisciplinary projects funded. One way to get some interdisciplinary work done is to organize a workshop.  The idea behind a workshop is to get a few very busy people to take a few days from their day-to-day work in order to work together on a common problem.  So, this is why I'm spending this weekend in a conference room instead of hiking with my family.

The point of this weekend's workshop is to develop a better understanding of how changes in the Arctic affect the North Atlantic.  I've stumbled into this line of research by uncovering a dramatic change in the Gulf of Maine plankton community that took place around 1990.  Turns out, lots of other things changed right around that time: the waters became less salty and began flowing faster, herring became more abundant and right whale calves became rarer.  Many of these changes were observed from New Jersey up to Newfoundland.  The best explanation so far is that these changes originated when the winds over the Arctic pushed a slug of fresh water and ice into the North Atlantic.  This created a pocket of fresher water that eventually moved down to the Gulf of Maine:

 The conditions that created this slug persisted through much of the 1990s.  The workshop, organized by my colleague (and former Ph. D. advisor) Chuck Greene, has brought together biologists like me, physical oceanographers, and Arctic climate specialists to try to get a better understanding of exactly what happened. 

Andy's concerns about discriminating wisely between trend and noise, between low-frequency and high-frequency signals in time series of environmental variables (Air temperature in his example), apply as well to measurable quantities in ecosystems. Particularly relevant is the phenology of the species, which defines the timing of crucial recurrent events of their life cycle, like the date of first arrival to the nesting ground, the date of germination, the date of mating, the date of blooming etc. You may have noticed that I used examples related to birds and plants. Well, while phenology is a general concept, an empirical knowledge patiently accumulated by bird lovers and Sunday gardeners of the 19th and 20th centuries was first to be translated into systematic scientific surveys. And following rigorous statistical analyses of those long time series of observations, it has been firmly established that changes in the phenology of most species accompanied trends in temperature. The strength of the correlation is all the more important as the seasonality (latitude) of the ecosystem and the dependance of the species to their environment increase. The connection with climate change issues is straightforward. And it is not just about how one species or another will cope with changes of its environment, but rather about the interlocked interactions between all those species.

If you can easily think at a beautiful tulip as a species embedded in its environment, it is the same, in a more dynamic way, for planktonic marine species. Now oceanographers begin to benefit of the fruits of several long lasting monitoring programs. Unfortunately, the ever increasing pace of global climate change means that oceanographers are required to draw firm conclusions about the impact of environmental variability on ecosystems and develop predictive capabilities in the meantime ! And this will remain an elusive target as long as the mechanisms gearing those changes are not understood properly. Daunting task, as the changes in timing of such major event as diapause entrance and exit emerge form several layers of physiological and behavioral processes obeying their own dynamics while interacting with each others. But impossible is not known at the EML, so we decided to model the mechanisms behind the diapause of the dominant copepod Calanus finmarchicus. We already know that even if it can produce several generation a year, this critically important species thrives in its seasonal environment (Northern half of the North Atlantic) thanks to its diapause strategy, which means killing time at depth in order not to be killed by the detrimental conditions prevailing at the surface in winter. For this purpose, it makes a feast on large phytoplankton cells (mainly diatoms) during the short period they are available, and build up impressive amount of energy rich lipid reserves. Those swimming droplets of lipid are in turn the basis for the rest of the upper trophic levels.

And what about changes then ? Things are more sparse there... Records of physiological properties related to the diapausing strategy are about a decade old now. Not enough really to study trends on climatological scales, but enough to understand that interannual variability is high (see figure). But abundance data are enough to see changes, especially in areas localized at its biogeographical fringe. In the North Sea for example, the ecosystem shifted from a copepod population dominated by 80% of C. finmarchicus before the 60's to a present state dominated by 80% of its southern congener C. helgolandicus. What is the role of diapause in that ? Not known yet. One thing is certain though: changes occur at an ever accelerating pace, and the unforeseen consequences for the ecosystems are likely to appear before our eyes while we are still racing to improve our understanding. I strongly wish that Copenhagen "talks" will end up with agreements as legally constraining on our leaders than the climate changes will be actually constraining on us.

Superimposed to the climatological (2004-2008) relative abundance of the different copepodid stages are box plots of the estimated dates of initiation (late winter) and termination (summer) of diapause in Calanus finmarchicus in the Gulf of Maine. Data from UNH COOC WB-7 station. Figure from James J. Pierson.

"Have you been outside today? It's 60 degrees in late November. I mean there's a Christmas Tree in front of this building and guys are wearing flip flops. I mean, you can't say this isn't real."

For those who missed it, here's the link to Al Gore's "Out-crazy the crazy" approach to dealing with climate change and other environmental problems:



The way we've ignored these dangers, and in some cases clung to denial, does border on crazy.