What happened to global warming?

In the Boston area where I live we are getting pounded with snow leading to record accumulations and the inevitable quips ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’  I have been pondering my response to this for the last days when this morning my acquaintance Carolyn Johnson, science editor of the Boston Globe, has an excellent piece in the paper giving a detailed answer entitled ‘How warming can worsen snowfalls’. 

First, it is more helpful to use the term Climate Change rather than Global Warming, even though it is true that the basic thing that is happening to our planet is a warming due to substantially higher levels of CO2. As a result, the entire planet has warmed up 0.74*C ( 1.33 F) between 1906 – 2005. That doesn’t sound much. Tell most people and they just shrug and say ‘Huh, I’ll just wear a lighter shirt in summer and turn on the A/C more often.'

But think about that for a moment; 93% of that extra heat has been absorbed by the oceans. Think of the amount of extra energy it has taken to heat up the entire Atlantic and Pacific etc oceans. That energy is going to be expressed in various ways: stronger hurricanes and more energy in the jet stream, as well stirring a more aggressive arctic vortex in the winter. 

I first ran into this when researching the paper that I co-authored in 2012 with my colleagues Walter Kittredge, Elizabeth Wright and Donald Lubin entitled Changes in the vascular flora of the Middlesex Fells Reservation, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, from 1895 to 2011. Rhodora, Vol. 114, No. 959.  In our study of the plants of this forest reservation, four miles in from the sea, we did find that some cold-loving plants had disappeared and a few other species had come in from the south. But we found a more marked change in those that liked things wetter; for example a 10% increase in wetland species. When I studied weather reports for Boston I found that there had been an 8% increase in precipitation in the last hundred years, most of that increase in the last thirty years. ‘Precipitation’ includes both rain and snow, the latter being measured in special receptacles that melt the snow and then record the water content. If it’s fluffy snow, ten inches equals just one inch of rain. 

In the warmer months Rhode Island, Eastern Massachusetts and SE Maine get more rain because the prevailing winds from the south and south west are carrying more moisture.  An Atlantic ocean current comes south down the coast of New England carrying an increased quantity of cold water (along with damp cool air) because of the melting arctic ice cap. And these air masses tend to collide around the coast of Massachusetts. In the winter a more energetic jet stream also drags more arctic air our way.  All this adds up to heavier snow storms in the winter and more rain the rest of the year. But, because of global warming our winters (though intense) are going to get shorter. The local records being beaten this week in Boston are for amounts of snow in a limited period – a week or two weeks; but even this winter is unlikely to beat the winter-long record set back in the winter of 1995-96 when Boston got 107.6 inches (2.73 meters) of snow. 

So, I guess I’ll have to go and do some shoveling. But I’m encouraged by the belief that Spring is not that far away. 

And while we Bostonians complain about all the snow, climate change is having, and will have, far more serious consequences in other parts of the world such as Southern California, the Philippines, East Africa and certain Pacific island nations.

Mitochondria

In my last blog I talked a bit about mitochondria, and now they’re really in the news with the vote in the British House of Commons (equal to the US House of Representatives) to allow the use of another woman’s mitochondria when the intended mother’s mitochondria are in some way compromised leading to fatal disease in any child.

Of course we can expect to hear religious conservatives prattling on about meddling with God’s work. But even the press are using the term ‘a baby from three parents’.  Nonsense!

Dr Lynn Margulis, who until her death in 2011 was a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was the pioneer of our understanding that in the early evolution of more complex forms of life certain bacteria got swallowed up into larger cells in what is now known and accepted as an extreme case of symbiosis: mitochondria as our energy ‘batteries’; and in plants chloroplasts for photosynthesis. These are microscopic organelles that have no say about me being a human as opposed to being a frog. And If you inject some chloroplasts from an oak tree into a rose bush it’s not then going to grow 80 feet tall and produce acorns! This British baby will be the child of its two parents’ gametes, just as I am.

Thanks to TV crime shows everyone has heard of DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid, a long thread like molecule that carries in the arrangement of it’s components the ability to make proteins. In the case of mitochondria there are a handful of genes specifically for making sugar metabolizing enzymes. With chloroplasts the little bit of DNA there controls the fabulous process of photosynthesis. But my mitochondria have had no say in making me a human being.  That happened when the nuclear DNA in the sperm from my father united with the nucleus in my mother’s egg cell. There’s no room for any mitochondria in the head of a sperm and so we get all our mitochondria from our mothers.

In 2002, Dr. Bryan Sykes of Oxford University published The Seven Daughters of Eve about the seven maternal lines of mitochondria amongst Europeans. Just seven. So in this British case, it will be pretty easy to find a donor with the exact same mitochondria as the mother.

We’re all happy to accept someone else’s blood when needed, provided it’s the same blood type of course. Same with mitochondria.  No genetic change, no ‘third parent’.  

Red blood cells carry oxygen to our cells. Once there the mitochondria use that oxygen to burn glucose to make energy - two organelles working in close cooperation. Let’s focus on the miracle of a new healthy baby made possible by these advances in medical science.