01/07/2018

Could Climate Change Lead To The Extinction Of Bees?

Newsweek - 

A mason bee pollinates a flower. Scientists found that when they heated up the bees' environments, up to 70 percent of them died. Getty Images 
The survival of bees is hanging in the balance. Some species are dying off at a record pace, and toxic agricultural chemicals might be to blame. There seem to be many threats to these winged creatures, but climate change may be the final straw for some bee species. If the Earth continues to warm and bees don’t find a way to adapt, some populations could face extinction, according to new research.
A team of scientists found that 30 to 70 percent of mason bees died when they heated up the bees' environments. This reveals that if temperatures continue to climb, bee populations could begin to die off at faster rates, disrupting ecosystems worldwide, said Paul CaraDonna, an ecologist at Northwestern University.
“It was a pretty sobering result. This is not good news for this bee,” CaraDonna told Newsweek.
Over two years, CaraDonna led a team of researchers in Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains to simulate the impact of climate change on bees. They built 90 nest boxes, housing up to 15 bees each. The scientists painted some boxes with white reflective paint to simulate a cooler environment, similar to that of the 1950s. A second set of boxes were painted with a clear coating to act as a control for the experiment.
And a final set of boxes were painted black to simulate the future climate predicted for the years 2040 to 2099. By simply painting the boxes black, they absorbed more radiant energy, heating the box and the bees inside. The bees lived in the altered environments from early in larval development all the way through metamorphosis and into adulthood. The findings were published Thursday in Functional Ecology, the British Ecological Society’s journal.
“Almost no bees die when you have cool conditions or regular conditions, and quite a bit more die when you warm things up a couple of degrees on average,” CaraDonna said. “I was quite surprised in those years there were many bees that didn’t make it.”


The bees that survived the heat became smaller, lost much of their body fat and suffered from disruptions to their hibernation. These results suggest bees that survived were not healthy and might struggle to find food or a mate.
“Local bee populations could possibly go extinct in the future because of climate change,” said CaraDonna, who also works as a research scientist for the Chicago Botanic Garden, a conservation science center.
This species of mason bee, Osmia ribifloris, also called the “blueberry mason bee,” is native to the western United States and northern Mexico. This particular bee constructs nests inside of holes and cracks in dead tree stumps. As a primary pollinator of the flowering desert manzanita shrubs, this bee may have a big impact on its ecosystem.
“Native pollinators are a really important part of what makes nature run smoothly,” said CaraDonna. “It's estimated that close to 90 percent of all flowering plants benefit from animal pollination. That ends up at around more than 300,000 plant species worldwide.”
While the specific mason bees used in the experiment do not pollinate agricultural crops, it’s possible that the rising temperatures could also hurt other bee populations. Through a trickle-down effect, the die-off of bees could eventually disrupt human life by hurting our agricultural systems, said CaraDonna.
“You start tinkering with all these pieces, and there are many consequences that can start disrupting the function of natural ecosystems, and eventually that can cascade to affect humans as well,” he said.

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Responding To Economic Climate Risk In Australia

Four Twenty Seven - Natalie Ambrosio

Regulatory pressure and financial damage are necessitating an increase in physical climate risk disclosure in Australia.
In exercising their own due diligence and assessing the exposure to physical climate risks in their portfolios, investors arm themselves with valuable information on corporate risk exposure which they can leverage to engage with companies around resilience.
This report explores the connection between climate hazards and financial risks and shares examples of corporate adaptation and investor engagement to build resilience.
LARGE IMAGE
The global tide of interest in the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) has hit the shores of Australian financial markets, steered by regulators concerned about the systemic risk climate change poses to the economy.
In 2017 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s Geoff Summerhayes was the first Australian regulator to formally endorse the TCFD.
“Some climate risks are distinctly ‘financial’ in nature. Many of these risks are foreseeable, material and actionable now,” he said.
This sentiment was echoed by John Price of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2018 and reflects growing regulatory concern over climate risk disclosure internationally, as shown by Article 173 of France’s Law on Energy Transition and Green Growth and the 2018 European Commission Action Plan.
LARGE IMAGE
This Four Twenty Seven Report, Responding to Economic Climate Risk in Australia, explores the drivers of financial risk in Australia and discusses approaches to addressing this risk.
The nation’s dominant industries are particularly threatened by the prevalent climate hazards.
For investors, understanding a company’s risk to climate change is an essential first step to mitigating portfolio risk, but must be followed by corporate engagement to build resilience.
Institutional investors are increasingly leveraging shareholder resolutions and direct engagement to prompt companies to disclose their climate risks and adapt.

Key Findings
  • Australia’s “Angry Summer” of extreme weather in 2013 cost the economy $8 billion and was followed by another summer of extremes in 2016-2017.
  • Construction, mining and manufacturing constitute almost 20 percent of Australia’s economy and are highly vulnerable to heat stress and water stress, which threaten large swaths of the nation.
  • Boral Limited and Rio Tinto are both Materials companies exposed to water and heat stress in their operations, but they have different risk scores stemming from differing vulnerabilities in their markets and supply chains.
  • Engagement on climate is relatively new for Australian shareholders, but is gaining momentum, with institutional asset managers voting on several climate risk disclosure resolutions in 2018.
  • Investors can address physical climate risk by reviewing their asset allocations, disclosing their own risks, investing in new opportunities and engaging with corporations.
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A Landmark Climate Change Ruling Could Go Up In Smoke After Justice Kennedy Retires

Mashable - Mark Kaufman

Exhaust and steam rising from a steel mill. Image: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images
After 30 years on the Supreme Court bench, Justice Anthony Kennedy will leave the nation's highest courthouse at the end of July.
With Kennedy's departure comes much uneasiness. One cause for concern is over the paramount climate decision Massachusetts v. EPA, in which Kennedy proved to be the deciding swing vote, as he often was. The worry is that with him gone, the ruling will be left imperiled.
The case occurred after the EPA decided, in 2003, that it could not regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Twelve states, including Massachusetts, sued the agency. They argued that these gases were pollutants and a danger to the public. Eventually, the case found its way to the Supreme Court.
Settled by a five to four vote in 2007, Massachusetts v. EPA ruled for the first time that heat-trapping greenhouse gases are pollutants, and that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate them, just as the agency reins in pollution emitted by cars and trucks.
"I think Massachusetts v. EPA is the most important environmental decision the Supreme Court has ever decided," Ann Carlson, the director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law, said in an interview.
President Donald Trump will select the next Supreme Court nominee, and it's almost certain this individual will, at minimum, find Massachusetts v. EPA flawed or bad law. Trump is openly hostile to widely accepted climate science, and appears not to have even an elementary understanding of how climate works.

Just how important has Massachusetts v. EPA been?
Before the decision, the EPA did not consider greenhouse gases — notably the invisible, potent gas carbon dioxide — an air pollutant. So it wasn't regulated as one.
Kennedy's swing vote changed that.
"I think it’s a highly significant case because it opened what had been a locked door," Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard University's environmental and energy law program, said in an interview.
"The case was tantamount to the opening gun in a race."
Justice Anthony Kennedy (on right) administers the judicial oath to Judge Neil Gorsuch in April 2017. Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Specifically, the case enabled the EPA to use a powerful law, the Clean Air Act, to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trucks, power plants, and industry. This same law had already proven hugely effective in limiting other air pollutants, like the nitrous and sulfur oxides expelled from cars.
"The Clean Air Act has been exceptionally successful as law in making huge changes in public health," said Goffman. "All you have to do is look at L.A. in the 1970s, and then look at it today."
"I remember visiting L.A. in the '70s, and after a day or two, having a sore throat because of smog," he added.
Following the Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the Obama Administration could use the power of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases, which didn't cause sore throats and coughing fits, but stoked accelerated warming and disruption of the global climate.
Cars, trucks, power plants, and fossil fuel operations all became regulated. In 2012, for example, the Obama Administration finalized ambitious gas efficiency standards for cars in the U.S. The goal was to slash fuel use in half by 2025, and accordingly, greenhouse gas emissions, too.
President Obama, though, chose to focus on something all Americans could get behind.
"By the middle of the next decade our cars will get nearly 55 miles per gallon, almost double what they get today," Obama said.
But the most far-reaching effort was the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan, which finalized EPA standards that intended to slash the carbon dioxide produced by U.S. power plants (notably from coal burning) substantially, to less than 30 percent of 2005 levels by the year 2030.
Smog-filled Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Image: Nick Ut/AP/REX/Shutterstock
The Trump administration now seeks to overturn both the historic Clean Power Plan and fuel efficiency standards.

Will a new court overturn Massachusetts v. EPA?
Instead of simply overturning the verdict, it's possible that a new court could take it apart piece by piece.
"I think they’d chip away at it instead of overturning it outright," said Carlson.
For instance, in 2014 the Supreme Court ruled, following conservative Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion, that the EPA couldn't regulate greenhouse gas emissions from some smaller sources of air pollution.
If Kennedy's replacement proves wary or opposed to Massachusetts v. EPA, each time an EPA greenhouse gas regulation is brought to court, the conservative majority may find another way to narrow the scope of when these gases can be reined in.
"This is really where I think people who view the Clean Air Act as the ongoing tool for limiting green gases in the future should be focusing their anxiety," said Goffman.
It's also still plausible that the court could overturn the decision completely.
The Sago coal mine in West Virginia. Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
"It’s unlikely, but not impossible," said Carlson, noting that just this week the court overturned a 40-year-old labor union decision.
Two current justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, already believe the decision should be overturned, said Carlson.

Massachusetts v. EPA embraced climate science
The landmark case didn't just allow the federal government to mitigate greenhouse gases, it also signaled an early embrace of climate science.
"It recognized that the science of climate change is strong and indisputable," said Carlson.
"Massachusetts v. EPA needed to determine if greenhouse gases endangered health and welfare,"  just like other pollutants, said Carlson.
The court found it did. These risks included "increases in temperatures, changes in extreme weather events, increases in food- and water-borne pathogens" and were supported by evidence from both the U.S. Global Climate Research Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Clean Air Act, on which the decision rests, certainly didn't always regulate gases like carbon dioxide, but it left ample room for the sciences to progress and reveal new threats to the public.
"It's hard to overstate how much the Clean Air Act was driven by science and an understanding of how science works," said Goffman, noting that Congress overhauled the law in 1977 and 1990 to account for advances in environmental and public health sciences.
"It’s almost as if Congress knew there would be a new class of pollutants," he said.

Ever wonder how the universe might end?

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