Breaking through these barriers is the intent behind a pilot project in Idaho’s Big Wood River Basin, where a diverse group of local stakeholders has been meeting regularly with OSU climate and social scientists to talk about and plan for climate-driven changes in water quality and availability. Convening and hosting this “knowledge-to-action network” is the Climate Impacts Research Consortium (CIRC) based at Oregon State. By fall, the network will have developed and analyzed alternative scenarios based on climate models, land-use practices and population growth.

The Pringle Falls Experimental Forest

The summer is warm and sunny in Corvallis, but my travels draw me east. Over and past the Cascades is an open land where the cold sparkling waters of a river flow north, and the sweet smell of Ponderosa pine blends with the fresh scent of lodgepole — the Deschutes National Forest. My one-person tent is packed in the back of a white state-owned pick-up truck with the essentials: a sleeping bag, a GPS unit, a camera, some protein bars, lots of buffalo jerky, a “Rite in the Rain” notebook and a pencil, a brown backpack, a bright orange hard hat and a soil corer.

In the late afternoon, I arrive at the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest and set up camp. The Forest Service cabins are nestled next to the gurgling and gushing Deschutes, whose French name means “River of the Falls.” The sounds of the rapids downstream bring a sense of calmness to my spirit. At the campsite, the ground is laden with pinecones, and the pine drops (Pterospera andromedea) expose themselves above the dead needles, branches and other forest litter. I unpack my gear and prepare for an early start out to the field sites the next day.

Mixed stands of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine dominate the Pringle Falls forest.

As you might guess, this isn’t the typical camping trip. I am embarking on an expedition. As a graduate student in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, I am exploring something that lurks in the soils of Central Oregon — a fuzzy microscopic fungus that colonizes tree roots and might predict the future of the forest.

But why is the future of the forest at stake, and why dig underground when we are concerned about trees? The answer lies in the effects that organisms have on one another in a forest ecosystem. Like intricate underground machinery, fungi connect life-giving nutrients in the soil to roots that transport water and food to tree trunk, branch and leaf. Trees connect to climate and wildlife in an environment that evolves over time.

In the near future, scientists expect that climate will change and our forests will adapt. Tree zones will shift and a valuable tree species in the Deschutes National Forest — lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) — is predicted to decline. This change will affect people as well. Native Americans used the long, straight and lightweight poles to build teepees. Today we commercially harvest lodgepole for telephone poles and fences. Big-game animals, such as deer and elk, use lodgepole as habitat.

Pine drops

Researchers at Oregon State University suggest that, as the climate warms, lodgepole pine will decline in the Pacific Northwest by the end of the 21^st century. As a result, Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) may be able to migrate into lodgepole zones. But this migration is dependent on the distribution or co-migration of mycorrhizae (fungi that live on tree roots), which are largely unexplored in Central and Eastern Oregon. The question is: Will this migration will be successful?

To answer that question, it helps to know a little about an ancient relationship. Scientists think that mycorrhizae, the fungus colonizing tree roots, evolved with land plants. Fungi and plants have been together since the Devonian period, which began more than 400 million years ago. External root fungi, otherwise known as ectomycorrhizae, form a sheath on the exterior of tree roots. These artful fungi form symbiotic, or beneficial, relationships with their host. Once colonization is complete, they send out filaments, which mine the soil for water and essential nutrients such as nitrogen.

Ultimately, it comes down to a trade that the tree host must submit to: The tree provides carbon, in the form of sugars, to the fungus in exchange for nutrients. The relationship is essential for the host and fungus to have the highest degree of success in the ecosystem — in this case, an ecosystem that I have the privilege to explore.

Getting to the core

The author takes a soil core.

The morning sun is bright in Central Oregon, but the air is cold and crisp. On my drive to the field sites, I can see the white peaks of Three Sisters in the distance. I pull the truck into the first site, take out my maps and venture out into the forest.  My leather boots softly crunch on the dried pine needles covering the soil. I pound my soil corer into the ground making sure to take a sample of the top 15 centimeters  (about six inches) of soil. I take in the smell of fresh earth, as I unscrew the metal corer to reveal a rich brown cylindrical soil core made up of pumice, fine roots and the mycorrhizae, too small to be seen with the naked eye. I dump the dirt, fine roots and all, into a Ziploc bag and place it in my backpack for analysis.

In the lab in Corvallis, I use molecular technology, such as DNA tests, to identify the root fungi of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine. I extract DNA, compare it to mushroom DNA in a database and identify the suspects. Like a detective, I name the species and unearth the world that had lain unexamined beneath the soil. And suddenly, this underground community is less of a mystery.

Russula

Cortinarius

My analysis reveals a diversity of species: Cenococcum, a black crusty fungus that doesn’t form mushrooms; Rhizopogon, which often forms subterranean truffles; and typical mushroom producers Cortinarius, Russula and Inocybe. It also reveals that the fungal community connected to Ponderosa pine and lodgepole overlap. That means that, when it comes to soil biology at least, Ponderosa will have a high chance of survival if it migrates into a lodgepole zone.

As the climate warms and the tree zones shift, the forest where we recreate and connect with nature may not be as we remember it. The warming climate might diminish one valuable member of the community, but forests know how to persist. By looking at underground fungi, we can determine whether trees have the potential to migrate into new zones and succeed. In the future, the smell of lodgepole pine might be absent from the breeze and the long skinny poles will be no more. Instead, the presence of underground fungi suggests that we might become immersed in the rich mahogany bark and sweet scent of Ponderosa.

___________________

Editor’s note: Maria Garcia is a master’s student working with Jane E. Smith, research botanist in the USDA Forest Service. Garcia’s research is supported by the Forest Service and by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Julia Rosen explains how to extract ancient air from ice samples in OSU’s Ice Core Laboratory (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

A shard of ice sits on the black surface of the lab desk, buoyed in a growing puddle. Three small heads hover above in a tight huddle. “It’s cold,” notes one of the kids. Somehow, this obvious observation always catches me off guard, as if I’ve forgotten the most fundamental quality of water’s solid phase. “That’s true,” I reply, “it’s also 10,000 years old.”

“Wow!” the students chorus, and their eyes widen as they look again with renewed awe at this innocuous specimen that could have come from an ice-cube tray in their freezer. Whether I am visiting loquacious third-graders or shyly curious middle-schoolers, I am always touched by the unjaded willingness of youth to imagine and attempt to grasp the unseen. It’s the reason every scientist falls in love with science.

I analyze ice cores in the Oregon State University Ice Core Laboratory and no longer think about their cool touch. I have learned that, like people, the most interesting things about them lie hidden inside. And, like people, it takes time and patience to understand them. When we succeed, these frozen time capsules from Greenland and Antarctica allow us to reconstruct climate far into the past so that by understanding its natural rhythms and quirks, we can predict what kind of future awaits these students.

But let’s start with the obvious: a clear, smooth cylinder of ice glittering with tiny bubbles like a flute of frozen champagne. Stunningly boring to behold, only an occasional band of volcanic ash or the subtle cloudy layers formed during dusty polar winters break its translucent monotony. However, this continuity is actually an ice core’s greatest strength. It provides a complete, unbroken record of past climates, one that is unavailable in almost any other natural archive.

As detectives of Earth’s history, geologists reconstruct stories from snapshots of ancient seas and whispers of long-dead creatures, piecing together a hazy story of our planet’s past. Ice cores are the long-lost diaries of climate. Every day, they recorded the temperature, sniffed the air and noted the snowfall. They sensed changes far from their polar homes — the amount of dust lofted from Asia, the gurgle of tropical volcanoes and much more. From the top to the bottom of a core lie flakes that witnessed every moment of geologic time that elapsed in between.

Thin Air

Physicists, chemists and geologists have spent 60 years learning to translate the primordial language of ice. Early pioneers of ice-core science discovered that they could estimate temperature using the chemistry of rain and snow. As the air warms, precipitation gathers more heavy molecules and fewer light molecules (known as isotopes) of water. The ratio of these isotopes thus provides a record of temperature. These scientists had the transformative idea of using old ice to reconstruct climate by exploiting this valuable relationship.

Each new analytical tool that becomes available to scientists provides another Rosetta Stone for decoding long-lost archives of the ice. Today, we can measure trace amounts of chemical impurities deposited on the ice sheets as dust and aerosols. They tell us how sea ice waxed and waned and which way the wind blew. They reveal the fingerprints of individual volcanic eruptions. While only the pristine inner core provides suitably clean ice for these highly sensitive measurements, the “snow dust” from cutting and cleaning the core does not go to waste. It can be used, for example, to reconstruct concentrations of a rare element, beryllium-10. Produced by cosmic rays high in the atmosphere, the abundance of this element reflects shifts in solar radiation.

Lit by an Arctic midnight sun, this iceberg was spawned by one of Greenland’s fastest moving glaciers near Illulissat. About 400 feet high, it covered an area larger than a city block. (Photo: Julia Rosen)

Of all the stories that ice cores tell, however, the bubbles of air embedded within them actually contain the most impressive secrets. As snow accumulated over thousands of years, slowly hardening into solid ice and forming the massive polar ice sheets, it sealed off little breaths of ancient air between the grains of snow — the very same air we would have inhaled if we had stood on top of the ice sheet 8,000 years ago, or 80,000 or 800,000. From those microscopic samples, we can retrace the evolution of our planet’s atmosphere across almost a million years of Earth history, a period that encompasses nearly all of human existence.

Revelations

In Antarctica, where extreme cold and meager snowfall limit the flow of ice, these cores stretch back across eight glacial cycles. During each, the Earth oscillated between periods of cold climate and expansive ice, including a vast glacial blanket that smothered northern North America, and a time of balmy warmth with ice sheets comparable in size to those on Earth today. Wobbles in the planet’s orbit periodically brought it closer to and farther from the sun’s furnace, setting the rhythm of the climatic metronome.

Across these dramatic changes, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rose and fell with the global temperature as the Earth’s oceans and biosphere adjusted to a changing environment. These gases both responded to climate change and amplified it through their potent ability to trap the Earth’s outgoing energy. But never in the past 800,000 years did these gases reach concentrations even remotely approaching current levels, and never did they rise so quickly, or shoot up at the end of an interglacial period when the receding sun should have lulled the Earth back into an icy slumber.

At the other pole, ice cores in Greenland felt those same changes, although the records of climate before 120,000 years ago crept away through the unstoppable march of glaciers to the sea. Nonetheless, these cores tell us something else completely new. Throughout the last cold period on Earth, which our ancestors waited out in the mild climates of Africa, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a barrage of climate changes so swift and so huge that certain places on Earth warmed by 20 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of decades. The cause of these dramatic jolts remains a mystery, but their power to radically reorganize the Earth system attests to the inherent volatility of the world in which modern civilization has only recently made a home.

We are slowly beginning to understand the anatomy of global climate and how it changes, its geographic fingerprint and its tempo. Ice cores paint a complex and sometimes surprising picture, one that generations of scientists will spend decades trying to fully understand. We now know the correct greenhouse gas concentrations to feed into our calculations as we simulate past climates in order to validate models for the future.

Ice cores have made one thing abundantly clear: Humans are in uncharted territory. In 800 millennia of records, no entries document a climate like the one we live in today. Even as you read this, we are busy writing the next page of the ice-core diaries.

Illustration by Hank Osuna

Time to Listen

These observations from opposite poles forewarn a perilous future for our planet. We know without question that we’ve entered a period in geologic history for which there is no natural analog, and we know that the Earth’s climate can respond dramatically to perhaps even the smallest nudge.

However, the most terrifying lesson I learned from ice cores did not come from drilling into the past, but from just standing on the surface. At 80 degrees North, well above the Arctic Circle in the empty white wilds of the Greenland ice sheet, I watched a supply plane on skis repeatedly try to lift off. First the crew dumped cargo and then off-loaded all their fuel except what they needed to get home. Finally, on their seventh attempt, they succeeded.

The problem? The snow had warmed to the freezing point, and microscopic drops of water on the surface made the friction between the skis and the ice too great to break. Last summer, 97 percent of the surface of Greenland experienced temperatures above freezing, more than any year in NASA’s 30 years of satellite observations.

The ice cores have told us all they know, and now it’s up to us to listen.

Editor’s note: Julia Rosen is working toward her Ph.D. in the Oregon State University Ice Core Laboratory under the guidance of Ed Brook, professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Support for the lab has come from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.

_______________________________________

For more information:

Analysis of Greenland Ice Cores Adds to Historical Record and May Provide Glimpse into Climate’s Future (Jan. 24, 2013)

Antarctic Ice Core Contains Unrivaled Detail of Past Climate, (Feb. 5, 2013)

Thus was born the biofuels industry — and also the first known barbecue.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

The name of that cave, Wonderwerk, means “miracle” in the Afrikaans language, and indeed biofuels were a miracle. From cooking to heating and light, fire aided the evolution of the human race. The biofuels industry even preceded Homo sapiens and anatomically modern humans by about 800,000 years.

Over time, barbecue techniques made steady progress, achieving ultimate perfection in South Carolina pulled pork. However, despite their importance and a few innovations like fireplaces and metallurgy, biofuel technologies tended to stagnate for about 999,000 years. In the developed world, biofuels were eventually dwarfed by fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and challenged more recently by solar, nuclear, wind and even wave energy.

Now, we’ve come full circle.

Biofuels are back, hotter than ever, the source of billions of dollars in new investments. From corn ethanol to biodiesel and now forest products, biofuels are often touted as a sustainable fuel source that will lessen our dependence on imported oil and provide domestic jobs. It’s ideally seen as win-win, and researchers all over the world are trying to perfect new technologies, increase efficiency and make biofuels more cost-effective.

It has also been proposed that biofuels could help mitigate climate change — that substituting them for their fossil-fuel counterparts would reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions into the atmosphere — but that assumption is facing challenges both locally and globally.

Jet Fuel

This is not your caveman’s biofuel. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program that was announced last year will bring $80 million to Pacific Northwest industry and universities, $9.8 million of it to Oregon State University, for a diverse program of research and education to create aviation fuel out of tree plantations and low-value wood products. Through the miracle of cellulosic ethanol, some jets of the future will fly on fuel made from Pacific Northwest trees.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

“We could take material that isn’t now being used and create a new billion-dollar industry in the Pacific Northwest,” says John Sessions, a distinguished professor of forest engineering at Oregon State and principal investigator working on the Northwest Aviation Renewables Alliance.

“At the same time, we could help thin forests that are unhealthy and overcrowded, benefit wildlife habitat, reduce the risk of catastrophic fire and provide some badly needed jobs in communities that have lost their historic base in timber production,” Sessions says. “This won’t solve all of the nation’s energy concerns, and we shouldn’t say that it will. But it could make an important contribution.”

Sessions is quick to point out that “not all biofuels are created equal” and that thinning forests will cost substantially more than just using residues from existing logging operations — although the cost issue would look much better if commercial timber from small trees were harvested along with residue. One of OSU’s primary roles in the new initiative is to identify ways to get wood out of the forests more efficiently, and Sessions says that cutting logistical costs by 30 percent or more is a reasonable target.

However, questions about the modern biofuels industry have been raised almost since its inception, and as the debate enters the forest-products industry, it’s getting more intense. Cost is a big issue. So is what many ecologists consider the single most serious environmental threat in the world today — global warming, or the greenhouse effect.

Carbon Emissions

Some early proponents of biofuels suggested that they could be “carbon neutral” or even better, meaning they will not compound concerns about greenhouse warming and might even reduce it. Since they are produced from crops or trees that “sequester” carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, the theory was that sequestration would offset most or all of the carbon they release when they are turned into one type of fuel or another.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

“Different sides in this debate tend to pick the numbers that best support their arguments,” says Mark Harmon, a professor of forest science at OSU and one of 18 researchers in the nation advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on biogenic carbon. “The truth is more nuanced.”

The bottom line, Harmon says, is that almost any harvest of existing forest trees will cause a net increase of carbon to the atmosphere and that it may take decades or even centuries to “pay it back” with future tree growth. For global-warming concerns that are real and immediate, that’s a problem.

“This is a dilemma, and there won’t be any magic fix,” he says. “Forests are renewable, but only over very long time spans. Biofuels from tree harvesting would create a carbon debt that would be very difficult to pay back, like borrowing on one credit card to pay off another. The enthusiasm for them may have gotten ahead of the science.”

Harmon has estimated that, in an Oregon Coast Range stand, if you removed solid woody biofuels for the reduction of catastrophic fire risk and used them to produce cellulosic ethanol, it would take 339 years to reach a break-even point in carbon sequestration.

Another study last year at OSU, the largest and most comprehensive yet done on the effect of biofuel production from West Coast forests, echoed these concerns. It found that an emphasis on bioenergy would increase carbon-dioxide emissions from these forests at least 14 percent, if the efficiency of such operations were optimal. Harvest increases, for any reason, would result in increases in greenhouse emissions.

An analysis just published in the journal Global Change Biology/Bioenergy raised even more doubts, if forest biomass were to reach its ultimate potential. The authors, who included Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at OSU, wrote that a major global commitment to forest-biomass energy “would result in a reduction of biomass pools that may take decades to centuries to be paid back by fossil fuel substitution, if paid back at all.”

Reported emission savings from forest bioenergy are based on erroneous assumptions, they added, and a large biofuels industry would push forest management to ever-shorter rotation lengths, with depleted soil nutrients and fertility, increased erosion and flooding, and degraded fish habitat in streams. Even the economics may become more difficult, according to this analysis. In Europe, where bioenergy is subsidized, the cost of woody biomass from conifers surged in price from 300 percent to 600 percent between 2005 and 2010.

“Based on review of the literature, the paper concluded that large-scale bioenergy production from forests is neither sustainable nor greenhouse-gas neutral,” says Law, who is also a co-author of the National Research Council report on methods for quantifying and verifying greenhouse-gas emissions. “These issues have not been thought out very fully.”

By the Numbers

That’s about the same perspective held by William Jaeger, an OSU professor of agricultural and resource economics who has studied the economics of biofuels for the past five years.

“Biofuels were being seriously promoted before two main areas were thoroughly analyzed,” Jaeger says. “Those areas are net carbon analysis and economic constraints. People looked at this somewhat superficially. They said, ‘We can grow our own energy; why buy it from Saudi Arabia?’”

Biofuels, he says, were seen at first as such a win-win by most groups that they engendered almost no opposition. Political leaders loved them, environmental groups went along, jobs were being created and crop prices went up for farmers.

Under Jaeger’s analysis, however, the facts are less rosy. He analyzed ethanol produced from crops and switchgrass cellulose, including some approaches that are simpler and even less costly than the current move toward forest-based cellulosic ethanol. Jaeger concluded that existing policies have been very costly, produce negligible reductions in fossil fuel use and increased greenhouse-gas emissions.

His bottom line?

For complex reasons, the growth of a biofuel industry is doing almost nothing to reduce use of fossil fuels. And if you wanted to reduce gas consumption by 1 percent, U.S.-produced biofuels would cost 20 to 31 times more than energy-efficiency improvements. Meanwhile, the cost of taxpayer subsidies for some of these programs is extraordinary: Current ethanol subsidies to operate a 100-million-gallon ethanol plant translate to about $1 million per job, per year. Depending on the type of biofuel, there are risks of local pollution, heavier demands on land use and higher food prices for the poor.

Will some of the research being done around the world, and in the Pacific Northwest, change that? Some researchers believe it will. At least incremental improvements in efficiency and cost are probable. Whether they will be enough to offset the huge obstacles is more problematic. But while subsidizing a whole industry right now is questionable, even Jaeger points out that investment in research often has a very high payoff.

Forest Investment

“Until we work on them, we really won’t know what improved technologies will be able to do,” says Claire Montgomery, an OSU professor of forest resources. “And some of these costs have to be kept in perspective. We’re spending billions of dollars to protect our access to fossil fuels, and the cost of fire suppression in the U.S. has tripled since the mid-1990s to $1 billion a year.”

Wood or Oil?

The research cited here shows what some of those consequences, good and bad, might be when we
transform wood, a carbohydrate renewable over a scale of years to centuries, into heat or fuel.
Read more…

Other issues aside, Montgomery says, Pacific Northwest forests and rural communities are struggling. Decades of fire suppression have led to overcrowded forests, insect and disease epidemics are increasing, rural communities have high unemployment levels, and there’s little money to do anything about it. A biofuels industry could help all of these.

In her research, Montgomery is trying to identify where a supply of wood that could fuel an industry most closely matches up with the communities that need help. “Displacing fossil fuels is good,” she says. “Creating jobs is good. Helping rural communities is good.”

But a biofuels industry is not simple, certainly not as simple as once envisioned. And the issues of greenhouse warming, high societal costs and other environmental concerns are not easily dismissed.

Biofuels still make for a great barbecue. But it’s safe to say the caveman who invented this industry a million years ago had no idea, before it was all over, just how complicated the business might get.

Phil Mote directs the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

It’s important to ask the right questions about data used to reach a conclusion. Are there gaps, either geographically or through time? Were robust statistical methods used to determine if a specific event was indeed unusual? Peer-reviewed research has shown that short periods of cooling can easily be embedded in longer-term warming trends; it’s simply a statistical fact in a time series with a positive trend and a variable system.

Recent cool weather notwithstanding, Oregon has undergone a substantial warming trend over the last 50 to 60 years. What are now considered exceptionally cool seasons were normal 75 to 100 years ago, and seasons now considered normal were exceptionally warm in the same period. If one arbitrarily selects the climatically insignificant period of 5 to 10 years, one can incorrectly conclude that there is no evidence of warming. But further research also shows reasons for the slight decline in global (and Oregon’s) temperatures: A combination of La Niña (when eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures are 3 degrees to 5 degrees Celsius cooler than normal) and solar minimum (a low point in solar activity) temporarily overcame the gradually increasing effects of greenhouse gases.

Globally, 2011 was the warmest La Niña year ever. Research clearly points to a resumption of the warming as the recent spate of La Niñas wanes and as the solar cycle moves toward maximum. In short, rigorous research tells us so much more than the comparison of averages over arbitrary lengths of time.

The larger point that concerns me is how easily many people dismiss rigorous research in preference for subjective observation. Both are valid ways of adding to the sum of human knowledge, but sometimes the results of research can be counterintuitive and can even contradict what we see with our own eyes.

Take, for example, the patient whose doctor tells him he has a treatable form of cancer. If he feels fine, should he rely only on his subjective feelings? Would he be wise to conclude that his doctor is in “the cancer camp” and wait for clear physical evidence before doing anything?

Or what about the roofer who tells a homeowner that her roof is badly worn and could start leaking in the next storm. Would she be wise to dismiss him as part of the “leaky-roof camp” and ignore him until she actually sees the water trickling through her dining room ceiling?

Why do some of us so flippantly dismiss scientists studying the health of our only planet? Why argue against taking prudent steps now?

Some people may wish that global warming is nonsense. So do I. But I have to accept the evidence provided by thousands of honest, hard-working scientists, meticulously documented during the past 120 years, that says otherwise.

— Phil Mote is the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute

California coast range newts in amplexus. (Photo: http://dipperanch.blogspot.com)

Ambling along the oaky trails at Finley Wildlife Refuge last Saturday morning — one of the first days without rain in a long, long time — my two friends and I paused at the edge of a pond along Woodpecker Loop.  Just under the murky surface, several rough-skinned newts were swimming in slow motion, their bodies undulating in rhythm with the rippling of the water and the dappling of the sun.

“Hey, they have two tails!” Lorraine pointed out. We realized, all at once, that each newt was in fact two newts, one atop the other. These weren’t just newts lazing around in the sun. They were mating. When I got home, I Googled “newt mating.” The term “amplexus” is what biologists call this behavior, which involves a lot of chin rubbing and sometimes goes on for days before the male deposits his sperm to fertilize the female’s eggs. That cold Latin noun seemed like an impoverished descriptor for the dancelike fluidity of the newts’ courtship. And it offers a huge clue to why ordinary people often have a hard time relating to, or believing in, science. Tell someone you witnessed newts in “amplexus” and watch their eyes glaze over. But tell them you saw newts in “embrace” (the English translation of the Latin), and they’ll want to know more. The explanation for the behavior may be biologic. But the pathway to understanding is, for most of us, more poetic.

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge that Kathleen Dean Moore, an environmental philosopher of national reputation, has taken on at Oregon State University. Last night, Moore and her colleagues Allen Thompson (coeditor of Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change just released by MIT Press) and Carly Lettero of OSU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, hosted more than 40 scientists, graduate students, science educators and science writers on campus for conversation and nascent collaboration. Co-sponsored by OSU’s Research Office, the gathering brought together researchers and scholars to talk creatively about the subject that unites their work: climate change. Scientists of oceans, rivers, forests, mountains, plants and wildlife met scholars of philosophy, history, communications, education and human health, briefly sharing their current research endeavors with one another. Then, over beer, wine and smoked salmon, they began to talk about new ways of thinking about and working on the looming crisis threatening our planet and our survival.

Joking that he was happy to see OSU’s “climate rogue’s gallery” assembled in one place, Rick Spinrad, vice president for research, kicked off the event by saying, “No single discipline can respond effectively alone.”

Moore, coeditor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, expanded on the urgency of talking and working across disciplines, the necessity of merging the empirical and the cultural in both conversation and action. Science is only half of the persuasion equation, she said. To get the average person to believe in climate change and, more importantly, to act on that belief, it’s not enough to pile more and more data onto their plates. Rather, the data (the way the world is) must be linked to values (what we ought to do). This “normative premise” derives from what we care about most deeply. For most of us, Moore said, it’s our children. This shared cherishing of children is the bridge, she said, that can carry us over the political chasm swallowing up so much of our national conversation these days.

“We need to create a global moral consensus that it’s wrong to wreck the world,” Moore told the group. “We have to tell the stories of climate change in ways that make people cry.”

Oceanographer Alan Mix added his voice: “Scientists are admitting that we’re never going to win the argument on a scientific basis — always thinking in terms of evidence, data points and squiggly lines on graphs.”

Moore summed up the event by encouraging “creative collaboration to amplify the social impacts” of scientific discovery. “It’s not enough to just do our own work,” she told the group. “We have to make sure our work is making a difference out in the world.”

What’s needed, she seems to be saying, is a sort of scholarly amplexus: an embrace of the sciences with the humanities toward renewal and restoration of life on Earth.

For more information, contact Carly Lettero, carly.lettero@oregonstate.edu, coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

I am lousy at poker, but that doesn’t keep me from participating in the worldwide gamble we call climate change. It’s a game of chance with deadly consequences. With each passing year, we up the ante by adding more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and tipping the scales in favor of a drastically different future.

Click to download the PDF

Some of the cards are already on the table: receding glaciers, rising sea levels, rampant forest pests, eroding coastlines, intense storms and spreading drought. By themselves, such trends are not the definitive signature of a changing climate. Taken together, however, they demonstrate that we are indeed living on a new planet, as author Bill McKibben argues. Here, the chances are diminishing that future generations will be able to grow enough food, keep people healthy, ensure public safety and enjoy our rich ecological heritage.

This issue of Terra shows what some Oregon scientists, foresters, farmers, public health officials and planners are doing to prepare. They face a moving target, because as they work, knowledge continues to evolve. Two recent examples from OSU suggest the scale of the challenge. A 2011 report in the journal Science by OSU professor Andreas Schmittner and colleagues concluded that the most drastic climate scenario posed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is less likely than had previously been judged. Contrary to some criticism, they did not rule out major consequences from small changes in climate.

Earlier, Alan Mix, one of Schmittner’s colleagues on the Science paper, co-authored a report in Nature Geoscience that throws cold water on a hypothesis involving the source of atmospheric carbon that ballooned after the last Ice Age. The evidence from a deep-ocean site about 70 miles off southwest Oregon was conclusive: The carbon came from some place other than the northeast Pacific, which scientists had considered the most likely location. The findings, said Mix, left them puzzled.

These might seem like arcane footnotes to arguments among specialists, but on them and other details rest our understanding of how the planet works. Much of that knowledge is in hand, but while scientists have reached wide agreement about the outlines of a changing climate, the picture is still coming into focus.

What do current trends mean for the rest of us? Here’s a view from writers and scientists assembled last fall by OSU’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word. In the Blue River Declaration, they wrote: “A truly adaptive civilization will align its ethics with the ways of the Earth. A civilization that ignores the deep constraints of its world will find itself in exactly the situation we face now, on the threshold of making the planet inhospitable to humankind and other species.”

If you like to gamble, you might think that nature is bluffing or that we’ve got the rules all wrong and we can go on changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans. With every passing year, it appears that nature is serious. We might not have every rule nailed down yet, but this is a game in which the losers are likely to be our children.

Illustration by Teresa Hall

I remember when I felt that the climate change workshop would go well. After a period of planning and preparation, our Oregon Sea Grant team arrived in Port Orford not knowing how the diverse community group would respond to the issue of a changing local climate when we were all actually face to face. So, after introductions and a brief discussion of some overall goals, our team explained why and how to make a “concept map” — each individual’s simple diagram of how he or she perceived a particular idea — in this case, the local effects that they were concerned about and that they thought might be linked to a changing climate.

For about 10 minutes, the group worked on their own concept maps and then put post-its next to each other on sheets of poster paper. As we all looked at the array, the 10 community members — a schoolteacher, fisherman, mayor, city manager, environmental leader and others — saw that they held both concerns in common and some that were individually distinct. Through discussion, we rearranged the post-its into clusters until everyone was satisfied with the way their concerns had been sorted.

“Everyone’s ideas are up there” … “no one’s excluded” … “we’re beginning to see an overall picture,” said members of the group. Bingo. With contentious issues such as climate change, a good place to begin is to have each voice within the group be heard.

This isn’t the end-point, of course, but it does highlight what’s often missing from national discussions of climate change and what can happen in a small group context in a workshop: actual two-way communication, listening respectfully, contributing respectfully.

Know the Audience

We started listening long before the face-to-face meeting. Like other professional communicators and similar climate programs on campus, including those of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, my Extension, education and research colleagues and I use methods such as surveys, focus groups and interviews with target populations before we start engaging them on the substantive issues — what a particular community may want to do around climate change.

From our 2008 surveys of coastal decision makers in Oregon and coastal property owners in Maine, for example, we learned about not only what information related to climate effects they thought they needed, but also what personal attitudes and other behavioral factors they held that were influencing their actions and intentions to act on information. Without understanding those attitudes and beliefs, we wouldn’t really know what information might be directly useful or how best to present it. In both states, one communication tool we used was short videos that specifically addressed concerns the intended viewers expressed. (Follow-up surveys confirmed their value.)

Focusing on the decisions that individuals and communities feel they need to make to address a recognized problem yields a much more constructive conversation than does focusing on global warming itself, we find. No surprise there, really: if coastal residents are concerned about flooding, that’s tangible and relevant to them. Whether people caused it by increasing use of fossil fuels that led to global warming is, for most, an abstraction — and an invitation to argument.

Public Opinion on Global Warming

Americans certainly have differences on the subject, which puzzles some people. How do we explain that despite about two decades of scientific pronouncements about global warming and the environmental, economic, and social hazards that it presents, just 63 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is happening? Only 50 percent believe it’s mostly caused by human activities, and that percentage has declined 7 points since 2008, even while global greenhouse gas emissions have increased, according to an ongoing study by Yale and George Mason universities (nationwide survey of adults conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication in November 2011).

Clearly, if “getting the word out” about the science was the only determinant of whether Americans believe the science about humanity’s contribution to global warming, we’d have higher percentages believing than 50%. But, of course, the calculation that each of us makes with the myriad of topics that are presented to us daily is far more complex than if we were blank sheets walking around waiting to be filled by indisputable facts.

If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

We’re all drowning in information and in competing claims on our time, making attention the scarce resource, as psychologist Herbert Simon observed way back in 1971 (“Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins Press). Before we turn up the volume on this or that “communication” about science, then, a good first question would be, have we dialed into the right frequency that the other party is tuned to? Guessing isn’t good enough. As a recent federal government report about climate communication pointed out, “there’s no such thing as an expert in communication, in the sense of someone who can tell you ahead of time (i.e., without empirical study) how a message should be framed, or what it should say.”

Hence the research that we do on the populations we hope to work with. Beyond the empirical research and specific communication strategies we employ as a result, our team uses tools from behavioral and decision research to guide our efforts. Still, I agree that gaining others’ attention by focusing on concerns of importance to them and providing information that helps with their decisions are worthwhile, even if they are missing part of the challenge. What is to be done — if anything — about the 25% of Americans in the Yale/George Mason research who are “dismissive” or “doubtful” about global warming — and who may be actively hostile, even in the face of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists?

Values Before Facts

Probably the first thing to recognize is that for all of us — except maybe the climate scientists themselves — every new science “fact” is not a fact of our direct experience but rather one received from someone else. Thus, either we have to collect evidence about it or accept the words of others. “So, just like any other kind of fact,” as researcher Dan Kahan of Yale mentioned during an interview that’s part of our Communicating Climate Change podcast series, “your beliefs are going to be influenced by your values in exactly the same way as any other kind of belief that you might form.” (see a transcript of Kahan’s remarks)

Those who do believe scientists tend to have one set of “cultural” values, according to Kahan and his colleagues in the Cultural Cognition Network, while those who don’t, typically have another set. So, for example, if today’s fact appears to undercut other deep-seated value beliefs that are far more important to you than the fact du jour, what do any of us do? We tend to discount the “fact.” So don’t expect all Americans to suddenly believe any particular thing.

What one does with this insight to improve science communication is a topic of intense interest and discussion among communication researchers and practitioners. (Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences is holding a conference to discuss the “Science of Science Communication” in May.) Many advocate using an understanding of others’ values to frame scientific information in a way that’s congenial to those others. If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

Being sensitive to the other person, curious about them, attempting to understand them and what they think about the topic of the communication, and responding to them thoughtfully as they engage the conversation — we know this works in our personal lives. It’s not the end, but it may be a way forward. Even with communicating about climate change.

McKibben described the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which he started in 2009 with seven students at Vermont’s Middlebury College, where he is a distinguished scholar. The campaign has coordinated more than 15,000 rallies in nearly 190 countries. He also told of circling the White House with thousands of fellow activists and spending three nights in a Washington, D.C., jail to protest the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

Between this and other events on campus — including a workshop sponsored by OSU’s Spring Creek Project and a local-foods breakfast prepared by Gathering Together Farm — McKibben sat down with Terra magazine’s Nick Houtman and Lee Sherman to talk about the urgency of climate action worldwide. Below is an excerpt from that conversation.

TERRA: From your perspective, how does Occupy Wall Street intersect with climate-change action as a people’s movement pushing back against corporate interests?

McKibben: I went down to Occupy Wall Street very early and got to speak through the grand human microphone. And the thing I said was: “I’m very glad you’re here. Wall Street’s been occupying our atmosphere for the last 30 years. It’s about time we returned the favor.” You know, we can’t get anything done on climate change because enormous corporate power blocks action, time after time after time.

TERRA: Do you see a coalition forming between occupiers and environmental activists?

McKibben: You know, it’s like when we circled the White House to protest the Keystone pipeline a couple of weeks ago, and then Occupy Portland circled the federal building in Portland. It’s not like there’s some central Occupy headquarters that you call up and say, “What do we do next?” It’s an expression of a mood. And that mood is tired of being pushed around by major corporate power. It’s not working, and the climate is the perfect example of that. We’re literally entering into a time when the planet itself is not going to work for people anymore. It’s not even that we can’t break our addiction to fossil fuel, because as people, we’re capable of it. The problem is that fossil fuel companies can’t break their addiction to the quantities of money that fuel generates.

TERRA: What is the role of research universities in advancing the agenda for environmental clarity and stability?

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

McKibben: It’s been really important that hard science has been applied to climate change in a huge, serious, sustained way. Probably more human intelligence has been directed at trying to understand this than just about any other scientific question. Thanks to research at universities above all, and for the work of federal government agencies like NASA, we’ve managed to understand this problem. In a short period of time it’s crunched difficult problems in atmospheric chemistry and physics. It’s given us a workable consensus on what’s going on. That’s an enormous triumph. The scientific method has worked remarkably well.

The part that hasn’t worked is the political method. Where we’ve failed as educators, as citizens, is in taking what we know and turning it into public policy. All the economists and policy people and everybody else have been saying the right thing to politicians, explaining the many ways that they could be working on this. It just hasn’t happened very much, especially at a federal level, because the power of the fossil fuel industry is so great.

So, that’s really our work — our responsibility as citizens — to take care of that. Outside of the classroom, we’ve got to build a movement big enough to make these guys do it. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

TERRA: Scientists often are hesitant to be advocates. They worry that they’ll lose their credibility as objective researchers if they advocate for a position. What do you think about that?

McKibben: I think that’s understandable. And I think it’s also a little too easy. I think it’s sometimes a cover for the fact that scientists, in personal terms, aren’t very comfortable engaging the world outside the lab. I completely understand it. I’m a writer by trade. My goal would be stay in my room and type; that’s how I like to engage the world. But there are situations desperate enough that one would change one’s M.O. a little bit. And I’m very glad to see more scientists stepping up and doing that.

If it wasn’t for the bravery of Jim Hanson at NASA — his willingness to state plainly what’s going on, to go to jail to back it up — I don’t know where we’d be. And I noticed when we were doing this mass civil disobedience in Washington, there were more scientists joining in, some of them untenured research scientists. That takes a lot of bravery.

But on the other hand, you know, if you’re spending half your life out in Greenland calculating how much ice is being lost, who better than you to have the credibility to stand up and say it? I mean, if you don’t say it, then what’s the point of doing the research in the first place?

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

TERRA: OSU’s Spring Creek Project is dedicated to bringing scientists together with poets, writers and musicians to talk about issues like climate change across disciplines in order to reach different segments of the population. The idea is that not everyone responds to science.

McKibben: You know, 350.org is this huge campaign that takes its name from scientific data, so we’re not at all afraid of science. In general, I find no problem with people anywhere in the world understanding the basics of the science. I think we sometimes overstate how difficult or complex it is.

On the other hand, environmentalists have done much better appealing to the left side of the brain — the half that likes bar graphs and stuff — and not so well appealing to the side that deals well with art and music and things like that. That’s why we’ve made a big effort to incorporate tons of that stuff into 350.org. Much of our work is based around images — these beautiful images of thousands of rallies and demonstrations around the world. We did this giant art project last November with 20 pieces of art so big you have to look at them from satellites to really understand them. It involved thousands of people. Just yesterday we released a song in five or six African languages for this project called Radio Wave — bringing in one radio station at a time, north to south across Africa, to arrive in Durban, South Africa, right when the big UN Climate Conference is kicking off there.

TERRA: Here in Oregon people who are addressing environmental change in their communities tend to ask very practical questions — you know, sea level rise in a beachfront community that is causing waves to crash through their front windows. Most people don’t see climate change as the source, or global warming as the issue to address. They want to protect their property from erosion, period.

McKibben: Yeah, of course. It’s always easiest to think about things just locally, and that’s good. But what we’ve come to understand in recent years is the scale of change and the pace of change that we’re now kicking off. We’re not going to be able to adapt past a certain point. So people better start thinking further upstream and figuring out that we’ve got to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere. If we don’t, then we’re out of luck.

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

TERRA: We’re closing in soon on 400 parts per million (CO2 in the atmosphere). So where do you find hope in thinking we could turn this around and even begin to move back toward 350?

McKibben: There are plenty of times when one doesn’t have an enormous amount of hope. But I am cognizant of the fact that there is a big and growing movement out there. We had a big win when we stopped this Keystone Pipeline. For one, the oil industry didn’t get its way. And second, the power of people willing to get arrested was sufficient to at least slow them down. Obviously, we can’t fight this fight little-Dutch-boy style, plugging one leak after another. But, we’re learning some lessons about how to build movements and how to take these guys on.

TERRA: How do you see China and India dealing with those issues?

McKibben: In China, the die is largely cast in certain ways. They’ve built an immense amount of coal-fired power plants. India is less so. They’re much further down the curve and there’s more chance for serious intervention. In both cases, we should be moving quickly to aid them with serious technological help to allow people, especially in India, to leapfrog past fossil fuel.

They’re also doing many things right — far righter than we are. I just did a big piece for National Geographic on China and energy. And, look, the Chinese have installed about 60 million of these solar thermal arrays for hot water. For a quarter of a billion Chinese, when they take a shower at night their hot water is coming off the roof. That’s about 25 percent of China. In the U.S., it’s less than 1 percent. The technology is simple. The payback is fast. You tell me why it’s not getting used.

TERRA: Do you see regional differences in perceptions of climate change? For instance, the Pacific Northwest has a pretty benign, temperate climate. We don’t have serious droughts or hurricanes. So the signs aren’t right in our face yet. It’s a problem because people don’t necessarily see it happening around them. But it can also be an opportunity because we have time to adapt if we get busy right now.

McKibben: Well, here’s the thing: There’s no place that’s going to do very well with this kind of change. I mean, we kind of thought we were sitting pretty in Vermont. It’s kind of benign and out of the way. But half the state damned near washed away from the hugest rainfall we’ve ever experienced, by far. It was just wracking — and expensive. So, it can happen here, too. There’ll always be places like Oregon that will temporarily benefit, like during this horrible drought in Russia. They had to stop all grain exports to the rest of the world, and the price of wheat goes through the roof. And, suddenly, if you’re a wheat farmer in Eastern Oregon, you’re sitting pretty for a while. But look at the computer models and you’ll realize you’re a coin flip away from that drought being right where you are.

TERRA: Here in the Northwest, there’s a lot of work going on with federal and state agencies. For our cover story, we’ll reflect on the application of the first Oregon Climate Assessment Report released about a year ago by our Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.

McKibben: The Northwest is really important for many ways. One, it’s ahead of much of the rest of the country in trying to do something about the environment. Two, this stretch of the Pacific is an important place to serve as a cork in the bottle to keep large amounts of energy from coming out of the middle of the continent and heading toward China. I was up in Washington State not long ago, where they’re trying to stop these proposed coal ports along the coast, which would take all the coal out of Wyoming and Montana and ship it to China. There may be a similar plan for Oregon at some point, too. And I was just up in Vancouver, B.C., where they’re trying to stop more of these pipelines out of the tar sands. You know, you guys are kind of the wall between a lot of bad, dirty energy and China. And so it’ll be an important place for people to be organizing hard.

TERRA: On the subject of population, how important is the correlation between population growth and carbon concentrations?

McKibben: At this point, it’s not the biggest driver of climate change. We’re going to see another 2 billion people in the next 50 years. It’s not going to be easy to deal with; the planet’s already strained at 7 billion. But in climate terms, most of the population increase will happen in places that are so poor, the incremental amount of energy they use is small. We forget how wide the gulf is. I mean, the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average Tanzanian uses in the course of a year. So you can have a lot of Tanzanians before their energy consumption mounts up very much. One of the great tragedies of climate change is that it happens hardest in places that caused it the least.

So, yeah, population growth is important for many reasons, and climate change is one of them. But the biggest driver of climate change right now is places whose population is relatively stable but whose consumption is starting to rise toward the American level, China being the obvious example.

And it must be said that we’ve done a better job than people thought about dealing with population growth. You know, the average woman 30 years ago had six children. That number is 2.4 now and falling fast. And it’s because we figured out what to do — to educate women and to empower them. Fertility rates predictably go down dramatically. And, that’s what we’ve got to keep doing — make contraception available and accessible, and educate people enough that they have some control over their own destiny.

See a video of McKibben’s November 17, 2011, Discovery Lecture at Oregon State University.

But climate? We look to patterns of wind, temperature and precipitation. You can’t use a compass to tell you if it’s going to rain, but scientists have known for many years that climate and the Earth’s magnetic field move in similar fashion. They don’t understand if they are related and, if so, why.

The JOIDES Resolution in port at Ponta Delgada, Azores. IODP Expedition 339, Mediterranean Outflow. (Photo: John Beck, IODP/TAMU)

Stranger yet is where Chuang Xuan, a postdoctoral scientist at Oregon State University, is looking for clues to solve this mystery: the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Xuan has joined an expedition on the research ship JOIDES Resolution to drill deep into the seafloor where the Mediterranean Sea flows into the Atlantic. It is there, he says, that thick sediments deposited by the Mediterranean’s outflow may have preserved variations in climate along with the magnetic history of the planet.

The expedition is part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), an international research program in which OSU scientists have played a leading role.

According to Xuan, the combination of high sediment accumulation rates and the type of sediment may yield excellent paleomagnetic records — good enough to record small geomagnetic changes that scientists call “excursions” — as well as high-quality paleoclimate data from the same sediment sequences. He plans to study correlations between the two types of records to see whether and how geomagnetic field variation and climate change might be connected.

Chuang Xuan (Paleomagnetist, Oregon State University) and Carl Richter (Paleomagnetist, University of Louisiana) discuss the results of their testing. Expedition 339, Mediterranean Outflow, of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. (Photo: John Beck, IODP/TAMU)

A member of OSU’s Paleo-and-Environmental Magnetism Laboratory in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Xuan studies the process that causes deep-sea sediments to be magnetized. By deciphering past variations in Earth’s magnetic field, he works to understand the causes and consequences of geomagnetic change. He uses magnetic records from Arctic sediments for paleoenvironmental and stratigraphic applications. He also develops software to process large volumes of paleomagnetic data on sediment cores.

Xuan received his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Florida in 2010. He earned his master’s in applied mathematics in 2005 from China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, where he also received his bachelor’s in geology in 2002.

See weekly trip reports, photos and other information about the expedition.

About IODP

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is an international research program dedicated to advancing scientific understanding of the Earth through drilling, coring, and monitoring the subseafloor. The JOIDES Resolution is a scientific research vessel managed by the U.S. Implementing Organization of IODP (USIO). Together, Texas A&M University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership comprise the USIO.  IODP is supported by two lead agencies: the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Additional program support comes from the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the Australian-New Zealand IODP Consortium (ANZIC), India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, the People’s Republic of China (Ministry of Science and Technology), and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources.

Illustration by Teresa Hall

It helps to have your old bills handy if you use the Household Emissions Calculator created by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. You’ll need to enter how many kilowatt-hours of electricity and therms of natural gas or gallons of heating oil you’ve used in the past year. Add miles traveled in the car, whether or not you recycle your trash or turn down the thermostat at night and myriad other details, and the calculator will tell you how many tons of carbon emissions you can call your very own. The per-person average for 311 million Americans, according to the EPA calculator, is about 10 tons per year.

However, missing from these numbers is a factor that, in the long term, can overwhelm our efforts to live more lightly on the planet: the choice to reproduce. “It’s probably the most basic of all biological urges,” Paul Murtaugh told a Corvallis audience in February. “To hint that there might be some benefit to controlling that urge is very controversial.” Last year, Murtaugh personally found out just how strongly people feel about it.

All in the Family

The Oregon State University professor of statistics and OSU colleague Michael Schlax published a paper in the journal Global Environmental Change describing an individual’s “carbon legacy” — the amount of carbon likely to be emitted in the future by one’s descendants. Parents, they reasoned, could be held accountable for one half of their children’s emissions, one quarter of their grandchildren’s and declining portions down through the generations.

Murtaugh and Schlax took a mathematical approach to understanding the consequences. They estimated how large a parent’s carbon legacy might be by creating a model based on per capita carbon emissions and a country’s population trends (fertility and mortality rates and average longevity). They used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations to compare the carbon legacies of parents in 11 of the world’s most populous countries.

Since family size and longevity vary widely even within the same population, they ran the model thousands of times country by country. Each time, the model chose a random parent with a specific number of descendants who lived and reproduced until the lineage ran out. From those hypothetical examples emerged an average parent’s carbon legacy for each country.

Murtaugh and Schlax didn’t stop there. On top of these calculations, they added another factor: future changes in annual carbon emissions. While there are wide disparities between rich and poor countries, today’s global average is about four metric tons (as carbon dioxide or CO2) per person. If new carbon-free energy technologies take hold, emission rates could drop. If not, they could stay the same or rise. So, looking forward to the year 2100, they used scenarios that were “optimistic” (drop to 0.5 tons), “constant” (stay at four tons) and “pessimistic” (50 percent increase to six tons).

The results were clear. “If you accept our method of accounting, a decision to have a child amplifies a single parent’s lifetime emissions by three or four times in most countries, by virtue of the carbon legacy that perpetuates through generations,” says Murtaugh. “Remember these emissions accumulate over hundreds of years and many generations.”

Lifetime Legacies

The effect was most dramatic in the U.S. On average, the additional emissions per child — about 9,400 tons under the “constant” scenario — was almost six times the amount of carbon emitted by a parent over his or her own lifetime. Not only that, it was 20 times more than the amount that could be saved over an 80-year lifetime by the energy conservation measures included in the EPA’s emissions calculator.

Nevertheless, Murtaugh calls those short-term reductions essential. “It’s not that we can solve the global warming problem by reducing the number of children that we have,” he adds. “It will help immeasurably in the long term, but in the short term, it’s essential that we reduce our per capita emissions right away.” In fact, under the “optimistic” emissions scenario, the drop in per capita emissions reduces future impact per child by almost 90 percent.

Slowing population growth can also help, but “the savings from these reductions in fertility aren’t going to be that meaningful unless we get our per capita emissions under control,” Murtaugh adds.

After the paper was published and featured in an OSU news release, news of their analysis splashed across international headlines and caught the attention of environmentalists, newspaper columnists and conservative bloggers. Some critics responded to a misperception that Murtaugh and Schlax had called for government policies to curb an individual’s right to have children. “We said nothing in our paper about policies,” says Murtaugh. “We just did the calculations and laid them out there for people to think about. But most of the people had obviously never seen the paper. We were called Nazis and Eugenicists.”

One individual phoned Murtaugh and suggested that he consider killing himself to reduce his own carbon emissions. The caller then proceeded to reach every member of the OSU statistics department demanding that Murtaugh be silenced. “I began to fear for my safety. Fortunately the blogs, calls and emails stopped after a few weeks,” Murtaugh adds.

More than climate and reproductive rights are at stake. Rapid population growth affects other species (think ivory-billed woodpecker, passenger pigeon, blue whale and Fender’s blue butterfly) and exhausts the planet’s carrying capacity, Murtaugh says. At current levels of production, it has been estimated that it would take 1.4 Earths to maintain today’s population into the future. “In other words,” he concludes, “we’re living off the capital now.”

The United Nations Population Division expects the global population to reach 7 billion in October.

Three Sisters in the Oregon Cascades (Photo: University Marketing)

That’s what happened in early November 2006, says OSU geoscientist Anne Nolin. On virtually every Cascade peak from Mt. Rainier in Washington to Mt. Hood in Oregon, a “perfect storm” of driving rain, balmy temperatures and receding glaciers sent torrents of rock and mud tearing downhill.

“It was raining almost to the top of Mt. Hood,” recalls Nolin, an internationally known expert in mountain hydroclimatology. On her laptop, she clicks open a photo of Mount Hood with one of her graduate students standing beside a jumble of debris that had spewed out of Eliot Creek into a grove of evergreens during the storm, which dumped over 13 inches of rain on Mt. Hood in 36 hours.

“This area used to be soft forest duff,” Nolin explains, pointing to the photo. “Now it’s full five feet in boulders and logs.”

Collecting data with sophisticated technologies (satellites, lasers and computer models), as well as traditional methods (boots on the ground), Nolin is leading an investigation that will more fully describe the forces energizing alpine debris flows.

“There’s an enormous amount of sediment up there — pyroclastic debris from volcanoes, till ground up by glaciers,” she says. “Once it’s no longer held in place by the ice, it becomes unstable. Add water, and these unstable sediments are mobilized.”

The study, supported by more than $350,000 in National Science Foundation (NSF) stimulus funds, also will help foresters, park managers and mountain communities better predict events like the 2006 deluge, which washed out bridges, swept away campgrounds, closed roads and set the stage for future floods by choking river channels.

Pineapple Express

Snow is Nolin’s medium. Practically born with skis on her feet, she has plied the slopes from Killington Mountain in Vermont, near where her family has a home, to Mt. Hutt in New Zealand, where she spent three and a half months of her 2009-2010 sabbatical. The other eight months she lived (and skied) in the Vaud and Valais regions of Switzerland. (The Northern and Southern Hemispheres together gave her back-to-back winters — something only a lifelong snow lover would deem delightful.) While overseas, she gave a flurry of presentations about debris flows, as well as conferring with fellow researchers at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and the University of Zurich.

The Cascades will see more rain, less snow and changing water flows as climate shifts precipitation patterns, says Anne Nolin of OSU’s Dept. of Geosciences. In addition to analyzing debris flow risks, Nolin focusing on snowpack and water availability in the McKenzie River Basin. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

All of these scientists are seeing the same thing on their local mountaintops: a steady nibbling away of glacial edges. Satellite images of Hood and Rainier show glaciers shrinking by 14 percent between 1987 and 2005, Nolin reports. That’s a loss of nearly 1 percent ice volume per year.

It is at this ragged glacial edge, where ice is fragmented and meltwater is leaking down the ultra-steep terrain of towering peaks, that most debris flows begin. Nolin and her team are trying to pin down the triggering mechanisms. One culprit could be the so-called Pineapple Express — those notorious storms nicknamed for the warm temperatures and monsoon-like quantities of rain they bring from their origins in the tropical Pacific. They are examples of “atmospheric rivers” — airborne water plumes that shoot extraordinary amounts of vapor through the atmosphere. Nolin describes them as “laser beams of moisture,” which blast into the Northwest from time to time, including the 2006 storm that ranked as the decade’s worst.

“We’re trying to understand the character of these storms and their impact on mountain sediments,” she says. “Basically, we want to know how climate change affects rain-induced debris flows in the Northwest and other mountain regions worldwide.”

After Year One of the three-year study, Nolin and her team of colleagues and graduate students have found a clear link between debris flow events and unusually high freezing levels — the elevation where precipitation falls as snow instead of rain.

“The freezing altitudes of nearly all the storms that caused debris flows are at least one standard deviation higher than other significant rainfall events occurring in the same season,” Nolin writes along with her co-investigators Stephen Lancaster, an OSU geomorphologist, and Gordon Grant, a courtesy professor from the U.S. Forest Service, in their annual report to NSF. “Further, nearly all debris-flow events were coupled with … atmospheric river-like conditions.”

Yet because of the complex interplay of mountain systems, storm dynamics and debris-flow mechanics, Nolin says, “the conclusive story continues to elude us.”

Upslope, Downslope

“Water flows downhill, but policy flows uphill,” Nolin told members of the international Mountain Research Initiative in Perth, Scotland, last fall.

On the “upslope-downslope continuum,” it’s the big population centers in the valleys and on the coasts that pass the laws and set the agendas for timber harvest, land use, energy resources, air quality, water allocation and just about everything else that affects the highlands, she explained.

Policy isn’t the only thing that rises. Greenhouse gasses produced by cities and by fossil fuel users in the lowlands have caused temperatures to rise in the mountains. Research reveals that this warming is altering the foothills and forests of Oregon’s Cascades in measurable ways. Spring is arriving a full month sooner than it did 50 years ago in some parts of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Nolin says, citing the research of OSU atmospheric scientist Christoph Thomas. Winters’ final frosts, he found, are falling ever earlier on the calendar. Water levels in the McKenzie River are dropping. Lower elevation snowpack — accumulated layers of snowfall that build up and compact during the winter — is disappearing.

“When snow melts earlier, we lose water storage,” says Nolin. “Snowpack is a reservoir for us.”

In Oregon’s Hood River Valley, 50 to 80 percent of the water that irrigates crops comes from Mt. Hood’s glaciers and snowpack. If early melting trends continue, that priceless meltwater is in danger of dwindling by early- to mid-summer, leaving farmers in short supply during the hottest months when they need it most.

“Climate change,” Nolin says, “disproportionately affects mountain regions.” One reason is found in the physical properties of light and frozen H2O — properties she studied along with satellite remote sensing as a Ph.D. student at U.C. Santa Barbara. After having previously worked as a soil and water scientist, she became entranced by the elegant physics of light interacting with ice particles.

“Soil and snow are both particulate, porous substances,” she says. “But snow is so much more simple and clean. Radiative transfer theory is a very straightforward way to monitor snow from satellites.”

In fact, the glittering white of snow and ice is what explains the vulnerability of mountains to climate change. Whiteness, Nolin explains, reflects sunlight back into the atmosphere. As light-reflecting snowcaps and ice sheets shrink, more sunlight gets absorbed into the earth instead of bouncing off.

Melting accelerates as ever more light and heat are captured and held. Scientists call this phenomenon the “ice-albedo feedback.” As a vicious cycle, it causes temperatures to actually rise faster in ice-laden places than elsewhere on the planet.

Those ice-laden places include the North Atlantic island of Greenland, where as an early-career scientist, Nolin spent several summers studying polar climatology.

“It’s flat and white as far as you can see,” she recalls. But if that sounds like a complaint about the frozen landscape, she quickly sets the record straight. “It glitters,” she says. “It’s very pretty.”

On the Web: See more about OSU’s Mountain Hydroclimatology Research Group.

Eagle III heads out to sea (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Two new regional climate centers will apply research to resource management issues faced by the general public and policymakers. With funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Pacific Northwest Climate Decision Support Consortium will bring together faculty from the universities of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Boise State, as well as Oregon Sea Grant and extension services, to meet the climate-related needs of businesses, governments, tribes and non-governmental organizations.

One of 11 regional groups, the program — Regional Integrated Sciences Assessments (RISA) — will help “to realign our nation’s climate research to better serve society,” according to NOAA.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of the Interior has established a new Climate Science Center with OSU, the University of Washington and the University of Idaho to assist state and federal agencies.

“It is the agencies that create action plans to adapt to climate change,” said Phil Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at OSU and a leader in both of the new regional centers. “What the Climate Science Center will do is provide the science needed to help the agencies make the best decisions. There also is a role for training students on climate change-related issues and preparing them to work in the organizations the center will serve.”

Warren M. Washington, National Center for Atmospheric Research, CO, received the 2009 National Medal of Science medal from President Obama on November 17, 2010. Photo by Ryan K. Morris Photography

With a bachelor’s in physics and a master’s in meteorology from OSU and a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University, Washington went on to become one of the country’s leading climate modelers. On Nov. 17, 2010, he was among 10 scientists to receive the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama in a White House ceremony (click here to see the event in the White House archive). The President recognized Washington’s commitment to increasing the number of women and minorities in science and engineering, as well as his accomplishments as a climate scientist.

Today, the senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research considers our greatest scientific challenge to be a sustainable Earth. Changes in the Earth’s climate, he says, threaten to undermine the environment that has enabled civilization to thrive.

In a Nov. 3, 2010, interview at OSU, Washington advised today’s youth to ignore peer pressure and to follow their own dreams. And for those interested in science, he suggested focusing on the fundamentals in physics, chemistry and biology. That’s the kind of education he received at OSU, and it prepared him to take advantage of opportunities in his own career.

During a snowstorm on Marys Peak, he also learned that science has its life-threatening dangers. Listen to him tell his story on the video.

"We're trying to use the natural geological archive to test how the ice sheet works," says marine geologist Joseph Stoner, whose research team is collecting evidence of past geologic and climatic changes in Greenland. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Why should the residents of Seattle, San Francisco, New York City and Boston worry about warming in Greenland, an ice-laden island in the North Atlantic? Because if all the water locked in the massive Greenland Ice Sheet flowed into the oceans, low-lying coastal cities worldwide would be inundated.

“The Greenland Ice Sheet could contribute up to seven meters of global sea-level rise if it were to melt,” says OSU marine geologist Joseph Stoner. “We don’t know if it’s going to melt, but that’s how much water is in the ice sheet. Therefore, we need to better understand the processes at work.”

In search of that understanding, Stoner and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are studying sediments flowing seaward in streams and rivers on the island’s southern tip. Those sediments — remnants of bedrock pulverized over eons by grinding glaciers and rushing rivers — hold clues to the ice sheet’s history across geologic time, he explains. Scientists know that the 680,000-cubic-mile chunk of snow, compressed from white to crystalline blue over many millennia, is receding. Satellite images from the past several decades show significant shrinkage. What isn’t known is the speed of melting or the extent that melting might take in coming years. By studying Greenland’s past with support from the National Science Foundation through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Stoner and his colleagues hope to bring its future into clearer focus.

“The key to understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet is to use the natural record of past variability as a sort of manual to what it could do in the future,” says Stoner, an associate professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. “We’re trying to use the natural geological archive to test how the ice sheet works.”

To recreate the ice sheet’s prehistoric behavior, he and his graduate students will collect sediment samples this summer, some dating back to Earth’s infancy when the atmosphere was a soup of greenhouse gases. Tracing the origins of these silts and sands should tell the researchers where the island was exposed during “interglacial” periods — warm stretches between ice ages — and where it lay buried beneath tons of frozen snow during colder periods.

The “markers” that will reveal these ancient patterns are both chemical and magnetic, Stoner says. He explains that isotopes of lead, strontium and neodymium serve as chemical hieroglyphics, telling stories about the ages and origins of the sediments that contain them. And the magnetic properties of those sediments lend additional details to the geologic record.

To read the magnetic profiles of marine and terrestrial sediments, Stoner’s lab recently acquired a new-generation instrument: a super-conducting magnetometer for measuring the magnetic properties and composition of rocks. Instead of using liquid helium as a coolant like old-style cryogenic magnetometers do, this one compresses helium gas till it reaches 3.5 degrees Kelvin, “just a little above absolute zero,” Stoner says. “It works through super-conductivity, which only happens at extremely cold temperatures.”

Stoner’s findings could cause scientists to rethink Greenland’s role in climate-change scenarios.

“When I first got into this field, people thought ice sheets behaved really slowly,” he says. “But the geologic evidence is telling us ‘no.’ We just didn’t understand the process by which ice sheets behave quickly. It’s a reminder that just because you don’t understand the process, it doesn’t mean something’s not happening.”

OSU immunotoxicologist Nancy Kerkvliet and research technician Sam Bradford use a flow cytometer to analyze cell response to chemical exposure. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Dioxin, the chemical pollutant made infamous by Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange, has long been known to suppress immune function in humans and other animals. Surprisingly, this dangerous side effect has a scientific silver lining. While studying the toxin’s health effects, researchers discovered the genetic pathway to immune system malfunction. For people who would actually benefit from suppressed immunity — those suffering from autoimmune and allergic diseases — this clue may lead to better therapies.

With $1.8 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, OSU toxicologist Nancy Kerkvliet and colleague Siva Kolluri are investigating a genetic mechanism that turns immunity on and off — the aryl hydrocarbon (AHR) receptor — in search of a non-toxic compound that activates immune-cell regulation. If found, this compound could lead to a new generation of treatment options for victims of lupus, type-1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

Learn more about OSU’s ARRA-funded research in human health, climate change, the oceans and education here.

"King Island," 1974, by Rie Munoz, reprinted with permission of the Munoz Gallery, Juneau, Alaska. Munoz has a personal connection to Oregon State University. When she taught on King Island in 1951, one of her young students was Olga Muktoyuk, the mother of OSU anthropologist Deanna Paniataaq Kingston. More than two hundred galleries in the West feature Munoz's colorful watercolors.

After years of warm weather and poor ice in the Bering Strait, the winter of 2006 felt more like the winters of old. On a rocky island 40 miles off the Alaska coast, thick ice hemmed the shores well into June. For two Inupiat men who volunteered to help an OSU team conduct research there, the ancestral tug was too strong to fight. They suspended their work to join a walrus hunting party, heading out in an aluminum skiff toward the massive floes drifting northward.

“Walrus,” one King Islander says simply, “is very much part of our life.”

For centuries, the tusked pinnipeds were the mainstay of King Island. Their rich, fatty meat was a prized delicacy. Their skins were stitched for boats, parkas and mukluks. Their hides kept the winds from screaming through the people’s huts. Rope was fashioned from walrus rawhide. Tusks were carved as tools, or with decorative scrimshaw for trade on the mainland. Even the intestinal lining, lightweight and waterproof, was sewn into raingear. Every part of the honored animal was used.

One hunter, when asked about the significance of walrus to King Islanders, answered, “You can’t live without it.”

Social structure, values and spirituality also centered on the great ice-borne beasts of the Arctic. Skilled hunter Vince Pikonganna reports that the walrus hunt “binds people together.” Bonds of kinship and friendship, he says, are “re-glued” as the community works in concert for mutual survival. “Sharing, sharing is a big thing among the natives, sharing,” Pikonganna stresses.

But the ancestral connection to the sea and its creatures is growing fainter each generation — not only for King Islanders but for all the indigenous peoples of the Arctic region, the Inupiaq, Yupik and Alutiiq (peoples known collectively as Eskimo) and the Athabaskan Indians of Alaska’s interior. That’s because they are, to borrow a phrase from the First Alaskans Institute, “at the epicenter of global warming.” As temperatures rise and ice recedes, marine animals migrate northward or spiral into decline, seas surge higher and storms rage more fiercely. The Anchorage Daily News reported in April that 184 coastal and river communities in Alaska are already feeling the effects of increasing erosion, melting permafrost and collapsing fisheries.

Scientists are in agreement that northern populations deeply reliant on nature are on the front lines of climate change, precisely because their sustenance and their culture are embedded in — indeed, are indistinguishable from — the natural world. The very reliance on nature that makes indigenous people vulnerable to shifting climates, however, also makes them repositories of centuries-old knowledge. Western scientists are beginning to actively seek that knowledge to help them puzzle out the intricate ecological systems of the Arctic.

One of those Western scientists, OSU anthropologist Deanna Paniataaq Kingston, is leading an effort to preserve the ecological knowledge of King Islanders. With $540,000 in support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), she and an interdisciplinary team of researchers are working with Inupiat elders to catalog the place names, edible plants, birds and dialect of the island. And, as the scientists are discovering, King Islanders’ intricate knowledge of weather, currents and ice formations wraps around everything. The OSU team believes that critical clues to Arctic climate systems reside in the community’s collective understanding of its world.