A new study led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Jerry Melillo says no, they aren’t green (when it comes to climate change). However, there are still many important factors to keep in mind before claiming this is the end of a long and complicated discussion.

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Turkey farmers growing greenhouse tomatoes have been using this technology since 2005. California is going to get it before the end of this year.

LA-based ClimateMinder now completely owns the Turkish company Kodalfa and it is eager to bring some of its technology to the US. This company’s “new” climate-monitoring and control system helps greenhouse farmers to monitor their crops and adjust the conditions of their greenhouses with wireless technology. This helps farmers and consumers in numerous and significant ways.

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Recently the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) of the UN reported that millions more people may find themselves facing long term hunger and even starvation, in east Africa.

Climate change affects Africa

El Nino is blamed for changing rainfall patterns, and that, combined with inadequate harvests and increasing conflict has led to a drop in cereal production already affecting Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. This could lead to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid.

Already more than 20 million people are receiving food assistance in the Horn of Africa region and their numbers are only likely to increase further towards the end of the year as El Nino drives heavy rains across the region, leading to mudslides on tree-denuded hillsides and the destruction of crops close to harvest time. The same rains often destroy roads and other infrastructure required to bring food aid and medicine into the region and can kill livestock or cause epidemic diseases in animals or human populations, all of which add to the complexity of managing food security in a region where conflict is endemic and border raids and ‘tribal’ disagreements are a standard response to poverty.

Horn of Africa countries badly hit

The worst hit country at present is Somalia, where the FAO claims that around half the population already need some form of aid; either food or medical supplies or both. Ethiopia is also expected to tip into reliance on emergency aid, as the second harvest of the year has failed and that means that food aid reliance could rise from 1.3 million to over six million people.

Kenya and Uganda are both expecting poor harvests, and Uganda has an even more disastrous prognosis as the ongoing unrest between government forces and rebels has forced people off their land or led them to stay barricaded in their compounds, resulting in less cultivation and a probably halving of the harvest of staple food crops. The current violence has left more than a million people in Uganda struggling with food security and the number is expected to rise steadily throughout the next twelve months, according to FAO experts.

Somali roadside wreckage courtesy of Carl Montgomery at Flickr under a creative commons licence

There is a growing movement to assess the value–in dollar terms–of “ecosystem services” such as storm protection (from salt marshes), pollination of crops (from bee colonies and insects), natural predation of harmful insects and parasites (by birds, bats and other animals), fertilizer from animal feces, fish in the oceans, clean water and air, and cooling/greenhouse gas-controlling forests, etc.

This movement has been gaining steam–especially with the recent loss of 40% of U.S. bee colonies by a mysterious virus (causing billions of dollars in lost crops), and the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina (largely due to the human destruction of natural buffers like salt marshes and sand bars).

Earlier this year, in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Peter Kareiva et al, published a call for renewed efforts to put a dollar figure on the value of nature’s services. Putting a price on such services (defined as any function of the natural world that we benefit from) is extremely tricky and difficult, but not putting any price at all on these services, in the view of the authors, seems a serious mistake.

Kareiva, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, elaborated on this idea: “In this world, cost benefit analysis and dollars are how decisions get made…When nature and the benefits that nature [provides] are not converted to dollars then it can’t be on the table for those discussions and, in a way, nature’s not getting credit for what it’s doing.” (quoted from a February, 5, 2009 podcast report by David Biello for Scientific American)

The time has come to credit Nature for what it does for us. Not to do so, the authors argue, is to devalue Nature, and thus to encourage our collective ignorance and misuse/abuse of its services.

photo credit: Jon Sullivan, public domain

It’s in the papers and on TV. It spreads across the Internet (including this very post), and it is finding its way into the classroom. Global climate change is nothing new. And it certainly isn’t going away. Not yet, anyway.

A report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” was put out on June 16, 2009. The report compiles years of scientific research and takes into account new data not available during the preparation of previous assessments. It was produced by a consortium of experts from 13 U.S. government science agencies and from several major universities and research institutes.

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You might think Zimbabwe had problems enough, with out of control inflation, an uneasy power-sharing government and a collapsed agricultural economy, but there is always room for things to get worse, or, more accurately, there’s plenty of room, but everybody and everything want to be in the same places.

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The US Agriculture Department says that fewer acres of corn and wheat will be planted in future, but this doesn’t necessarily mean a price hike. Acreage of corn being planted has dropped in part because there is less demand from the ethanol industry. Corn is used as livestock food as well as serving as a cereal and providing ethanol for a range of industry uses, including biofuels.

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The recent fall in grain prices across the developed world may have given the impression that food security isn’t a problem – but it is. There are more people not getting enough to eat than there were a decade ago.

Prices for grain, globally, are still 20% above the 2006 average, so overall this is a period of extremely high costs for staple foods. And while commodity prices have fallen in international markets, retail prices have not fallen in the developing world at anything like the same rate. In other words, a warehouse full of corn is cheaper, but a bag of corner on a Nairobi street corner is more expensive, than in 2006. And while the immediate suspicion is corruption in the developing world, that’s probably not the main reason for the hiked prices staying high. Cereal stocks are at a thirty year low – a situation made worse by the use of certain crops for bio-fuel – and scarcity of reserves will always keep prices high.

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In a huge break for the United States’ anti-GMO movement, a federal judge ruled that the US Fish & Wildlife Service should not have allowed genetically modified crops to be planted within a Prime Hook, a national wildlife refuge in Delaware.

The suit, filed by the Center for Food Safety, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, and the Audubon Society in Delaware, challenged that the US Fish & Wildlife Service knowingly put habitat at risk when it allowed farmers to plant GMO’s inside the 10,000-acre wildlife refuge. The results were better than anyone expected.

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Vegetables today are larger, but contain more “dry matter” which dilutes the concentrations of minerals.  This results in 5% to 40% less magnesium, iron, calcium, and zinc.

Selective breeding to increase crop yields has let to genetic dilution, which has also in turn caused declines in protein and amino acid levels in produce.

Because of the increased use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, crops are now harvested so quickly that the plant has less time to absorb nutrients either from synthesis or the soil.

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Water science is a funny old business, but not in the amusing sense of funny. The World Water Forum has not been a barrel of laughs in recent years: whether you specialise in aquifer depredation, freshwater salination, chemical leaching, water based conflicts or polar cap melting, there’s been not a great deal of good news to share with the rest of the world.

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Apart from the $1 billion in lost production and sales, what has been the cost of the peanut butter recall?

The environmental impact will take years to unravel.  The first level of harm is the weakened price for peanuts, which hits farmers hard, and the limited outlets that are now available to those who farm them – in Georgia, small farmers in particular are looking at little or no income for the next year, and then at a severely reduced marketplace. Peanuts are used in many more products than peanut butter and Reese’s Cups, but where they have been used as a filler or paste to give structure and mouth appeal to certain foods, alternative products like carnauba are now being used, meaning that a lot of the low-grade peanuts formerly bought by the food processing industry are going begging.

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Vietnam faces a stark choice. Its farmlands are shrinking as government policy to achieve ‘industrialised nation’ status by 2020 continues. But national food security has always been a focus of Vietnamese political and cultural life. How is it to balance these two competing aims. One answer is through the use of atomic energy.

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It’s a decidedly low-tech way to deal with a 21st century problem, but a newly published paper argues that the world can cut carbon dioxide emissions up to 15 percent a year by taking the crop waste leftover after the harvest and dumping it into the deep ocean.

Stuart Strand of the University of Washington and coauthor Gregory Benford of the University of California at Irvine argue in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that such a reduction is possible by dumping 30 percent of world crop residues at least 1,500 meters deep in the oceans. The method would lock up the carbon in the crop waste deep underwater for thousands of years, the authors said.

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A large Florida landscaping business has planted a 22-acre biomass crop at its nursery that will produce enough fuel to operate its fleet of 25 diesel trucks.

Brian Shank, president of Clermont Scapes in Groveland, Florida, said he decided to plant a 22-acre plot of Jatropha in order to save money for his hurting business, but also to set an example for other companies looking for cost-effective ways to help the environment.

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From our friends at ZapRoot: Farmers take it to the extreme to protect their crops. The Auto Alliance has jump on the green bandwagon. These Guys are Full of **it returns.

Links for this week’s edition:

sustainablog - Killing for Crops
Gas 2.0 - Ecodriving with the AAM
EcoScraps - McDonalds Green Billboard
Shell and the Alberta Oil Sands
Sad Hippies
Some Key Findings of the report are:

1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. (p. 13)

2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow. Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow. (p. 27)

3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase. Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health. These impacts are different from region to region and will grow under projected climate change. (p. 41-106, 107-152)

4. Climate change will stress water resources. Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage. (p. 41, 129, 135, 139)

5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged. Agriculture is considered one of the sectors most adaptable to changes in climate. However, increased heat, pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production. (p. 71)

6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge. Sea-level rise and storm surge place many U.S. coastal areas at increasing risk of erosion and flooding, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska. Energy and transportation infrastructure and other property in coastal areas are very likely to be adversely affected. (p. 111, 139, 145, 149)

7. Threats to human health will increase. Health impacts of climate change are related to heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents. Robust public health infrastructure can reduce the potential for negative impacts. (p. 89)

8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses. Climate change will combine with pollution, population growth, overuse of resources, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone. (p. 99)

9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems. There are a variety of thresholds in the climate system and ecosystems. These thresholds determine, for example, the presence of sea ice and permafrost, and the survival of species, from fish to insect pests, with implications for society. With further climate change, the crossing of additional thresholds is expected. (p. 76, 82, 115, 137, 142)

10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today. The amount and rate of future climate change depend primarily on current and future human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases and airborne particles. Responses involve reducing emissions to limit future warming, and adapting to the changes that are unavoidable. (p. 25, 29)

Watch Video Coverage of the presentation of the report on youtube.

Photo Credit: bbum via flickr under Creative Commons License

Photo 2 Credit: Dimit®i via flickr under Creative Commons License

This will involve the setting up of crop banks and seed vaults, so to speak, in developing countries that depend on staples such as corn and rice, to tap on their valuable ’sustainability traits’ as a way of conserving the diversity of the world’s food crops.

In attempts to boost food security, crops from banana to sweet potato will be screened to identify material that plant breeders can use to produce varieties adapted to conditions associated with climate change.

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Whereas they may swill the grape juice, inhale the aroma and swoon over the subtleties cascading o’er the taste buds, I’m already on my third can and the match yet to start.

But my, how I jolted when I came across a story suggesting that English vineyards may, in decades to come, suffer because our summers are set to become too hot.

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The unusual idea came from Dallas Hanks, a 44-year-old biologist who is working on his doctoral degree at USU. With an initial $50,000 boost fromUDOT , Hanks aims to prove the 2,500 miles of state-owned highway right-of-way could yield an annual average of 500,000 gallons of 100 percent biodiesel, also known as B100.”

Maintaining those ubiquitous, out-of-place strips of lawn comes at a surprising price - over a million dollars each year in mowing costs alone - and keeping that grass weed-free (as if that was really necessary) generally involves considerable herbicide applications. In the spirit of turning liabilities into assets, converting that sod into a renewable fuel source would have substantial benefits. USU and UDOT’s researchers plan on starting out with a 1 mile test strip of various oil-seed crops, which will later be compared on a productivity basis to a flat, fertile farm plot.

Hanks, a former Utah Valley State College biology instructor, said he conservatively estimates planting swaths of safflower, camelina, canola and perennial flax will save about $1.6 million per year in mowing costs. UDOT officials said they wouldn’t know the total taxpayer savings until the project’s first-year experiment is finished.”

“It’s really a great opportunity to show some leadership,” said UDOT Executive Director John Njord.
By addressing efficiency, energy development and climate-change concerns, the project “has it all,” said Laura Nelson, Huntsman’s energy policy adviser.”

State agencies in Utah recently began pushing for innovation and conservation under the Governor’s order to increase energy efficiency 20% by 2015. If this experiment is successful, UDOT plans on using biodiesel produced from the freeway crops (or FREE-Diesel) in government vehicles.

For more information, see the Salt Lake Tribune.

My personal take:

This is about as cool as San Francisco’s recent decision to start making biodiesel from the city’s used restaurant oil. Depending on how much energy is used in the production of the crops, UDOT has the potential to reduced CO2 emissions by several million tons each year.

Has your city started producing its own biodiesel? If so, I’d be interested to hear and/or write about it.

Some Key Findings of the report are:

1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. (p. 13)

2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow. Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow. (p. 27)

3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase. Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health. These impacts are different from region to region and will grow under projected climate change. (p. 41-106, 107-152)

4. Climate change will stress water resources. Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage. (p. 41, 129, 135, 139)

5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged. Agriculture is considered one of the sectors most adaptable to changes in climate. However, increased heat, pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production. (p. 71)

6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge. Sea-level rise and storm surge place many U.S. coastal areas at increasing risk of erosion and flooding, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska. Energy and transportation infrastructure and other property in coastal areas are very likely to be adversely affected. (p. 111, 139, 145, 149)

7. Threats to human health will increase. Health impacts of climate change are related to heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents. Robust public health infrastructure can reduce the potential for negative impacts. (p. 89)

8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses. Climate change will combine with pollution, population growth, overuse of resources, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone. (p. 99)

9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems. There are a variety of thresholds in the climate system and ecosystems. These thresholds determine, for example, the presence of sea ice and permafrost, and the survival of species, from fish to insect pests, with implications for society. With further climate change, the crossing of additional thresholds is expected. (p. 76, 82, 115, 137, 142)

10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today. The amount and rate of future climate change depend primarily on current and future human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases and airborne particles. Responses involve reducing emissions to limit future warming, and adapting to the changes that are unavoidable. (p. 25, 29)

Watch Video Coverage of the presentation of the report on youtube.

Photo Credit: bbum via flickr under Creative Commons License

Photo 2 Credit: Dimit®i via flickr under Creative Commons License