Research: between (Love)joy and depression

Hold on: the tipping point for Amazon collapse is at 20% deforestation. Guess where we are now: at 19%! Oh my God. That is maybe the most, but not the only worrying fact presented at the Bioscience Day held yesterday at the University of Maryland. The Amazon data were a sneak preview of a World Bank study to be published one of these days, given by keynote Dr. Thomas Lovejoy. He also mentioned a study by the UK Hadley Center, concluding that 20-40% of the Amazon will be lost at 2 degrees. But besides climate, the Amazon is also under stress from deforestation (which contributes to global warming) and forest fires (aggravated by global warming). To curb a spiral of depression in the audience's mind, Lovejoy presented a bright green solution: planetary engineering using ecosystems - a "re-greening of the emerald planet", meaning carbon sequestration through restoration of ecosystems to bring CO2 concentrations back to 350 ppm (we're now at 390), a level considered safe according to up-to-date climate science. (See a short version of his slide show in this video.) The idea was attractive. But where is the energy in the equation? Mr. Lovejoy didn't talk about efficiency or renewables. I can't believe he would advocate unabated use of fossil fuels. The key thing is that there is a huge potential for mitigation of disruptive climate change in restoring ecosystems, which means: protection, reforestation, restoring grassland and agricultural practices that restore soil carbon.

During the day, in the presentations of many research projects, endless graphs with down-sloping trends were shown, painting a rather depressing picture of the state of nature. Eric Post titles his talk "the vanishing arctic". He showed how population, individual weight, size, fertility and first year survival of polar bears were all going down steadily. Caribous? Some up, the vast majority down. The arctic in particular is teaching a lot about the impacts of climate change. It is a relatively simple ecosystem, with little functional redundancy and clear species interactions. Besides, warming is faster in the Arctic than elsewhere. It is a real-life laboratory for climate research. Eric Post also showed that current warming is not unique. It happened before, in the Pleistocene, but today's warming is even faster. And the rate of warming is what matters for species and ecosystems having to adapt. Studying Pleistocene extinctions teach us that climate change has likely been the driver of the demise of icons like the mammoth and the steppe bison. Their decline had started long before humans came into play, although humans might have played a role in the final extermination of the species. This underscores that climate change is a major driver and risk of loss of species.

To balance the depressing results there was the joy I could feel about the research itself, about the quest for data and understanding what is going on out there and how the world works. It must be wonderful to let yourself be surprised by nature, but also to find your theory or model confirmed in real-life experiments and put an end to falls debate, myths and unproductive opinions with real data. That is not so easy, unfortunately. While the scientific consensus about the existence and causes of climate change is so great that talking about 'likeliness' and 'uncertainty' has become a marginal discussion for purists, the debate is naggingly persistent in the media. Inexplicably popular right-wing talkshow hosts like Rush Limbaugh keep polluting the ether and infesting people's minds with nonsense. And to hear Eric Post say that he regularly receives anonymous emails asking him "where he bought his PhD," putting him under pressure not to talk about climate change anymore. Shocking, criminal.