Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Recently advocates of CO2 catastrophic climate change have been trumpeting a new paper in PNAS by Kyle C. Cavanaugh et al :“Poleward expansion of mangroves is a threshold response to decreased frequency of extreme cold events” The authors argue “Our analyses provides evidence for a threshold response, with declining frequency of severe cold winter events allowing for poleward expansion of mangroves. Future warming may result in increases in mangrove cover beyond current latitudinal limits of mangrove forests, thereby altering the structure and function of these important coastal ecosystems.”
The authors, from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, use a bewildering array of statistics to suggest mangroves are marching march northward along the coast of Florida only because climate change has resulted in just 1.4 fewer days with temperatures falling below -4C between 1984 and 2006. However the authors admitted “decreases in the frequency of extreme cold events was only significant if an extreme cold event was defined as colder than −4 °C; the relationship disappeared when the temperature threshold was raised a small amount” but they later imply this suggests just how sensitive the mangroves are too what most of us would see as an insignificant change.
Their introduction also suggested that the authors were more interested in proving global warming than investigating all the confounding factors that may have also affected the increase in mangroves along their study site of the Indian River Lagoon. I was immediately suspicious because land use changes due to agriculture and urbanization have severely altered Florida’s hydrology and habitat and for decades disappearing mangroves have been a growing concern amongst conservationists. Nonetheless the authors claimed the spread of new mangroves were “uncorrelated with changes in mean annual temperature, mean annual precipitation, and land use.”
However I knew people who participated in Indian River Lagoon Shoreline Restoration Projects – Volunteer Events a few years back. That’s the very area that the authors claimed the expansion of mangroves could only be explained by climate change. Yet these CO2 advocates ignored well-advertised activities such as the “Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Shoreline Restoration Project” which is working to identify suitable un-vegetated and disturbed shoreline areas to restore fringing mangrove habitats along the Indian River Lagoon. This is accomplished through planting red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle) and associated species, such as marsh grass (Spartina alterniflora).
In April of 2010 there was a call for volunteers “needed to help with plantings, site maintenance, follow-up monitoring, and plant care at the mangrove nursery located on the grounds of the St. Sebastian River Preserve State Park. Planting events will be scheduled in the spring, and follow-up monitoring, site maintenance, and nursery work days are scheduled year round.”
So I sadly present the authors with my “Cheesy Climate Science Award” created in honor of past researchers who lead the way by hijacking conservation success stories and metamorphosing them into a climate catastrophe campaign as done in the IPCC paper here.
Whether climate change is natural or manmade, we can make a more resilient environment by restoring habitat and watersheds. We must demand more critical thinking, so that such frivolous publications stop misrepresenting honest conservation efforts in order to create a picture of climate doom. Trustworthy environmental stewardship must be guided by better science.
Read previous essays at landscapesandcycles.net
The longer the CACA Cult keeps spinning out its Message, the worse its going to be in the aftermath. Its doubling down will be proof of its basic bad (to-the-bone) faith–and a good reason to ignore it in the future.
R. de Haan says:
Mangroves come to Winnipeg
No but the IPCC should
I think all global warming conferences need to be held in Winnipeg in the dead of winter.
ahhh tropical Winnipeg
Regards and Keep warm
“Their introduction also suggested that the authors were more interested in proving global warming than investigating all the confounding factors…”
Of course they were.
They wouldn’t have got funding without the magic words in the grant submission, would they?
Even climate McScientists have to eat!
“Poleward expansion of mangroves is a threshold response to decreased frequency of extreme cold events”
I thought climate change meant an increase in extreme weather events, both hot and cold. Isn’t that what they claim whenever an unusual cold spell occurs anywhere on the planet? I just checked the “climate change” page on Wiki, and it says climate change can cause “more or fewer extreme weather events.” Talk about a non-falsifiable prediction! But even so, how do the authors of this paper know that climate change will only cause a “decreased frequency” of extreme cold events in Florida? I can guarantee that if a record cold event occurred tomorrow within the same area as this study’s location, they would immediately claim that man-caused climate change was the cause. These authors would be among them. Is there any doubt of that?
NPR has a well-defined customer base in the environmental socio-political movement, and they serve that customer base in those ways that keep the money flowing in.
NPR’s credibility with its own customer base will not suffer in the slightest from carrying a story on a pseudo-scientific paper that has been demonstrated to be transparently fraudulent in its data, in its methods, and in its ultimate conclusions.
NPR is one with its user community, and so there will be no post-discovery updates concerning the NPR story, no clarifications will be made, and certainly no acknowledgement of the blatantly fraudulent science inside of the paper will be offered.
Gail Combs-
Then there were the green Iguanas, numb with cold, falling out of trees in Miami in 2010.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6947254/Kamikaze-iguanas-fall-from-Floridas-frozen-trees.html
Then there was the 2013 article on an old oil/gas power plant near Kennedy Space Center being upgraded to natural gas combined cycle, and the requirement that the old plant’s thermal plume into a local river be maintained to protect the hundred’s of wintering Manatee from freezing to death in future years of global thermageddon. Or something.
http://www.powermag.com/cape-canaveral-next-generation-clean-energy-center-brevard-county-florida/
” Ironically, far from being a threat to the manatees, the plant’s presence attracted more and more of the endangered animals to the lagoon because of how its effluent raised water temperatures, especially during the winter.”
“So in the fall of 2010, after the old plant was torn down, FPL spent nearly $5 million installing a system of pumps and heaters in the lagoon to replace the lost effluent. FPL worked with state and federal officials to ensure the manatees would survive the three-year hiatus before the new plant came online. The system worked as planned, with hundreds of manatees clustering around the heaters as they once did around the old plant’s outlet. The system surely averted a catastrophe for the animals as temperatures plunged to record lows that winter.”
Nice article, Mr Steele.
I did some checking based on the PNAS paper and SI. It says virtuall the entire paper study area is the Indian River Lagoon (in fact a nearly 150 mile long estuary spanning 4 coastal counties. Mangrove restoration started in 1996. By the time of a special restoration report on best practices, there had been 57 separate restoration sites planted. Proportionately, seedling survival was most successful in the northern half of IRL because of less runoff pollution ( from 1989 to the present, the proximate population has increased 50% to 1.6m).
Freezes are a big deal in Florida because of the citrus industry. $2 billion of citrus is produced in the 5 counties containing the IRL. The industry maintains a ‘freeze’ website. ” major freezes” damage that years fruit, not the trees. “impact freezes” damage or kill the trees. There was a major freeze in 1981. There were impact freezes in 1983, 85, and 89. There have been none since.
So this paper is not charting AGW ecotome tipping points and mangrove [invasion into salt] marshes. The satellite images document natural recovery progression ( mangroves need ‘nurse’ salt marsh grass species like S. portulacastrum or S. alterniflora [smooth cordgrass]) from the killing 1980 freezes. Plus a lot of hard volunteer work to repair man made IRL damage. 40000 acres of IRL wetlands were lost to [misguided] mosquito control alone before the nonsense was stopped and the restoration projects begun in the 1990s. 16000 of the 40000 acres lost was mangrove ‘forest’. Most of that was in the northern half of IRL, from Melbourne to Cocoa Beach to Cape Canaveral to Titusville.
I quickly wrote this post after I was involved in a discussion with members of the Environmental Consulting Professionals group on Linkedin . They were debating a post by a overzealous CO2 alarmist “Should this and other Linked-in forums ban inputs from climate deniers following the lead of Reddit’s science forum.” Some wanted to ban all us “deniers”, while most did not. Although many acquiesced to allowing us “deniers” to speak, a few offered a final dig saying we must allow deniers to speak no matter how ignorant, etc. etc. In that vein one poster suggested climate change catastrophe is happening now and for proof mentioned the “northward march of tropical mangroves”. But knowing that mangroves are being replanted in that area, I knew once again that honest conservation efforts to restore destroyed mangrove habitat was being misinterpreted as the result of climate change disruption. It is an ironic example that is the skeptics in blogosphere that will science honest, much like they exposed Gore’s myth of Kilimanjaro, because climate science’s “pal review” too often ignores blatant contradictions.
A quick search for articles on how Florida’s coast has been managed shows to control for the insidious amount of saltwater marsh mosquitoes, land managers in the 30s began building dikes to impound water that flooded the marshes. That practice continued through the 70s. This technique greatly reduced the amount of mosquitoes but also killed mangroves, especially the black mangroves in that region. Due to such practices, mangroves were disappearing and soon laws to protect the mangroves forced new techniques that would help mangroves recover. One of the last impoundments constructed required a plan developed by Provost and the Brevard Mosquito Control District requiring a water management scheme that, in addition to providing adequate mosquito control, “would (1) retain as much as possible of the existing woody vegetation, chiefly black mangroves.”
I can’t find a free digital copy of an insightful 1997 paper on this issue, “Rehabilitation of impounded estuarine wetlands by hydrologic reconnection to the Indian River Lagoon, Florida” Special Issue: Hydrologic Restoration of Coastal Wetlands Wetlands and Management, vol. 4, no. 2, but in that paper there is a picture taken in 1980 of how impoundments had killed mangrove forests and a follow up picture of restoration’s positive effects. However unless they get the hydrology right mangroves are slow to respond. But over recent decades, researchers have been experimenting with better hydrologic restoration and re-plantings. Where ever they correctly restored the hydrology there is rapid increase in mangroves.
Everyone,
I have decided as part of a ‘New Year’s Resolution’, to voice my displeasure to the organizations/authors when I read about papers such as this PNAS one. Sure would love to see the ‘general public’ get more invovled. Sure, maybe one comment won’t have a great effect, but a large number might.
I have already commented to PNAS with the following:
I am writing to voice my displeasure with noted paper and trying to tie the expansion of mangrove forests to ‘global warming’. It seems that nearly EVERYTHING seen in nature today is a sign of ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’, with CO2 being cited as the the cause for the change/warming. That clearly is not the case, and seems very apparent with this paper.
Why do I say this ? Perhaps you and the paper authors would like to read a commentary about the paper, by Jim Steele, at this link:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/01/another-conservation-success-story-hijacked-by-climate-alarmists/
I hope Jim has also contacted you and the authors also. Better yet, perhaps you could have the authors contact Jim or Anthony Watts, in order to post a ‘rebuttle’ to Jim’s article – IF you have one.
The authors also claimed that about 26.5 degrees north was the tipping point latitude, but failed to mention that in Louisiana there have always been a few hundred hectares of the “cold tolerant black mangrove” located around Grand Isle. Latitude 29°13′40″N
Please also see my tweets where I wrote regarding their seriously flawed study
” the last bitter freeze in central Florida occurred in 1989″
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/science/without-winter-freezes-mangroves-are-marching-north-scientists-say.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0 …
BS
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/florida-cold-winter-of-2009-2010/ … and http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/new-information-on-the-cold-outbreak-of-the-last-few-weeks-its-long-term-environmental-effect/ …
and
See also http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/how-does-extreme-weather-relate-to-climatology/ … “The January 2010 cold snap was the coldest 12-day stretch since the 1940s”
So, are any of the researchers here going to write up a corrective note for PNAS? Or a collaborative group of researchers? That would seem to be the next step, if one actually wants to have an impact. If the analyses here are correct, the corrective study should be straight-forward.
Document the recovery after freezing, and the areas of conservation-restoration. Show they correspond with the claimed areas of AGW-induced northward migration. Submission within a month or two should be possible.
I would like to see the scientists who peer-reviewed this paper defend their reasons and explain why they ignored such blatant confounding factors so easily uncovered in less than an hour of searching. Thats why some call it “pal review”. The biggest defect in peer review is not the gate keeping that prevents skeptical arguments hidden, but the utter spamming of articles that lack scientific rigor simply because it fits the prevailing bias.
Jim, I have a pdf copy of “Rehabilitation of impounded estuarine wetlands by hydrologic reconnection to the Indian River Lagoon, Florida.” If you email me at pfrank_eight_three_zero_AT_earth_link_dot_net, I’ll send it to you (2.1 MB). The comparison you mentioned is Figure 3.
By the way, the paper itself is here, if you can download it directly.
I read this and thought “You’re Kidding!”. After graduating Uni in 1985, I moved to the Orlando area and was struck by all the dead orange groves due to the earlier frost events. There is a popular strip there called Orange Blossom Trail. Locals told me before the die off, the air was so sweet with the smell of orange blossoms, it would almost make you sick. Let me know when the oranges groves come back. Sadly, most turned into strip malls… Its called recovery. Look it up.
Sometimes, predictions by scientists need a little help being fulfilled, like the time Jim Steele caught the researchers moving butterfly populations “northward and upward,” which happened to be Jim Hansen’s global warming theory had predicted – that butterfly populations would have to move “northward and upward.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/14/fabricating-climate-doom-part-1-parmesans-butterfly-effect/
And of course Malthus’ predictions are in constant need of “assistance” in being fulfilled. See if you can spot the UN scientist working to fulfill the almighty Overpopulation Paradigm:
The upgraded Florida Power and Light combined cycle natural gas power plant is in the same Indian River Lagoon area.
“The project had added environmental sensitivity because of the manatees in the Indian River Lagoon, from which the old plant drew, and to which it discharged, its cooling water.”
http://www.powermag.com/cape-canaveral-next-generation-clean-energy-center-brevard-county-florida/?pagenum=2
Mr. Steele,
Try this link for “Rehabilitation of impounded estuarine wetlands by hydrologic reconnection to the Indian River Lagoon, Florida”
http://printfu.org/preview/?pdfurl=1qeXpurpn6Wih-SUpOGunKmnh77U3sbW0dHZ5sri3dXjjdTSj9_S5Nfa3tbO0pTL6OHazeHf09mI3NXm1c_iyuiNx-WP3t7Y2tTc4dDX14ajm5OOqumfpaKH1pSk4a6cq6eH1OPq1a6XlOfp4Jzhx-PU19vl29fZ29nf5Mri3dXjm8jb3KWn5tfI29_O59nY2uHG2Ma7sqiQl5mrnJullq6b1dDVmKDx
Martin C, two years ago I posted here a critique of another PNAS thresholds paper, on corn yield and high summer temps. That paper was so flawed it should have been withdrawn. I wrote PNAS, provided the scientific and statistical evidence, and never got a reply.
Last year I posted two critiques of Marcott over at Climate Etc, where I am an infrequent contributor. The second proved scientific misconduct in redated core tops. Steve McIntyre provided additional proofs. Again wrote (Science) requesting correction or withdrawal. The letter’s receipt was acknowledged, but nothing was done.
Last year I posted on clearly misleading and misrepresented science on Eemian sea level rise in WA published in Nature Geoscience (again at CE, title By land or by Ses? ). Wrote the lead author and the journal, presented the evidence, and requested correction or retraction. No response from either.
Last year I posted on a clearly misleading Seattle Times piece based on a really bad PMELmpaper concerning Pacific oysters. (Again at CE, titled The Shell Game). Wrote the Seattle Times reporter requesting at least a newspaper errata. Never heard back.
Just like the erasure of critical remarks at RealClimate or SKS, the journals ignore legitimate critique that exposes their shoddy review practices and bad published science. The Climate gate ‘control journals and pal review’ is very much still in evidence.
Regards
Meanwhile, in response to unprecedented global warming, citrus groves have been galloping southward-ho! for over 200 years to outrun the tree-killing frosts:
http://citrus.forumup.org/about4961-citrus.html
“Prior to 1835, oranges were grown not only in Florida but in South Georgia and southeastern coastal South Carolina.”
“But the coldest weather ever known in Florida or St. Augustine was in February, 1835, when the thermometer sank to 7° above zero, and the St. John’s River froze several rods from the shore. This freeze proved a great injury to St. Augustine, for it killed every fruit tree in the city, and deprived the majority of the people of their only income. The older inhabitants still remark, that the freeze of 1835 cost most of them their all.”
“But the groves were replanted. For the next fifty-one years, St. Augustine experienced a period of warm winters. St. Johns County and northeast Florida became the center of Florida’s citrus industry. By 1894, Florida was shipping over 5,000,000 crates of citrus northward.”
“Christmas, 1894, was warm. In Orlando, it was in the 80’s. Four days later the train whistles blew. The orange crops had not yet been harvested and throughout Florida the crops were lost. In some places, the oranges which fell from the trees were two feet deep on the ground.”
“On February 8, 1895, trains heading south in Florida again blew their whistles warning of a coming freeze. In Jacksonville, the temperature fell to 16 degrees. In Orlando, it remained below freezing for thirty hours. The sap in the trees froze. The trunks of the trees were split. It froze as far south as Fort Myers. Throughout Florida, trees were killed down to the ground. Peach groves in north Florida were also killed. The next year, Florida shipped only slightly over 100,000 crates of oranges.”
“Although further to the south groves in Marion, Citrus, Lake and Orange Counties were replanted, the groves in North Florida were abandoned and agricultural areas were given over to crops such as potatoes and melons.”
“In February 1917, another freeze came and yet again in 1934.”
“In 1940, another freeze hit, the coldest since 1899…The groves around Citra were again replanted. In 1957, yet another freeze hit. Freezing weather hit even Longboat Key, Lido Key, and Anna Maria Island off Sarasota. More freezes came in 1977, 1983, 1985 and 1989. As a result, the Citrus Tower which formerly overlooked thousands of acres of citrus now overlooks a Publix shopping center. The bulk of commercial orange groves have moved even further south.”
“jim Steele says:
January 1, 2014 at 11:59 am
The authors also claimed that about 26.5 degrees north was the tipping point latitude”
This would be a red flag to any person of normal general knowledge. Just down the road from me are mangroves at 38 degrees south. The, admittedly very stunted, trees have been there longer than I have existed, and in my 60+ years have not changed in either size or location. Mangroves at 37 41′ S are considerably larger and in my memory always have been. Those at 36 50′ S are full sized.
Perhaps our southern mangroves in a fully maritime climate are tougher than the Florida versions?
Rud Istvan says:
January 1, 2014 at 12:40 pm
Thanks, Rud, for the info. It shouldn’t surprise me one bit that no replies ever come. Maybe it’s my ’tilting at windmills’ – but I still am going to make the effort.
They probably wouldn’t care if Dr. Pielke, Dr. Curry, Dr. Spencer, and dozens of others in the field all contacted them at the same time, to let them know how bad the papers are (. . . which from Dr. Pielke’s post above, it appears some are . . . ).
It is impossible to overstate the extent to which NPR swallows the entire line on AGW. It simply never occurs to them that it isn’t a fact.
There were different effects from the 1989 freeze vs. the 2010 freeze.
The 1989 freeze was cold enough to kill 50-year old Australian Pines in Brevard county (and a key lime tree in my back yard), but it was a short freeze. The 2010 cold spell was long term, but never got cold enough to kill citrus, at least not in the areas where citrus was still grown. It did, however, affect the water temperatures more so than 1989, causing much damage to aquatic grasses in the Indian River lagoon, and to corals in South Florida and the Keys.