An official from Thailand’s Food and Drug Administration takes a sample from a shipment of frozen fish imported from Japan to test for possible radiation contamination at Ladkrabang customs in Bangkok (Reuters/Sukree Sukplang)

NASSAU, Bahamas: The health minister of the Bahamas says he has ordered an investigation into a bacteria outbreak at a local hospital following the death of two babies and amid reports of new cases.

The United Nations health agency today reported that the cholera outbreak in Sierra Leone was escalating and stressed the need to rapidly scale up the response to the spread of the of the frequently fatal water and food-borne disease.

In a press briefing in Geneva, Glenn Thomas, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), confirmed the spread of cholera to an additional two districts of the West African country, noting that since the beginning of 2012, there had been 11,189 reported cases and 203 deaths due to the outbreak.

Mr. Thomas told reporters that the WHO was supporting the Government of Sierra Leone in the areas of epidemiology and social mobilization and had sent three cholera experts form its regional office to respond to the deteriorating crisis, UN News Service reports.

Cholera is an acute intestinal infection caused by eating food or drinking water contaminated with the bacterium known as vibrio cholerae. The disease has a short incubation period and produces a toxin that causes continuous watery diarrhoea, a condition that can quickly lead to severe dehydration and death if treatment is not administered promptly. Vomiting also occurs in most patients.

In his briefing, Mr. Thomas also provided an update on the outbreak of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where a total of 15 cases of viral contamination, including nine deaths, have been reported.

He said that the WHO was supporting the DRC Ministry of Health in conducting a series of epidemiological investigations as well as surveillance, public information and social mobilization initiatives.

Ebola is transmitted by direct contact with the blood, secretions, other bodily fluids or organs of infected persons or animals such as chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys and antelopes, and it has an incubation period of two to 21 days.

Sufferers can experience fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headaches and a sore throat, as well as vomiting, diarrhoea, rashes and impaired kidney and liver function. In the most severe cases, the virus leads to both external and internal bleeding. The most recent outbreak happened last month in Uganda with a total of 20 cases, including 14 deaths, reported across the western part of the country.

In its briefing, the WHO added that it did not recommend that any travel or trade restrictions be applied to the DRC because of the outbreak.

TODAY’s Al Roker tracks Tropical Storms Isaac’s current path as it takes aim at Puerto Rico and the eastern Caribbean.

By Weather.com and wire reports

Despite Tropical Storm Isaac’s threatening winds and rains ahead of the GOP convention in Florida, Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan are taking aim at President Obama and his handling of the economy. NBC’s Peter Alexander reports.

By Dr. Jeff Masters

Two typhoons to hit coastal areas

By The Associated Press Published 

MINERAL, Va. (AP) — When the “Big One” rocked the East Coast one year ago, the earthquake centered on this rural Virginia town cracked ceiling tiles and damaged two local school buildings so badly that they had to be shuttered for good. Now as the academic year gets under way, students are reciting a new safety mantra: Drop, cover, and hold on.

Earthquake drills are now as ubiquitous as fire drills at Louisa County schools in central Virginia, where 4,600 students were attending classes when the 5.8-magnitude quake struck nearby on Aug. 23, 2011. Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt.

“It’s the new normal,” Superintendent Deborah D. Pettit said of the earthquake drills. “It’s become a normal part of the school routine and safety.”

One such drill is planned for Thursday at 1:51 p.m. EDT — the precise moment a year ago when the quake struck.

The unexpected jolt cracked the Washington Monument in spots and toppled delicate masonry high atop the National Cathedral. The shaking was felt far along the densely populated Eastern seaboard from Georgia to New England.

While West Coast earthquake veterans scoffed at what they viewed as only a moderate temblor, last year’s quake has changed the way officials along the East Coast view emergency preparedness.

Emergency response plans that once focused on hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and snow are being revised to include quakes. Some states have enacted laws specifically related to the quake, and there is anecdotal evidence of a spike in insurance coverage for earthquake damage.

The quake was centered 3 to 4 miles beneath Mineral, a town of fewer than 500 people about 50 miles northwest of Richmond. Yet it was believed to have been felt by more people than any other in U.S. history.

The damage, estimated at more than $200 million, extended far beyond rural Louisa County. In the nation’s capital, the Washington Monument sustained several large cracks and remains closed indefinitely.

The National Park Service plans next month to finalize the contract to repair the Washington Monument. Repairs are expected to cost $15 million and require a massive scaffolding, and the landmark obelisk is likely to remain closed until 2014.

The National Cathedral reopened last November, but repairs are expected to take years and cost $20 million. The cathedral announced Thursday that it has received a $5 million grant from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc. With that funding in place, stonemasons were scheduled to begin active restoration Thursday afternoon. Previously, they had been stabilizing the damaged components and cataloging the damage.

In Virginia, the North Anna Power Station became the first operating U.S. nuclear power plant shut down because of an earthquake.

Was it a once-in-a-century anomaly, or are there more quakes to come?

Scientists are trying to answer that question as they pore over the data and survey the epicenter from the air.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, much of central Virginia has been labeled for decades as an area of elevated seismic hazard. But last year’s quake was the largest known to occur in that seismic zone.

“Scientists would like to know if this earthquake was Virginia’s ‘Big One,’” said J. Wright Horton of the USGS.

Meanwhile, the quake prompted several jurisdictions to revise their emergency response plans.

“We learned a lot, that’s for sure,” said Laura Southard, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. One lesson, she said: the need to conduct post-quake assessments to size up damage.

Ultimately, 6,400 homeowners and renters in nine Virginia localities received $16.5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

*********************************************************************************************************************************

Volcanic Activity

Tungurahua Volcano, Ecuador, activity update: increasing explosive activity

Tungurahua’s eruption continues. This morning, a tall ash plume was rising to 32,000 ft (ca. 10 km) altitude and drifting west. A slight decrease in tremor is visible on the latest seismograms.
So far, effects of the eruption have been limited to ash fall. In canton Quero, the ash fall during the past days has damaged more than 5000 hectares of plant cultivations and hit about 2.000 families.
In the meanwhile, scientists from the volcano observatory have made an overflight of the volcano and posted the following interesting update (freely translated) for 20-21 Aug:

The volcano emits a neary constant eruption column, associated with explosions, that reached a maximum height of 5 km and an average height of 1.5 km above the crater, with moderate ash content, drifting to the west. There were no new reports of ash fall.
An increase in the number and size of the explosions was observed since 15:00 local time on 20 Aug. Until 16:00 on 21 Aug, there were 16 large explosions producing strong cannon-shot noises heard in villages near the volcano and in cities as far away as Ambato, Riobamba and Miracle.
The seismic activity at Tungurahua shows a constant tremor signal associated with steam, gas and ash emissions.
Otherwise, the roaring noises have decreased in intensity and duration with respect to the previous days.
In the evening observatory staff observed constant expulsion of hot material in jets. Lava blocks landed outside the crater and rolled up to 1.5 km from the top of the volcano’s flanks.

An explosion at 14:11 on 21 Aug generated an ash column rising 4 km above the crater, that produced a small pyroclastic flow that descended approximately 2.5 km along the Achupashal creek.

Staff of the Geophysical Institute of the National Polytechnic School conducted an overflight of the volcano yesterday afternoon for thermal and visual monitoring of the activity in the crater area and top of the mountain. They observed that that much of the western and southwestern flank have been covered by fresh ash and blocks.
Thermal images show near continuous explosive activity from the inner crater, ejecting incandescent material onto the the upper flanks of the volcano, where temperatures ranged between 116 and 150°C.

The morphology of the summit consists of an outer crater containing an inner crater about 80 m wide, and a few dozend meters distance from the outside crater. The inner crater was observed to be almost filled with fresh lava. Numerous large meter sized hot blocks could be identified in the crater area and the upper flanks. Temperatures measured at the crater raned between 550°C for the inner crater and 236°C at the outer crater.

Many fresh lava blocks have accumulated in ravines on the south-west, west and north-west upper flanks of the volcano. These could be mobilized to form avalanches IG scientists warn.

The thermal image analysis confirmed that during the night of Saturday, August 18, a lava flow and an incandescent avalanche of blocks that had accumulated in the north-western flank flew down through the Cusu canyon as had been observed then.

IG recommends the authorities and the general public to maintain protective and preparative measures in case the activity escalates further which is a possibility. Most danger during the ongoing activity comes from pyroclastic flows, lahars and ash fall.

• All news about: Tungurahua volcano
• Information about: Tungurahua volcano

• Actualización de la actividad del volcán Tungurahua (21 de agosto de 2012) e informe preliminar del sobrevuelo realizado el 20 de agosto de 2010 (IG)
• 600 mil qq de papa no se cosecharían por ceniza del volcán Tungurahua (El Universo)

While parts of the Southwest, particularly Southern California, still have three months of fire season left, Smurthwaite said, shorter days, declining temperatures and higher humidity will help curtail fires.

“That’s almost like putting a little wet blanket over a fire,” he said.

Firefighters in Northern California on Thursday made progress in containing a huge wildfire that has burned 80 homes and other buildings and is threatening 900 more. It was 57 percent contained on Thursday.

Fire crews assessing the rural area determined Thursday that 84 buildings had been destroyed since it was sparked by lightning Saturday. It was unclear when the structures burned and how many were homes.

More than 2,500 firefighters were battling the fire near several remote towns about 170 miles north of Sacramento.

Elsewhere in California, a large wildfire in Plumas National Forest continued to expand, helped by gusty winds.

In Washington state, fire crews still hoped to fully contain a week-old wildfire that has destroyed 51 homes and 26 outbuildings and damaged at least six other homes, authorities said.

The fire, about 75 miles east of Seattle, has caused an estimated $8.3 million in property damage.

In south-central Idaho, authorities have spent more than $23 million fighting a fire near the towns of Pine and Featherville and another in a forest near the resort town of Stanley.

Those wildfires have each consumed about 150 square miles, and will not be extinguished for some time, Smurthwaite said.

“We expect to be managing them for weeks to come,” he said.

Associated Press writers Haven Daley in Manton Calif., Jonathan Cooper in Salem, Ore., Brian Skoloff in Salt Lake City, Terry Collins, John S. Marshall and Terence Chea in San Francisco, Shannon Dininny in Yakima, Wash., Mike Baker in Olympia, Wash., and Jessie Bonner in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.

23.08.2012

Forest / Wild Fire

USA

State of California, [Plumas National Forest]

Researchers propose disaster ‘emergency mode’

By John E Dunn, TechWorld

German researchers have proposed using home Wi-Fi routers as a backup mesh network in the event that cell and phone systems in cities and towns are overwhelmed during emergencies.

In a recently-published paper PDF, Kamill Panitzek and colleagues at the Technical University in Darmstadt in Germany describe how home routers could be linked to one another to form a huge informal backbone for use by fire, police and ambulance services.

REVIEW: Linksys routers get smart (except for ‘easy setup’)

Panitzek and his team tested the concept in the centre of Darmstadt by surveying the number, signal strength and location of routers using a sophisticated version of wardriving that was able to fix their coordinates with a high enough degree of accuracy to construct a hypothetical mesh.

The team found 1,971 routers, 212 of which had no encryption applied, and a further that used the obsolete WEP standard.

On the basis of the pattern of routers found, the team calculated that a resilient and sufficiently dense mesh network would be possible if a distance of around 30 metres between nodes was assumed.

One problem was that there were not enough open (i.e unsecured) routers which would require citizens to create an “emergency switch” mode to allow access to the number of nodes needed to create a viable mesh.

Most recent home routers can support such a system without modification as long as they allow for the creation of an open ‘guest’ network running in parallel to the user’s secured Wi-Fi access, that is firewalled from it.

“We found that with a communication range of 30 metres a mesh network could be easily constructed in urban areas like our hometown. The resulting networks showed to be resilient to node failures,” Panitzek said in the analysis.

The team accepts that there are some barriers to the idea beyond the mere density of routers available in a particular locality. Would users agree to have an open channel enabled on their routers?

A better idea might be for router makers to introduce an emergency mode into their products that users would know was fully secure, but the prospects of that look remote for now without legislation.

Mesh networks have been a buzz technology for some years and have found commercial applications. Arbua Networks launched a small meshing system for its own access points in 2011. Although a powerful idea, the technology remains on the fringes of development.

The use of combat weapons on German home soil is only acceptable as a last resort

Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be at least some residual concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the virulence of British media hostility towards the WikiLeaks founder is now unrelenting.

This is a man, after all, who has yet to be charged, let alone convicted, of anything. But as far as the bulk of the press is concerned, Assange is nothing but a “monstrous narcissist”, a bail-jumping “sex pest” and an exhibitionist maniac. After Ecuador granted him political asylum and Assange delivered a “tirade” from its London embassy’s balcony, fire was turned on the country’s progressive president, Rafael Correa, ludicrously branded a corrupt “dictator” with an “iron grip” on a benighted land.

The ostensible reason for this venom is of course Assange’s attempt to resist extradition to Sweden (and onward extradition to the US) over sexual assault allegations – including from newspapers whose record on covering rape and violence against women is shaky, to put it politely. But as the row over his embassy refuge has escalated into a major diplomatic stand-off, with the whole of South America piling in behind Ecuador, such posturing looks increasingly specious.

Can anyone seriously believe the dispute would have gone global, or that the British government would have made its asinine threat to suspend the Ecuadorean embassy’s diplomatic status and enter it by force, or that scores of police would have surrounded the building, swarming up and down the fire escape and guarding every window, if it was all about one man wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations in Stockholm?

To get a grip on what is actually going on, rewind to WikiLeaks’ explosive release of secret US military reports and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables two years ago. They disgorged devastating evidence of US war crimes and collusion with death squads in Iraq on an industrial scale, the machinations and lies of America’s wars and allies, its illegal US spying on UN officials – as well as a compendium of official corruption and deceit across the world.

WikiLeaks provided fuel for the Arab uprisings. It didn’t just deliver information for citizens to hold governments everywhere to account, but crucially opened up the exercise of US global power to democratic scrutiny. Not surprisingly, the US government made clear it regarded WikiLeaks as a serious threat to its interests from the start, denouncing the release of confidential US cables as a “criminal act”.

Vice-president Joe Biden has compared Assange to a “hi-tech terrorist”. Shock jocks and neocons have called for him to be hunted down and killed. Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old soldier accused of passing the largest trove of US documents to WikiLeaks, who has been held in conditions described as “cruel and inhuman” by the UN special rapporteur on torture, faces up to 52 years in prison.

The US administration yesterday claimed the WikiLeaks founder was trying to deflect attention from his Swedish case by making “wild allegations” about US intentions. But the idea that the threat of US extradition is some paranoid WikiLeaks fantasy is absurd.

A grand jury in Virginia has been preparing a case against Assange and WikiLeaks for espionage, a leak earlier this year suggested that the US government has already issued a secret sealed indictment against Assange, while Australian diplomats have reported that the WikiLeaks founder is the target of an investigation that is “unprecedented both in its scale and its nature”.

The US interest in deterring others from following the WikiLeaks path is obvious. And it would be bizarre to expect a state which over the past decade has kidnapped, tortured and illegally incarcerated its enemies, real or imagined, on a global scale – and continues to do so under President Barack Obama – to walk away from what Hillary Clinton described as an “attack on the international community”. In the meantime, the US authorities are presumably banking on seeing Assange further discredited in Sweden.

None of that should detract from the seriousness of the rape allegations made against Assange, for which he should clearly answer and, if charges are brought, stand trial. The question is how to achieve justice for the women involved while protecting Assange (and other whistleblowers) from punitive extradition to a legal system that could potentially land him in a US prison cell for decades.

The politicisation of the Swedish case was clear from the initial leak of the allegations to the prosecutor’s decision to seek Assange’s extradition for questioning – described by a former Stockholm prosecutor as “unreasonable, unfair and disproportionate” – when the authorities have been happy to interview suspects abroad in more serious cases.

And given the context, it’s also hardly surprising that sceptics have raised the links with US-funded anti-Cuban opposition groups of one of those making the accusations – or that campaigners such as the London-based Women Against Rape have expressed scepticism at the “unusual zeal” with which rape allegations were pursued against Assange in a country where rape convictions have fallen. The danger, of course, is that the murk around this case plays into a misogynist culture in which rape victims aren’t believed.

But why, Assange’s critics charge, would he be more likely to be extradited to the US from Sweden than from Britain, Washington’s patsy, notorious for its one-sided extradition arrangements. There are specific risks in Sweden – for example, its fast-track “temporary surrender” extradition agreement it has with the US. But the real point is that Assange is in danger of extradition in both countries – which is why Ecuador was right to offer him protection.

The solution is obvious. It’s the one that Ecuador is proposing – and that London and Stockholm are resisting. If the Swedish government pledged to block the extradition of Assange to the US for any WikiLeaks-related offence (which it has the power to do) – and Britain agreed not to sanction extradition to a third country once Swedish proceedings are over – then justice could be served. But with loyalty to the US on the line, Assange shouldn’t expect to leave the embassy any time soon.

With the world’s media attention focused on Yemen’s fight against Al-Qaeda, you would probably be forgiven for not knowing that Yemenis are facing the worst hunger crisis since records began. The term ‘food insecurity’ is increasingly being associated with the once self-sufficient but improvised Yemen. In fact over 44% of Yemen’s population will face a lack of food to eat this year aloneand the UN says that 5m Yemenis are considered “extremely food insecure”. The causes of this crisis range from a lack of political stability caused the 2011 revolution, failure to control and plan on behalf of the Yemeni government and the inability of donors states such as the US to view Yemen beyond the ‘terrorism goggles’.As it currently stands there are no two ways about it, Yemen is no longer on the brink of a catastrophic food crisis, but rather is now in the midst of a food catastrophe. Oxfam last September warned that Yemen was at breaking point, today one can freely admit that Yemen has broke. For example in al Hodeidah and Hajjah, one in three children are malnourished, which is double the standard emergency level. While the UN estimates that 267, 000 Yemeni children are facing life threatening levels of malnutrition. Yemen’s food crisis presents a number of challenges to Yemenis across the political, economical and social spectrum. The previously already poor are on the verge of death, the once slim middle class are finding it hard to pay for life necessities, whilst the rich and often elite, find it much easier to spend their wealth.But it is children who bear the brunt of Yemen’s food price escalation, as mothers are reportedly taking their children out of school to beg on the streets.

But Yemen’s food crisis does not only represent a threat to Yemenis, but much more importantly it represents a threat to various actors in the region and the wider world, ranging from neighbouring oil-rich, but moral-poor Saudi Arabia to the ever-more self-interested United States. This is because Yemenis across the country but particularly in the South have lost faith and trust in their government; beyond this they are no desperate for any support from anyone willing to help them. When the central government is unable to provide for its people, help reduce inflation and meet the most basic of security, extremist organisations such as Ansar al-Sharia are monopolising on the dire economic reality by providing the most basic of needs including food and in turn gain their trust. Although practicality dictates that these extremist operations are some-what limited to the more lawless areas of Yemen, the fact remains that central government seem unable, unwilling and incapable of forming a comprehensive response to the immediate food catastrophe.

The situation is compounded by the hundreds of thousands of Internally Displaced People in the southern part of Aden and Abyan as a result of the war against Al-Qaeda. Not to mention that at the same time, tens of thousands of refugees from the Horn of Africa are arriving on Yemen’s shores. The UN Envoy to Yemen, Jamal Ben Omar said that Yemen’s situation is complicated on many levels; as each day passes the complications continue to violently combine to the detriment of Yemen’s most hungry.

Putting the seriousness of the matter into context, 10 million people visited London this summer for the 2012 Olympics, the same amount are expected to starve this year in Yemen. Aside from the people’s desperation potentially leading to extremism, the humanitarian consequences of such a catastrophe would be unprecedented in the Arab region. Hence the imperative of response mounted by international community. For example, the UK have announced they will provide £28m to towards combating the crisis but this still this falls short of the £90m promised they promised. Additionally the EU has committed an additional €5m but this remains insufficient. Although significant funds totaling $4bn were pledged at the Friends of Yemen meeting in May, these pledges urgently need to materalise and turned into tangible humanitarian aid to keep people alive, as people cannot survive on promises. The UN says it needs $591 million in aid to meet current needs but has it has received less than half that amount. Whilst the next Friends of Yemen conference has been delayed till the end of the day, donors must respond now before the crisis further deepens.

Yemen’s diaspora community has also been active in helping to alleviate the crisis. So far the British-Yemeni community has successfully sent 40 tones of food; clothing and medicine to help people displaced from Abyan and has raised over £250,000 for Islamic Relief’s Yemen appeal. Further to this, the newly minted Yemen Relief and Development Forum, a UK-based umbrella charity, has also launched a campaign to raise money for food relief but its effectiveness is limited due to the proper lack of media coverage. Oxfam who, last month issued a joint appeal with Islamic Relief to raise $38m for the emergency relief of 5m people, has even admitted that Yemen’s plight is not emotionally appealing enough for people to give money. Joy Singhal, the manager of Oxfam’s humanitarian response in Yemen said that “It is not a crisis like the tsunami in Indonesia or the earthquake in Haiti. Yemen is one of two or three Arab states in the Middle East considered to be a middle-income area because it isn’t in the media”.

With the lack of media attention, the international community and aid agencies have no choice but to increase their efforts in combating Yemen’s food crisis, whilst ensuring that they do not fall into the trap of viewing Yemen within the security spectrum. Yemen’s new ‘unity’ government is currently weak; overall international support is lacking, whilst figures from the past such as Ali Abdullah Saleh continue to stand in the shadows, any policy which places terrorism and security concerns over the dire humanitarian situation would not only be a catastrophe for the starving Yemeni people, but a catastrophe for the security interests of the international community.

Even though it sounds like science fiction, researchers are taking a second look at a controversial idea that uses futuristic ships to shoot salt water high into the sky over the oceans, creating clouds that reflect sunlight and thus counter global warming.

University of Washington atmospheric physicist Rob Wood describes a possible way to run an experiment to test the concept on a small scale in a comprehensive paper published this month in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

The point of the paper – which includes updates on the latest study into what kind of ship would be best to spray the salt water into the sky, how large the water droplets should be and the potential climatological impacts – is to encourage more scientists to consider the idea of marine cloud brightening and even poke holes in it. He and a colleague detail an experiment to test the concept.

“What we’re trying to do is make the case that this is a beneficial experiment to do,” Wood said. With enough interest in cloud brightening from the scientific community, funding for an experiment may become possible, he said.

The theory behind so-called marine cloud brightening is that adding particles, in this case sea salt, to the sky over the ocean would form large, long-lived clouds. Clouds appear when water forms around particles. Since there is a limited amount of water in the air, adding more particles creates more, but smaller, droplets.

“It turns out that a greater number of smaller drops has a greater surface area, so it means the clouds reflect a greater amount of light back into space,” Wood said. That creates a cooling effect on Earth.

Marine cloud brightening is part of a broader concept known as geoengineering which encompasses efforts to use technology to manipulate the environment. Brightening, like other geoengineering proposals, is controversial for its ethical and political ramifications and the uncertainty around its impact. But those aren’t reasons not to study it, Wood said.

“I would rather that responsible scientists test the idea than groups that might have a vested interest in proving its success,” he said. The danger with private organizations experimenting with geoengineering is that “there is an assumption that it’s got to work,” he said.

Wood and his colleagues propose trying a small-scale experiment to test feasibility and begin to study effects. The test should start by deploying sprayers on a ship or barge to ensure that they can inject enough particles of the targeted size to the appropriate elevation, Wood and a colleague wrote in the report. An airplane equipped with sensors would study the physical and chemical characteristics of the particles and how they disperse.

The next step would be to use additional airplanes to study how the cloud develops and how long it remains. The final phase of the experiment would send out five to 10 ships spread out across a 100 kilometer, or 62 mile, stretch. The resulting clouds would be large enough so that scientists could use satellites to examine them and their ability to reflect light.

Wood said there is very little chance of long-term effects from such an experiment. Based on studies of pollutants, which emit particles that cause a similar reaction in clouds, scientists know that the impact of adding particles to clouds lasts only a few days.

Still, such an experiment would be unusual in the world of climate science, where scientists observe rather than actually try to change the atmosphere.

Wood notes that running the experiment would advance knowledge around how particles like pollutants impact the climate, although the main reason to do it would be to test the geoengineering idea.

A phenomenon that inspired marine cloud brightening is ship trails: clouds that form behind the paths of ships crossing the ocean, similar to the trails that airplanes leave across the sky. Ship trails form around particles released from burning fuel.

But in some cases ship trails make clouds darker. “We don’t really know why that is,” Wood said.

Despite increasing interest from scientists like Wood, there is still strong resistance to cloud brightening.

“It’s a quick-fix idea when really what we need to do is move toward a low-carbon emission economy, which is turning out to be a long process,” Wood said. “I think we ought to know about the possibilities, just in case.”

The authors of the paper are treading cautiously.

“We stress that there would be no justification for deployment of [marine cloud brightening] unless it was clearly established that no significant adverse consequences would result. There would also need to be an international agreement firmly in favor of such action,” they wrote in the paper’s summary.

There are 25 authors on the paper, including scientists from University of Leeds, University of Edinburgh and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The lead author is John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Manchester, who pioneered the idea of marine cloud brightening.

 

Two new studies by scientists at UC Berkeley provide a clearer picture of why some species move in response to climate change, and where they go. One study, published online in the journal Global Change Biology, finds that changes in precipitation have been underappreciated as a factor in driving bird species out of their normal range.

In the other study, published the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers found a sharp decrease in range for the Belding’s ground squirrel, but noted some surprising areas where the species found refuge.

The two studies exemplify the type of research being explored through the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology, or BiGCB, an ambitious effort to better understand and predict how plants and animals will respond to changing environmental conditions by studying how they have responded to earlier periods of climate change.

The first study’s findings challenge the conventional reliance on temperature as the only climate-related force impacting where species live. The authors noted that as many as 25 percent of species have shifted in directions that were not predicted in response to temperature changes, yet few attempts have been made to investigate this.

“Our results redefine the fundamental model of how species should respond to future climate change,” said study lead author Morgan Tingley, who began the research as a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. “We find that precipitation changes can have a major, opposing influence to temperature in a species’ range shift. Climate change may actually be tearing communities of organisms apart.”

The findings are based upon data gathered from the Grinnell Resurvey Project, which retraces the steps of Joseph Grinnell, founder of the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, in his surveys of Sierra Nevada wildlife from the early 1900s. The resurvey project, which began in 2003, was led by Craig Moritz, former UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, and his colleagues at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

For the bird study, the researchers included 99 species in 77 historic survey sites in Lassen Volcanic, Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, as well as in several national forests. In the century that has passed since the original Grinnell survey, summer and winter temperatures have increased an average of 1-2 degrees Celsius in the Sierra Nevada. Yosemite experienced the most warming – with average temperatures increasing by 3 degrees Celsius – while parts of Lassen actually got cooler and much wetter.

Among the bird species that moved upslope are the Savannah Sparrow, which shifted upward by 2,503 meters, and other meadow species such as the Red-winged Blackbird and Western Meadowlark. The ones that shifted their range downslope include both low-elevation species like the Ash-throated Flycatcher and Western Scrub-Jay, and high-elevation species like the Cassin’s Finch and Red-breasted Nuthatch.

“Temperature did not explain the majority of these shifts,” said Tingley, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University’s Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy. “Only when we included precipitation as an explanatory variable did our models adequately explain the movement patterns we observed.”

The researchers found that while rising temperatures tended to push birds to cooler regions upslope, increased precipitation, which is more common at higher elevations, pulled them downslope.

“We believe many species may feel this divergent pressure from temperature and precipitation, and in the end, only one wins,” said Tingley.

Notably, more than half of the bird species in each of the three study regions did not shift their range despite pressures from climate change. “Moving is a sign of adaptation, which is good from a conservation standpoint,” said Tingley.

“More worrisome are the species that have not shifted. How are they adapting? Are they moving, but we just can’t detect it? Or are they slowly declining as environmental conditions gradually become less ideal where they live?”

The answers are complex, as illustrated by the second UC Berkeley paper about range changes for a species of squirrel found in the mountains of the western United States.

In that paper, researchers again used information obtained from the Grinnell Resurvey Project. Through visual observations and trapping surveys conducted throughout the mountains of California, they discovered that the Belding’s ground squirrel had disappeared from 42 percent of the sites where they were recorded in the early 1900s. Extinctions were particularly common at sites with high average winter temperatures and large increases in precipitation over the last century.

“We were surprised to see such a dramatic decline in this species, which is well-known to Sierran hikers and was thought to be fairly common,” said study lead author Toni Lyn Morelli, a former National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher who was based at UC Berkeley. “In fact, the rate of decline is much greater than that seen in the same region for the pika, a small mountain-dwelling cousin of the rabbit that has become the poster child for the effects of climate warming in the contiguous United States.”

Morelli added that the squirrels are thriving in areas that have been modified by humans. For example, irrigated Mono Lake County Park serves as an artificial oasis that sustains squirrel populations despite otherwise hot and dry conditions in eastern California.

“As predictions indicate that the range of the Belding’s ground squirrel could disappear out of California by the end of the century, these areas might be particularly important for this and other climate-impacted species,” said Morelli, who is now a technical advisor for the U.S. Forest Service’s International Programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Although the Belding’s ground squirrel is widespread, the rapid decline in its distribution is of concern because it is an important source of food for raptors and carnivores. However, the paper suggests that even when climate change causes large range declines, some species can persist in human-modified areas.

“Taken together, these two studies indicate that many species have been responding to recent climate change, yet the complexities of a species’ ecological needs and their responses to habitat modification by humans can result in unanticipated responses,” said Steven Beissinger, professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and the senior author on both studies. “This makes it very challenging for scientists to project how species will respond to future climate change.”

Funding from the National Science Foundation, National Park Service, and California Landscape Conservation Cooperative helped support this research.

 

Ancient pollen and charcoal preserved in deeply buried sediments in Egypt’s Nile Delta document the region’s ancient droughts and fires, including a huge drought 4,200 years ago associated with the demise of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the era known as the pyramid-building time.

“Humans have a long history of having to deal with climate change,” said Christopher Bernhardt, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. “Along with other research, this study geologically reveals that the evolution of societies is sometimes tied to climate variability at all scales – whether decadal or millennial.”

Bernhardt conducted this research as part of his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Benjamin Horton, an associate professor in Penn’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science. Jean-Daniel Stanley at the Smithsonian Institution also participated in the study, published in July’s edition of Geology.

“Even the mighty builders of the ancient pyramids more than 4,000 years ago fell victim when they were unable to respond to a changing climate,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “This study illustrates that water availability was the climate-change Achilles Heel then for Egypt, as it may well be now, for a planet topping seven billion thirsty people.”

The researchers used pollen and charcoal preserved in a Nile Delta sediment core dating from 7,000 years ago to the present to help resolve the physical mechanisms underlying critical events in ancient Egyptian history.

They wanted to see if changes in pollen assemblages would reflect ancient Egyptian and Middle East droughts recorded in archaeological and historical records.

The researchers also examined the presence and amount of charcoal because fire frequency often increases during times of drought, and fires are recorded as charcoal in the geological record. The scientists suspected that the proportion of wetland pollen would decline during times of drought and the amount of charcoal would increase.

And their suspicions were right.
Large decreases in the proportion of wetland pollen and increases in microscopic charcoal occurred in the core during four different times between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago.

One of those events was the abrupt and global mega-drought of around 4,200 years ago, a drought that had serious societal repercussions, including famines, and which probably played a role in the end of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and affected other Mediterranean cultures as well.

“Our pollen record appears very sensitive to the decrease in precipitation that occurred in the mega-drought of 4,200 years ago,” Bernhardt said. “The vegetation response lasted much longer compared with other geologic proxy records of this drought, possibly indicating a sustained effect on delta and Nile basin vegetation.”

Similarly, pollen and charcoal evidence recorded two other large droughts: one that occurred some 5,000 to 5,500 years ago and another that occurred around 3,000 years ago.

These events are also recorded in human history – the first one started some 5,000 years ago when the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt occurred and the Uruk Kingdom in modern Iraq collapsed. The second event, some 3,000 years ago, took place in the eastern Mediterranean and is associated with the fall of the Ugarit Kingdom and famines in the Babylonian and Syrian Kingdoms.

“The study geologically demonstrates that when deciphering past climates, pollen and other micro-organisms, such as charcoal, can augment or verify written or archaeological records – or they can serve as the record itself if other information doesn’t exist or is not continuous,” said Horton.

This study, Nile delta response to Holocene climate variability, was published in the July edition of Geology, and was authored by Christopher Bernhardt, USGS; Benjamin Horton, Penn; and Jean-Daniel Stanley, Smithsonian Institution. Support for the work came from the University of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Smithsonian Institution.