09/02/2020

Climate Change: Loss Of Bumblebees Driven By 'Climate Chaos'

BBC - Helen Briggs

Bumblebee collecting pollen from a flower. Getty Images
Key points
  • University of Ottawa researchers looked at data from bumblebees over a 115-year period
  • Bumblebees' chances of survival have declined by 30 per cent in a generation
  • The research centred on increased frequency of heatwaves, droughts and other extreme events
"Climate chaos" has caused widespread losses of bumblebees across continents, according to scientists.
A new analysis shows the likelihood of a bee being found in any given place in Europe and North America has declined by a third since the 1970s.
Climbing temperatures will increasingly cause declines, which are already more severe than previously thought, said researchers.
Bumblebees are key pollinators of many fruits, vegetables and wild plants.
Without them, some crops could fail, reducing food for humans and countless other species.
Dr Tim Newbold of University College London (UCL) said there had been some previous research showing that bumblebee distributions are moving northwards in Europe and North America, "as you'd expect with climate change".
He added: "But this was the first time that we have been able to really tie local extinctions and colonisations of bumble bees to climate change, showing a really clear fingerprint of climate change in the declines that we've seen."
Bumblebee declines are already more severe than previously thought, said lead researcher Peter Soroye of the University of Ottawa in Canada. "We've linked this to climate change - and more specifically to the extreme temperatures and the climate chaos that climate change is producing," he said.
North American bumblebee on a flower. Antoine Morin
Bumblebees are among the most important plant pollinators. Declines in range and abundance have been documented from a range of causes, including pesticides, disease and habitat loss.
In the new study, researchers looked at more than half a million records of 66 bumblebee species from 1901 to 1974 and from 2000 to 2014.
They found bumblebee populations declined rapidly between 2000-2014: the likelihood of a site being occupied by bumblebees dropped by an average of over 30% compared with 1901-1974.

'Alarming' losses
Bees have been hardest hit in southern regions such as Spain and Mexico due to more frequent extreme warm years. And, while populations have expanded into cooler northern regions, this has not been enough to compensate for the losses.
Jonathan Bridle and Alexandra van Rensburg of the University of Bristol described the findings as "alarming". Commenting in the journal Science, they said: "The new study adds to a growing body of evidence for alarming, widespread losses of biodiversity and for rates of global change that now exceed the critical limits of ecosystem resilience."
There are around 250 species of bumblebee in the world. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), declines have been documented in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia, caused by a variety of threats that range from habitat loss and degradation to diseases and pesticide use.


Bumblebee decline from the University of Ottawa

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(AU) Delivering Accountability In The Face Of The Climate Crisis

Asia & the Pacific Policy Society - Greg Raymond

The effects of climate change are spurring endless debate on what to do next, but without adequate oversight, governments can’t be held to account for their climate policies, Greg Raymond writes.
The Parliament needs support if it is to make any headway on climate policy. PHOTO: Aditya Joshi on Unsplash
Australia’s institutions of governance are failing. This is the unavoidable conclusion the public has reached as the nation experiences its unprecedented bushfire crisis.
Australian decision-makers have known since at least 2008 that climate change would devastate our country, yet the political process has been unable or unwilling to implement the strategies needed to reduce emissions, nor to exert influence globally to encourage others to do the same. Why is this?
One aspect of this problem is clearly the relationship between science and politics. While science transforms our lives continuously, it only rarely intrudes into politics in significant ways. For the most part, scientific research into vital areas like weapons, medicine, and farming are handled by well-established ministries like defence, health, and agriculture. Each of these has its own policy-making ecosystem, of journalists, think-tanks, and academics feeding experience and expertise into crucial decisions.
It is rare that science comprehensively transforms our lives in a very short amount of time. The rise of science itself in Renaissance Europe was one such juncture when figures like Galileo and Newton changed worldviews fundamentally in ways that eventually relegated religion into a more subordinate place in human affairs.
Dealing with climate change is likely to be a challenge of similarly transformative proportions, touching on all aspects of life. Even a successful transition from fossil to renewable energy may not be enough to avoid the immorality of bequeathing a wrecked environment to future generations.
The importance of science in managing the implications of the Anthropocene – the era in which human actions on planet earth are of equal or greater importance than natural processes in affecting our physical environment – is only gradually being recognised.
Climate change is currently the most crucial aspect of the Anthropocene, since the rapid warming of the planet will almost certainly have devastating consequences for the ecosystems on which our lives depend.
But the all-encompassing nature of this problem, and the scale of the response required, has overwhelmed our political institutions. It is exposing the periodic weaknesses of democracies, where instead of grasping the necessity of leading uncomfortable change, governments and partisan media organisations collude in fostering regressive identity politics.
Accountability is at the heart of successful liberal democracies, and when accountability is not delivered, problems fester. But, accountability can only be delivered where there is agreement on what constitutes success and failure. A significant problem at the heart of Australia’s torrid climate policy debate is the absence of agreed metrics for measuring Australia’s performance.
The concepts required to understand climate change, and to make policies to combat it, are relatively new, and journalists are much less confident in using these to analyse policies and hold politicians to account than in other issues.
Compare the effectiveness of journalists on economic issues to that of climate policy. The language and concepts of managing budgets – like budget deficits or monetary policy – are over a century old. Journalists, quite naturally, are well schooled in these, and it helps them to hold governments to account.
The bushfire crisis has shown us that the environment must surely rank as a concern of importance equal to the economy – indeed, it is inextricable from it, as the economic cost of the 2011 floods, and now the 2019-2020 bushfires, have shown. But journalists and the media, sophisticated and adept in matters of economic policy, the language of debt, deficit, interest rates, and government expenditure, are much less sure-footed when it comes to climate change concepts.
Whether it be the relationship of individual disasters to broader climate trends, or the quality of our carbon abatement policies, both in absolute terms and in relation to what is required globally to avoid catastrophe, they, perhaps understandably, aren’t as familiar with what is required of the government, and so struggle to keep it accountable.
Given that time is running out to address climate change before the planet reaches tipping points – after which natural processes, such as the release of methane from Siberia’s permafrost, will make even the most ambitious policies irrelevant – trying to improve the capacity of our political system to navigate the problem of climate change is imperative.
One possibility that should be considered by the next government, or the current government if it is prepared to undertake real reform, is establishing a Parliamentary Carbon Office (PCO), modelled on the principles of the Parliamentary Budget Office.
APCO would have a similar mission; to improve transparency around climate change and carbon issues, and to evaluate the economic and environmental costs of climate change policies prior to elections.
The PCO would inform the Parliament by providing independent and non-partisan analysis of climate change, emissions policy, and the financial implications of proposals. By developing a standardised approach, a PCO would ease the burden on journalists currently struggling to reconcile the different methodologies employed by various actors with various agendas.
It could also overcome the problem of key ministries such as Treasury and Environment being used to produce partisan talking points for the executive, rather than provide impartial recommendations. It is important to note, this was a key rationale for the founding of the PBO.
The time for ‘business as usual’ thinking has clearly passed. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently commented, we must have the “courage to think in new ways, the strength to leave well-trodden paths, the readiness to venture into new territory, and the resolve to act more quickly … guided by the conviction that unfamiliar approaches can succeed.”
Giving Parliament greater capacity for supporting accountability could help sterilise the toxic politics of climate change while moving us towards better solutions for meeting this fiendishly complex existential challenge.

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Antarctica Logs Hottest Temperature On Record With A Reading Of 18.3C

The Guardian - 

A new record set so soon after the previous record of 17.5C in March 2015 is a sign warming in Antarctica is happening much faster than global average
The Argentinian Esperanza base in Antarctica – seen in March 2014 – recorded its hottest day on record on Thursday. Photograph: Vanderlei Almeida/AFP via Getty Images
Key points
  • Experts say Antarctica is one of the fastest warming regions globally
  • Antarctic ice sheet melting increased six-fold between 1979 and 2017
  • Increased temperatures are predicted to cause major sea level rise
Antarctica has logged its hottest temperature on record, with an Argentinian research station thermometer reading 18.3C, beating the previous record by 0.8C.
The reading, taken at Esperanza on the northern tip of the continent’s peninsula, beats Antarctica’s previous record of 17.5C, set in March 2015.
A tweet from Argentina’s meteorological agency on Friday revealed the record. The station’s data goes back to 1961.
Antarctica’s peninsula – the area that points towards South America – is one of the fastest warming places on earth, heating by almost 3C over the past 50 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Almost all the region’s glaciers are melting.
The Esperanza reading breaks the record for the Antarctic continent. The record for the Antarctic region – that is, everywhere south of 60 degrees latitude – is 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982.
Prof James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington, was a member of an ad-hoc World Meteorological Organization committee that has verified previous records in Antarctica.
He told Guardian Australia it was likely the committee would be reconvened to check the new Esperanza record.
He said: “Of course the record does need to be checked, but pending those checks, it’s a perfectly valid record and that [temperature] station is well maintained.”
“The reading is impressive as it’s only five years since the previous record was set and this is almost one degree centigrade higher. It’s a sign of the warming that has been happening there that’s much faster than the global average.
“To have a new record set that quickly is surprising but who knows how long that will last? Possibly not that long at all.”
He said the temperature record at Esperanza was one of the longest-running on the whole continent.
Renwick said higher temperatures in the region tended to coincide with strong northwesterly winds moving down mountain slopes – a feature of the weather patterns around Esperanza in recent days.
He said there were complex weather patterns in the area, but the Esperanza reading was likely a combination of natural variability and background warming caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
He said: “The reason the peninsula is warming faster than other places is a combination of natural variations and warming signals.”
Prof Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, has carried out research at James Ross Island at the northern tip of the peninsula.
“It’s an area that’s warming very quickly,” she said, adding it can occasionally be warm enough to wear a T-shirt.
Previous research from 2012 found the current rate of warming in the region was almost unprecedented over the past 2000 years.
Abram said: “Even small increases in warming can lead to large increases in the energy you have for melting the ice. The consequences are the collapse of the ice shelves along the peninsula.”
Meltwater can work its way through cracks in ice shelves, she said. Because ice shelves already float on the ocean, their collapse does not directly contribute to rising sea levels.
But Abram said the shelves acted as plugs, helping to keep the ice sheets behind them stable. Melting of ice sheets does contribute to rising sea levels because they are attached to land.
Dr Steve Rintoul, a leading oceanographer and Antarctic expert at CSIRO, said: “This is a record from only a single station, but it is in the context of what’s happening elsewhere and is more evidence that as the planet warms we get more warm records and fewer cold records.”
The lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica – and anywhere on Earth – was at the Russian Vostok station, when temperatures dropped to -89.2C on 21 July 1983

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