Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future
As wildfires continue to rage across Montana, scientists are quietly finishing work on their first-ever assessment of the state’s climate – and how it is changing.
The sneak preview: Look outside your front window, state climatologist Kelsey Jensco advises.
“This is certainly what the future may look like,” he told Montana Public Radio in a recent interview. [Read more…]
Every week brings new reports of ecological changes brought about by the Earth’s changing climate – everything to the effects of rising sea levels to the extinction, or explosion, of the globe’s plant and animal species.
That includes tiny insects not previously on the radar of most Minnesotans.
“Eastern larch beetles, tiny burrowing bugs native to Minnesota, are exploding in number across the state’s northern forest and have killed or damaged about a third of the state’s tamarack trees — one of the first clear signs of a rapidly changing climate,” wrote Josephine Marcotty in a recent Minneapolis Star Tribune story. [Read more…]
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series focused on forests and climate change. In this article, we focus on the role that forests play in storing and producing atmospheric carbon and the opportunities land managers have to impact those roles. Next Monday’s installment will focus on the impact of climate change on forested ecosystems.
In 2013, Slovenian archaeologist Ivan Sprajc hacked his way through a remote jungle on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The modern-day Indiana Jones was on the trail of a huge discovery: a lost Mayan city obscured by centuries of nearly impenetrable forest.
It wasn’t the first ancient city unearthed from the jungle: Sprajc found two others in the area the following year, and archaeologists have been discovering Mayan, Incan and Aztecan cities deep in Central and South American jungles for a century or more.
More importantly, for archaeology and for the planet, it probably won’t be the last. [Read more…]
A new State of the Climate report confirmed that 2016 surpassed 2015 as the warmest year in 137 years of recordkeeping.
Major indicators of climate change continued to reflect trends consistent with a warming planet.
Last year’s record heat resulted from the combined influence of long-term global warming and a strong El Niño early in the year. The report found that the major indicators of climate change continued to reflect trends consistent with a warming planet. Several markers such as land and ocean temperatures, sea level, and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere broke records set just one year prior. [Read more…]
Climate change will, ultimately, affect every creature on this planet.
And the changes will be more complex and multi-layered than most of us can comprehend – at least until we see them with our own eyes.
I was reminded of this recently while reading a trio of research reports about acorn woodpeckers, a wondrous species common along the Pacific Coast and in the southwestern United States. [Read more…]