Penguins are in trouble

Penguins setting off sirens over health of world's oceans | Vince Stricherz | EurekAlert | Jul 1, 2008

This article is from a while back, and it references a paper published in BioScience in the July/Aug 2008 issue. According to the latest research, populations of different penguin species are declining not only due to overfishing and pollution, but also due to climate change. Increasing temperatures are causing sea ice to retreat earlier in the year before baby penguins have developed insulating fat and feathers, and it's also causing fish populations that penguins depend on to migrate farther and farther away.

I was pretty surprised that I hadn't heard about this sooner. One would think that if a cute and cuddly charismatic megafauna were in trouble, it would get a lot of attention. (It definitely made me feel a bit heartbroken to know that baby penguins are freezing to death.) Maybe it's because no one has photographed a penguin floating on a piece of sea ice yet or maybe it's because 2008 has been an unusually eventful year. In any case, just wanted to put this out there.

(Thanks for adding me to the blog, Kristine!)

Food insecurity

After a more than year-long hiatus, I am resurrecting the Breakfast Club. To start things off, I'll summarize the paper we discussed in the Friday afternoon lit club: "Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat." The paper was pretty much a synthesis of information that was already out there, utilizing previously published predictions of average summer temperature, predictions of summer temperature extremes in the future, and then suggesting based on historical incidents that the extremes we're likely to see will lead to food insecurity.

Frequently I think the papers we read in lit club are more or less jumping off points for a discussion. We (of course) discussed how to do the paper better. The last part of the paper wasn't particularly quantitative, relying on anecdotes rather than any statistical analysis. A more quantitative approach might take the predicted temperature extremes and correlate them to crop losses, and use that to predict some financial loss. A project of this sort focusing on Tanzania is under way here at Purdue, trying to predict the impact of climate change on poverty. One of the complicating factors is the response of countries (which tend to put up protective tariffs when one country has a bad crop year, even though doing so tends to exacerbate the economic impact of the crop failure) and the response of individuals (who may move from rural to urban or urban to rural areas in response to economic stress).

Also discussed: GTAP, which is a database of trade flows between something like 200 countries. It is also the database that shows why biofuels are, in the final analysis, bad for CO2 emissions. As food crops are diverted from food use to fuel use, something else must take its place. Marginal land that was used for grazing, for instance, might be converted to cropland to grow the soybeans that the US stopped growing in favor of corn, and more forest then converted to new grazing land. Using fossil fuels, growing crops simply to burn, we are burning sunshine.