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Atlantic Current Slowdown 2 Kyoto Relocated Carbon Production 2 Cosmic Rays and Clouds 4 Earth’s Sensitivity to Carbon Dioxide 4 Climate Change and Body Size 5 Europe’s Windy Future 6 tm BriefingS | Climate Change & Environment 2

national emissions are debat- OCEANOGRAPHY able, however, because it may Briefings encourage so-called carbon Atlantic current leakage, in which carbon-inten- slowdown sive production is relocated out-

Scientific American Briefings: Climate ckph oto to side national borders. Change & Environment consists of / i S summaries of recent peerreviewed articles Researchers have long the- Rahel Aichele and Gabriel from the scientific literature. It draws these orized that the ocean’s thermo- V i ck ers Felbermayr of the University of ott

summaries from the journals of Nature Sc Publishing Group, including Nature, Nature haline or meridional over- Munich, Germany, compiled a Hillside fires in California. Climate Change, Nature Geoscience, Nature turning circulation — an ocean set of annual data on the carbon Physics and the Nature Reviews journals. “conveyor belt” driven by tem- and/or shifting of habitat for footprint — the sum of domestic Mariette DiChristina perature and salinity gradients, many species. As a result there is carbon emissions and net emis- Senior Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, Scientific American which includes the warm North growing interest in proactive ad- sions embodied in trade — of 40 Philip Yam Atlantic Gulf Stream — might aptation strategies, perhaps the countries from 1995 to 2007. Managing Editor, Online, Scientific American slow down as a result of climate most controversial of which is Their model allowed them to John Rennie change. But this has proven dif- assisted colonization, in which isolate the impact of the pro- Contributing Editor, Scientific American ficult to measure. species are moved to new suit- tocol commitments on domestic Michael Mrak Uwe Send of the Scripps In- able habitat that they could not emissions from the impact on Design Director, Scientific American stitution of Oceanography in have reached on their own. the overall carbon footprint. The Philip Campbell Editor-in-Chief, Nature California, and colleagues, Conservation biologist Helen researchers also estimated the looked at readings from three Regan, at the University of Cali- impact of the protocol on the Steven Inchcoombe Managing Director, Nature Publishing Group, moored buoys that are part of fornia, Riverside, USA, and col- carbon-import ratio — the and President, Scientific American the Meridional Overturning leagues focused on Tecate cy- amount of emissions embodied Mike Florek Variability Experiment (MOVE) press, a rare fire-dependant tree in imports relative to domestic Executive Vice President, Scientific American array, anchored at either end of found in California. They emissions. An increase in the Bruce Brandfon a single 1,000-km strip running tracked the impacts of climate ratio indicates that carbon Vice President and Publisher, Scientific American eastwards from Guadalupe, change on the tree’s habitat to leakage has occurred. Wendy Elman Vice President, Digital Solutions, Scientific American north of Venezuela. Data from investigate whether assisted col- Michael Voss January 2000 to June 2009 onization could help offset Vice President and Associate Publisher, Marketing showed a 20 percent decrease in threats, such as habitat loss and and Business Development, Scientific American deep-ocean southward flow altered fire regimes. Christian Dorbandt across this line. This is the first The results suggest that as- Managing Director, Consumer Marketing, Scientific American direct observation of interan- sisted colonization could be an Matt Hansen nual and decadal variability in effective risk-minimizing Senior Production Editor, Nature Publishing Group this current, the team reports. strategy, so long as there are Kerrissa Lynch The slowdown is probably a suitable sites nearby and trans- Web Production Editor, Scientific American

result of natural variability rather located trees are able to estab- ckph oto to How to contact us than climate change, the team lish successfully. However, as- For subscription correspondence, including change of e-mail addresses: says, and is likely to reverse sisted colonization may be inef-

U.S. and Canada: 800-333-1199 within a few years. Under- fective where other threats are lji S c/ evi adosav Outside the North America: +1-515-248-7684 R Email: [email protected] standing such fluctuations is im- ongoing, such as where humans S as h a Postal address: Scientific American Briefings, Box portant for climate prediction, have increased the rate or se- 3187, Harlan, IA 51537 Annual subscription (12 issues): $19.95 (USD) and more data will come from the verity of fire outbreaks. They found that, on average, For editorial comments: Rapid Climate Change Project’s —Alastair Brown, the Kyoto commitments have re- Email: [email protected] array of 20 moored instruments, Nature Climate Change duced domestic emissions by 7 www.ScientificAmerican.com installed in 2004 between the percent, but the carbon-import Canary Islands and the Bahamas. ■■ Glob. Change Biol. doi: ratio increased on average by Scientific American is a trademark of 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02586.x (2011) Scientific American, Inc., used with permission. —Nicola Jones, about 14 percent. This implies a Nature Climate Change substantial relocation of carbon- EMISSIONS TRADE intensive production; carbon ■■ Geophys. Res. Lett. doi: tm leakage cancelled out the do- 10.1029/2011GL049801 (in the press) The effects of mestic savings, rendering carbon Kyoto footprints unchanged. ECOLOGY —Monica Contestabile, The Kyoto Protocol, which Nature Climate Change Moving trees came into force in 2005, was the ■■ J. Environ. Econ. Manage. doi: 10.1016/ Climate change is expected first multilateral attempt to cap to lead to significant shrinkage carbon emissions. Its effects on j.jeem.2011.10.005 (2011) SUBSCRIBE >> tm BriefingS | Climate Change & Environment 3

lyst is added, three of these rings chemically join together, releasing hydrogen in the process. Liu’s work was funded by a US Department of Energy project that is aiming to develop a viable liquid or solid storage mechanism for hydrogen fuel by 2017. The team is now working to make recycling of their On the Cover starting material cheaper and The North Atlantic Gulf more energy efficient. stream, part of the ocean’s uoman —Nicola Jones, /l thermohaline circulation Nature Climate Change system, exerts a significant ckph oto to

i S ■■ J. Am. Chem. Soc. doi: 10.1021/ influence on the Logging site in the Amazon. ja208834v (2011) hemisphere’s climate. Studies have begun to measure its natural FORESTRY a potential strategy for managing CLIMATOLOGY variability. See page 2. tropical forest that minimizes Selective logging risks to the climate. Teak record for Credit: RedAndr/Wikimedia Tropical deforestation —Alastair Brown, Commons contributed about 16 percent of Nature Climate Change Burma the total anthropogenic carbon There are few long-term in- emissions between 2000 and ■■ Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi: 10.1073/ strument-based climate records 2006. In addition to releasing pnas.1105068108 (2011) in Asia, so researchers turn to carbon into the atmosphere, de- natural records instead. This in- forestation changes land surface TECHNOLOGY cludes tree rings from species, reflectivity, which affects regional such as teak, that have identifi- temperature and precipitation Liquid hydrogen able rings from the wet and dry patterns. Reduced-impact log- Fuel-cell cars — which run seasons in the tropics. In 2010, a ging, which selects certain valu- on hydrogen and emit only water tree-ring atlas of droughts and able trees, is intended to mini- from their tailpipes — offer a monsoons in Asia over the last mize disruption of the forest compelling way to reduce trans- 1,000 years was published but canopy, but the effect of this log- port emissions. However, manu- some countries were not repre- ging practice on land–atmosphere facturers have struggled to find sented in the regional study. carbon exchange has not been ways of safely storing enough hy- Now, Rosanne D’Arrigo of the well quantified. drogen in a car for long journeys. Tree-Ring Laboratory at the Scott Miller of the Atmospheric Researchers have now taken Lamont-Doherty Earth Observa- Sciences Research Center at the a step towards an alternative: tory in New York, and colleagues, State University of New York, US, storing the hydrogen as a liquid. have looked at teak samples from and co-workers measured carbon University of Oregon chemist Burma’s Maingtha Reserve dioxide exchange and various eco- Shih-Yuan Liu and colleagues re- Forest, revealing a climate record logical parameters to investigate port the creation of a new mate- stretching from 1613 to 2009. the effects of selective logging on rial: BN-methylcyclopentane, a Their results match well with carbon exchange in an old-growth five-membered cyclic amine bo- those from neighboring coun- Amazonian forest. rane that is a stable liquid at tries, D’Arrigo’s team reports. Results suggest that the log- room temperature and pressure. They recommend stitching to- ging caused small decreases in When a cheap iron chloride cata- gether more such records, al- Scientific AmericanBriefings, Climate Change & Environment, Volume 1, Number 2, February 2012, published monthly by Scientific American, a primary production, leaf produc- though intense logging makes it division of Nature America, Inc., 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10013-1917. tion and latent heat flux, and in- hard to find long-lived trees. Subscription rates: 1 year (12 issues) $19.95 (USD). Please send subscription correspondence, including change creases in respiration, tree mor- —Nicola Jones, of e-mail and postal addresses to: tality and wood production. The Nature Climate Change Scientific American Briefings, Box 3187, Harlan, IA 51537. E-mail address for subscription inquires: net effect of reduced-impact log- [email protected]. ■■ Geophys. Res. Lett. doi: E-mail address for general inquires: ging was short lived and effects [email protected]. ckph oto to 10.1029/2011GL049927 (in the press) Subscription inquires: were barely discernible after only U.S. and Canada: 800-333-1199; other: +1-515-248-7684. Science doi: 10.1126/

must play a big role. CLOUD The latest estimate doesn’t aSTROPHYSICS will tackle that question next. fully cover the impact of ice —Nicola Jones, sheets, vegetation or clouds on Cloud maker Nature Climate Change climate sensitivity, so the numbers shouldn’t be taken as defin- ■■ Nature doi: 10.1038/nature10343 (2011) itive, the researchers caution. —Nicola Jones, MODELING Nature Climate Change Slower warming ■■ Science doi: 10.1126/ science.1203513 (2011) How much will our planet warm if carbon dioxide levels double from pre-industrial CARBON STORAGE levels? In other words, what is the planet’s “sensitivity” to When peat dries carbon dioxide? Peatlands lock away the This has proven a hard ques- large quantities of carbon that tion to answer, mainly because build up in these water-saturated ckph oto to

i S of uncertainty about how aero- environments owing to the pres- Do cosmic rays and solar ac- sols and the ocean alter heating ence of phenolic compounds, tivity affect our climate? Re- effects. The 2007 Intergovern- which inhibit microbial decom- searchers have proposed that mental Panel on Climate Change position. Phenolic concentra- cosmic rays, which hit Earth in report set out a best estimate of tions remain high in peatlands greater quantities when sunspot 3 °C, with a 66 percent chance because anoxic conditions limit activity lulls, might help to nu- that the true answer lies be- the activity of the enzyme re- cleate cloud particles and thus tween 2 °C and 4.5 °C, and a sponsible for their breakdown. cool the Earth. A long-antici- slight but real possibility of more However, droughts introduce ox- pated particle physics experi- than 10 °C of warming. ygen into these systems, and the ment designed to test this link — frequency of these events is CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Out- increasing. door Droplets) — has now Nathalie Fenner and Chris yielded its first results. Freeman of the Wolfson Peatland The experiment, based at Eu- Carbon Capture Laboratory at rope’s particle-physics labora- Bangor University in Wales, UK, tory CERN, near Geneva in Swit- used in vitro manipulations, me- zerland, uses a particle beam to socosm experiments and field mimic cosmic rays in an ultra- observations to examine the im- clean steel cloud chamber, pact of drought on peatland where temperature, water vapor carbon. and other atmospheric constitu- They found that drought ents can be carefully controlled. stimulates bacterial growth and The team aims to quantify the ckph oto to activity of the enzyme phenol roles of various gases in nucle- oxidase, reducing the concen- a lxp in / i S ating the precursors of cloud tration of phenolic compounds particles, so that these numbers in peat. This further stimulates can be plugged into climate Now, Andreas Schmittner of microbial growth, causing the models. Oregon State University, and col- breakdown of organic matter CERN’s Jasper Kirkby and leagues, have produced a more and the release of carbon di- colleagues report that sulphuric precise answer by using a more oxide. Furthermore, they show acid and ammonia vapors can complete temperature recon- that re-wetting the peat acceler- enhance nucleation by up to a struction of the last ice age — ates carbon losses to the atmo- factor of ten under the condi- 21,000 years ago — than was pre- sphere, owing to drought-in- tions they studied. However, the viously available. Their warming duced increases in nutrient and nucleation rate within CLOUD estimate is 2.3 °C, with a 66 per- labile carbon levels, which raise was, surprisingly, only one tenth cent chance the answer lies be- pH and stimulate anaerobic de- to one thousandth of what hap- tween 1.7 °C and 2.6 °C. More than composition. These findings pens in the real world, so other 6 °C of warming, the researchers suggest that severe drought, vapors — perhaps amines — conclude, would be implausible. and subsequent re-wetting, SUBSCRIBE >> tm BriefingS | Climate Change & Environment 5

could destabilize peatland has a stronger affect on develop- They suggest that temperatures carbon stocks. ment rate than on body mass ac- in Greenland may have a direct —Alastair Brown, cumulation. The model shows effect on the winter monsoon in- Nature Climate Change that these animals not only ma- tensity, dust grain size and ture more quickly at warmer summer monsoon precipitation ■■ Nature Geosci. doi: 10.1038/ temperatures, but also use less over East Asia. If this is true, ngeo1323 (2011) energy to do so, giving them an rising temperatures in Green- evolutionary advantage in most land are likely to bring in- BIOLOGY conditions. Their model could be creasing episodes of natural used to predict the effects of cli- disasters. Growing up too mate change on various species’ —Felix Cheung, body sizes, the authors say. Nature China fast —Nicola Jones, ■■ Nature Geosci. doi:10.1038/ngeo1326 For ectotherms — cold- Nature Climate Change blooded animals, including rep- (2011) tiles and amphibians, which ■■ Proc. R. Soc. B doi: 10.1098/ rspb.2011.2000 (2011) cannot regulate their tempera- CLIMATE CHANGE ture through their own metabo- lism — environmental tempera- CLIMATE CHANGE The growth of ture changes “literally change the pace of life,” according to We- Winter breezy, dying seas nyun Zuo, of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, dry and dusty and colleagues. High-latitude climate Ectotherms develop from in- changes can have serious conse- fancy to adulthood more quickly quences for East Asia. Previous Commons in warmer conditions, and in- studies have found that, for ex- crease their body mass faster ample, changes in westerly too. Most ectotherms follow a winds and the Mongolian high- temperature-size rule, whereby pressure system are the reasons D iaz /W i k imedia andro the warmer the temperature, the behind the increasing episodes j smaller the animal is at maturity. of desertification, sandstorms Al e Ocean dead zone, featuring a red algal bloom, But for about 15 percent of spe- and “muddy rain” in China. off the coast of San Diego, Calif. cies, the reverse holds: the A new study led by Youbin warmer it is, the larger they get. Sun at the Chinese Academy of Oxygen-deprived dead Sciences in Xi’an has now found zones in coastal waters around that rising temperatures in the world have expanded expo- Greenland may strengthen nentially since the 1960s and are winter monsoons, promote dust likely to increase further in a storms and reduce summer pre- warming climate. cipitation in East Asia. Markus Meier of the Swedish The researchers performed Meteorological and Hydrolog- grain-size analysis and optical ical Institute in Norrköping and dating on loess soils obtained his colleagues used a group of from Jingyuan County, Ningxia, physical–biogeochemical and Gulang County, Gangsu — models, driven by data from re- ckph oto to both located in the depocenter of gional climate models, to project K / i S

Z iva modern dust storms. Because the effects of climate change and Salamanders and other ectotherms develop faster in a warmer world. the grain size of loess soil re- changes in nutrient cycles on ox- flects changes in winter mon- ygen conditions in the Baltic Zuo’s team explains this soon strength, they were able to Sea. oddity with a simple mathemat- reconstruct a record of winter Most scenarios suggested ical model, in which the rate of monsoon intensity over the past that oxygen-depleted zones at biomass accumulation and the 60,000 years. the bottom of the sea would ex- pace of maturity have different The researchers found strong pand by the end of the century. temperature dependences. The correlations between East Asian Driving factors include rising usual size rule applies for those winter monsoon, Greenland ice- nutrient input from river runoff; animals in which temperature core and Chinese cave records. reduced oxygen flux from the at- SUBSCRIBE >> tm BriefingS | Climate Change & Environment 6

mosphere to the ocean; and in- the tropics on a 23,000-year creased oxygen consumption by cycle. BIOFUEL surface-level organisms that are Records in other parts of the fed by the boost in nutrients. warm pool that do show glacial– Fuel or housing? Similar changes can be expected interglacial shifts in precipita- for coastal oceans worldwide, tion could reflect the effects of the authors say. glacial reduction of sea level, —Quirin Schiermeier, Nature which eliminated the shallow seas that serve as a moisture ■■ Geophys. Res. Lett. doi: source to the neighboring 10.1029/2011GL049929 (2011) islands. —Alicia Newton,

CLIMATE Nature Geoscience ckph oto to / i S

■■ Quat. Sci. Rev. doi: 10.1016/ Precession ph oto us j.quascirev.2011.09.016 (2011) P l control Cornfields outside Chicago.

Marine sediment analyses ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE Substantial increases in suggest that over the past corn production will be required 400,000 years, the hydrological Windy future in the United States to meet the cycle over the Western Pacific Climate change is antici- 2020 biofuel targets set by the warm pool was controlled by pated to lead to more frequent 2007 Energy Independence and local incoming solar radiation. wind storms in Europe with an Security Act. Initially these tar- associated boost in the incidence gets will consist entirely of corn- of dangerous sea conditions, starch-based fuels, and the pro- coastal flooding and property ductive Midwest is likely to bear damage. Some modeling studies the brunt of these policy goals. indicate that an increasing Megan Mehaffey and her col- storm trend may already be de- leagues at the US Environmental tectable in observational re- Protection Agency investigated cords, but robust evidence has the landscape changes required been missing. to meet these biofuel targets. Markus Donat, of the Climate Their model suggests that 25 Change Research Centre at Uni- million acres of farmland in the versity of New South Wales, American Midwest will need to

NASA Sydney, and his co-workers used switch from crop rotation to full- Precession of earth. a newly developed atmospheric time corn production, with sev- reconstruction for the period eral regions increasing full-time Kazuyo Tachikawa and col- 1871–2008 to calculate two dif- corn production by more than 50 leagues at Aix-Marseille Univer- ferent measures of storminess — percent. At the same time, urban sity, France, determined the geo- storm frequency and local wind growth by 2020 is expected to chemistry of marine sediments speeds — for six regions across cover more than seven million and associated fossils in a core Europe. acres of farmland, potentially collected from the northern In addition to pronounced pushing corn production into coast of Papua New Guinea. decadal-scale variability, the re- smaller, more intensive areas or Using the abundance of ele- searchers found a distinct in- onto lower-quality land. ments typically found in the crease in wind-storm activity to- The model indicates where rocks of the island, they recon- wards the end of the twentieth landscape changes are likely to structed river run-off, and hence century, which was particularly occur, and should help policy- precipitation, over the past four clear in the North Sea and Baltic makers to evaluate the trade-offs glacial–interglacial cycles. Some- Sea regions. It is not yet clear between economic benefits and what surprisingly, precipitation whether this trend can be attrib- ecosystem services offered by dif- intensity was seemingly unre- uted to climate change. ferent land-management options. lated to the glacial cycles. In- —Alastair Brown, —Alastair Brown, stead, changes in rainfall were Nature Climate Change Nature Climate Change closely linked with the precession of the Earth’s orbit, which ■■ Geophys. Res. Lett. doi: ■■ Ecol. Soc. Am. doi: 10.1890/10-1573.1 strongly influences insolation in 10.1029/2011GL047995 (2011) (2011) SUBSCRIBE >> tm BriefingS | Climate Change & Environment 7

77 percent if there was a 5 per- ADAPTATION cent chance and 31 percent if there was just a 1 percent Coffee futures chance. When the farmers In May 2008, tropical storm weren’t told what their risk was, Alma struck Costa Rica bringing half of those who had said that floods and landslides that caused they wouldn’t invest in adapta- misery to thousands, loss of tion at a 5 percent risk hedged croplands and US$35 million in their bets and decided to invest. damages. When neighboring farmers of A few months later, Francisco differing risk levels were Alpizar of the Environment for grouped, and told they could Development Centre in Turri- pool their resources and share alba, Costa Rica, and his col- adaptation costs, 69 percent of leagues investigated around 200 the groups said they would in- ckph oto to coffee farmers’ attitudes towards vest, irrespective of their indi- investing in adaptation mea- vidual risk. sures to prevent future losses. In / i S j fmdesign —Monica Contestabile, an experiment, 95 percent of they would invest in adaptation Nature Climate Change farmers in the Tarrazu valley, if there was a 10 percent chance which had been badly hit by of being hit by an extreme ■■ Ecol. Econ. doi: 10.1016/ Alma, told the researchers that weather event. This dropped to j.ecolecon.2011.07.004 (2011)

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