A recent study suggests global warming is altering marine life in Monterey
Aozotorp
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june01/warming_3-28.html#
A recent study suggests global warming is altering marine life in Monterey
Bay. Spencer Michels reports.
JIM LEHRER: A spokesman for President Bush made it clear today the U.S. was
no longer interested in the Kyoto treaty on global warming. Spencer Michels
has been looking into that debate, and here is his report.
SPENCER MICHELS: On the shores of California's Monterey Bay, a tide pool is
revealing information about global warming that scientists here say bodes
ill for the world's environment. The pool is just out the back door of
Hopkins Marine Station. A few years ago, Rafe Sagarin, then a Stanford
undergraduate working under Professor Chuck Baxter, used maps found in an
old thesis from the library to find metal markers that had been pounded into
the rocks about 70 years before.
RAFE SAGARIN: There were four originally, and we found two. One is out where
those seals are, out there...
SPENCER MICHELS: The markers had been installed in the early '30s by Willis
Hewatt, another Stanford student, who used them to intensely study a strip
of tide pool one yard wide and 100 yards long. When Sagarin found Hewatt's
Ph.D. thesis, he had a ready made baseline for examining the exact same
designated area, or transect.
RAFE SAGARIN: It was really exciting, just the whole treasure hunt for
finding the bolts that marked the transect, and it was very important
because we were able to take a square-yard frame, which is exactly what
Hewatt did, and put it down in the exact same place that he put down a
square-yard frame, and compare that exact area to what happened now.
A 'catastrophic' signal
SPENCER MICHELS: Sagarin and his colleagues counted more than 125,000 tidal
animals. With the average winter water temperature a degree higher than in
Hewatt's day, he found that many of the old species had disappeared from
this intertidal zone, and new ones had moved in.
RAFE SAGARIN: What we're seeing here is species that are really dominating
the community, like this anemone, that have come from the south and are
doing well here, really thriving.
CHUCK BAXTER: It has now become one of the dominant anemones in the
intertidal, and it is a southern form, so it's one of the ones signifying
change in the community.
SPENCER MICHELS: It's rare that scientists could quantify so accurately the
effects of warmer weather. Sagarin says his conclusions go beyond the life
in this tide pool.
RAFE SAGARIN: These animals are-- and plants-- are all sort of indicators
that indeed, climate is changing, and it's having effects on living things.
And we are still a natural species-- we depend on living things for
everything-- so those effects are going to carry up all the way to the human
realm.
SPENCER MICHELS: The director of the Hopkins Marine Station, George Somero,
has watched the tide pool research, and his conclusions are even broader.
GEORGE SOMERO: Now, I see these changes that we're finding in marine
communities as being a catastrophic situation. It's not effecting human
beings yet to a very great extent. If it should turn out that the West
Antarctic ice sheet begins to ebb, and as sea level rises, and if you are
living on a coastal community, then the message may start coming across. And
I think the intensity of storms that global warming is likely to trigger,
again, is going to get a message across.
The threat of extreme weather
SPENCER MICHELS: Somero is at one end of a continuing debate over global
warming and its effects on the earth. A vocal minority either doubts its
existence, or says there is no reason to worry. But most mainstream
scientists say its consequences could be serious.
They say global warming occurs because gases including carbon dioxide form a
lid on the earth's atmosphere. That lid prevents some of the heat from
escaping. Instead, it is reflected back to the earth's surface, where it
raises temperatures. That's called the greenhouse effect.
At Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, delegates from all over the world agreed that all
nations need to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, especially CO2.
But no country has yet endorsed the rules agreed to at Kyoto. And three
years later, a meeting at the Hague collapsed when participants couldn't
agree on how to proceed.
SPOKESMAN: There's no deal. It's closed up.
SPENCER MICHELS: This year, a UN panel on climate change concluded that
man-caused global warming not only exists, but threatens major changes in
plant and animal life. Steve Schneider, an environmental scientist at
Stanford, worked on the report.
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Not only do we think it's going to get warmer, and maybe
unprecedentedly warmer, but we may change the incidence of extreme events--
that is, droughts and floods, heat waves, El Nino might intensify, and
perhaps the most worrisome of all to me is increased intensity of
hurricanes, because it's the top-end powerful storms that do most of the
damage.
SPENCER MICHELS: Schneider and his colleagues say that one degree Fahrenheit
of warming in the last century is pushing nature around. Glaciers are
receding, lake and river ice is melting earlier, birds are migrating from
the tropics sooner, marine communities are moving North along the California
coast, and coral-- very sensitive to temperature change-- is dying, or
bleaching, threatening to ruin the economies of areas that depend on it for
tourism.
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: So far, I would argue that we can't claim that's done any
harm. But what it says is that even the one degree Fahrenheit is sufficient,
now, to cause an impact on nature. And the projections for the future are,
if we're lucky, a few degrees more, and if we're unlucky, ten. And ten, to
me, would be certainly catastrophic for nature.
More CO2: 'A good thing'
ANCHOR: When we strip away all the scare headlines and oversimplifications,
a very different picture emerges.
SPENCER MICHELS: The Greening Earth Society, which made this film, is one of
several industry groups that have not subscribed to the predictions of
global warming catastrophes. The Western Fuels Association sponsors the
society, which claims that more CO2 will benefit America, not harm it.
ANNOUNCER: Carbon dioxide is a plant nutrient that causes faster growth,
increased yields, and improved water use efficiency, and this translates
into more vigorous tree growth worldwide.
SPENCER MICHELS: President Bush joined the doubters when he recently decided
not to press for a reduction in CO2 produced by American coal and natural
gas power plants, reversing a campaign pledge.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We got an energy crisis in America that we have to
deal with in a common sense way.
SPENCER MICHELS: His turnabout followed intense pressure from the coal and
utilities industries, which say reducing emissions would increase energy
costs. In a letter to four Senators, the president said: "This is especially
true given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of and
solutions to global climate change, and the lack of commercially available
technologies for removing and storing carbon dioxide." The president's
decision was applauded by Thomas Gale Moore, former economic advisor to
Ronald Reagan, and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
THOMAS GALE MOORE: The evidence at the moment is that we have had a buildup
of carbon dioxide, and that's leading to a greener world. We have more
plants. In the northern hemisphere, they grow more vigorously, they grow
faster, they're going further North. I would think that a greener world is a
better world because we all either... all animals either eat plants or eat
animals that eat plants, including us. So more plants is a good thing.
SPENCER MICHELS: More weeds?
THOMAS GALE MOORE: More weeds and more... and more redwoods.
SPENCER MICHELS: Moore, who wrote a book on global warming, says studies
show it could even have positive economic effects in the United States.
THOMAS GALE MOORE: All the economists who have looked at it have concluded
the effects are going to be minuscule for the United States. Trying to do
something about it, however, they all agreed is going to be very costly. Let
us take a little bit of the money that we'd spend on Kyoto and spend it on
helping Bangladesh be able to protect them from sea surges which occur
anyway, and help the people get rich. It's a much better way to go than this
futile Kyoto.
'The animals are telling us something'
SPENCER MICHELS: But Schneider says that the economic argument, even if it
turns out to be partly true, is shortsighted.
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: It's very likely that we'll be looking at increased
endangerment, and probably quite a lot of extinctions. Now, if that's not
into the economic calculations of those people who say it's good for you,
all they're thinking about is corn plants and dollar return on investment. I
think they're out of touch with the value system of most the people in the
world.
RAFE SAGARIN: So I would kind of count a bunch of them at once.
SPENCER MICHELS: While the debate continues, so does the study of tide pools
for additional evidence of changes due to warming.
RAFE SAGARIN: The intertidal animals are telling us something. And although
I don't expect most people to care all that much that there's been a big
species composition change in the intertidal, when it affects them and the
health of their families, it is a serious issue.
SPENCER MICHELS: And yet more research is on the horizon. The Department of
Energy recently announced it will join with the University of Maryland to
look into climate change, ways to curb carbon dioxide emissions, and
economic impacts of global warming.