It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, July 20, 2023
Kill the bill, say First Nations as they unite in opposition to Métis self-governance legislation
Story by The Canadian Press • Monday
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller says he is available to broker talks between chiefs in Ontario and the Métis Nation of Ontario.
Miller made his offer at the Assembly of First Nations annual general assembly in Halifax on July 13. It came a day after the chiefs unanimously voted in favour of a resolution to take steps to kill a federal bill that gives the Métis Nations in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario self-government.
“I do understand how heated this is and hopefully there will be a space to sit down… and to have a discussion,” said Miller.
The offer stands whether that discussion is between the Chiefs of Ontario and the Métis Nation of Ontario, or between the various section 35 rights holders in Saskatchewan, Manitoba or Alberta, or elsewhere in the country as parties advocate for their rights, Miller said. Or the minister would just get out of the way if need be, he said.
On June 21, Bill C-53, an Act respecting the recognition of certain Métis governments in Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan, to give effect to treaties with those governments and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, received first and second readings in the House of Commons.
“We are not going to support the legislation and we're going to fight it to the very end,” Gull Bay First Nation Chief Wilfred King told Miller.
Ontario chiefs are leading the way. Concerns centre around what chiefs call unproven claims by the Métis Nation of Ontario for an expanded membership list, including six additional historic Métis communities beyond the single community in northwestern Ontario along the Manitoba border where the Red River Métis settled. Formal recognition of these additional communities was granted by the Ontario government in 2017.
“First Nations in Ontario are calling for Bill C-53 to be withdrawn so that there is a proper due diligence by Canada and consultation with First Nations before the bill is passed to prevent a mistake that will harm legitimate rights holders for generations to come,” said Nipissing First Nation Chief Scott McLeod. He moved AFN Resolution 33/2023, Protect First Nations Rights and Interests from Unfounded Métis Rights Assertions.
McLeod called the bill “a form of modern colonization.”
“For First Nations or legitimate Métis rights holders, Canada is not the arbiter of rights and titles in our territories and does not have the authority to create new section 35 holding entities with jurisdiction in our territories without consulting us,” he said.
In supporting the resolution, chiefs pointed out that federal funding for such issues as housing, education, and health, as well as grant dollars from industry, would be going to Métis communities that were not legitimate rights holders.
“We are not against legitimate Métis rights and claims, and we acknowledge their existence in this country, but this legislation opens the door for people that may not be qualified under that type of criteria,” said McLeod.
The Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF), which holds itself as the national government of the Red River Métis, and the Métis Nation British Columbia (MNBC) have both come out in support of the Ontario First Nations, citing concerns over the MNO’s expanded membership list and increased number of historic communities.
“We certainly do not recognize nor acknowledge that s.35 Red River Métis rights exist in the whole of Ontario …,” wrote Clement Chartier, ambassador for the MMF, to the AFN executive committee on July 6.
The MNO’s membership and additional communities has been an issue with the Métis national advocacy organization, the Métis National Council (MNC), since 2018.
In 2021, the national council passed a motion to establish an expert panel that would, in part, provide the MNO with the opportunity to present the work it “engaged in” with the Ontario government in 2017 to identify the additional historical Métis communities. That expert panel has yet to meet.
“Engaging meaningfully with First Nations (in Ontario) and sincerely addressing the resolution passed at the MNC general assembly are both critical for ensuring a strong, collaborative and resilient Métis Nation,” wrote MNBC President Lissa Dawn Smith in a July 12 letter to MNO President Margaret Froh.
Miller said he understood the concerns raised by chiefs as they did not have the opportunity to review the legislation before it was introduced, which he said was an “archaic trapping of the legislative process.”
He said chiefs and organizations that felt their rights were being impacted will now have the ability to speak before committee on the legislation, which he described as “very skeletal, very basic recognition of the…collective right of certain Métis communities to govern themselves accordingly.”
He stressed that it did not include harvesting rights or land.
The bill says its purpose is to “advance the recognition of the right to self-determination, including the inherent right of self-government recognized and affirmed by section 35 of the Constitution Act 1982…”
The bill was introduced June 16 with a Ways and Means motion associated with it. Ways and Means motions deal with financial measures.
While at this point there are no monies attached to Bill C-53, the bill does include the future possibility for the Métis governments to negotiate “tax treatment” agreements.
Miller said he didn’t want a “false sense of conflict” between Métis and First Nations, because “if there is anyone to blame in this country for the state of the non-recognition of section 35 rights, it should be the federal government. It should be Canada.”
After reading this article today, the MNO responded with a statement from MNO President Margaret Froh. She stated MNO had always welcomed “respectful dialogue with First Nations leaders” and asserted that the MNO had reached out multiple times to Chiefs of Ontario and the Anishinabek Nation to discuss Métis rights and Bill C-53.
Froh also said she welcomes the offer by Miller to facilitate a meeting between the groups, or for Ontario Minister of Indigenous Affairs Greg Rickford to facilitate such a meeting.
“Bill C-53 only pertains to the internal governance of our Métis governments – our Métis citizenship, Métis elections, Métis governance operations, and Métis child and family services. Bill C-53 does not deal with land, harvesting or any land-related rights. It does not impact the rights of First Nations in any way,” read the statement.
Windspeaker.com
By Shari Narine, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Windspeaker.com, Windspeaker.com
Espresso can prevent Alzheimer’s protein clumping in lab tests
Whether enjoyed on its own or mixed into a latte, Americano or even a martini, espresso provides an ultra-concentrated jolt of caffeine to coffee lovers. But it might do more than just wake you up. Research now published in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry shows that, in preliminary in vitro laboratory tests, espresso compounds can inhibit tau protein aggregation — a process that is believed to be involved in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Roughly half of all Americans drink coffee every day, and espresso is a popular way to consume it. To “pull” an espresso shot, hot water is forced through finely ground coffee beans, creating a concentrated extract. This is often used as a base for other drinks, including the trendy espresso martini. Recent research has suggested that coffee could also have beneficial effects against certain neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. Although the exact mechanisms that cause these conditions are still unclear, it’s thought that a protein called tau plays a significant role. In healthy people, tau proteins help stabilize structures in the brain, but when certain diseases develop, the proteins can clump together into fibrils. Some researchers propose that preventing this aggregation could alleviate symptoms. So, Mariapina D’Onofrio and colleagues wanted to see if compounds in espresso could prevent tau aggregation in vitro.
The researchers pulled espresso shots from store-bought beans, then characterized their chemical makeup using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. They chose caffeine and trigonelline, both alkaloids, the flavonoid genistein and theobromine, a compound also found in chocolate, to focus on in further experiments. These molecules, along with the complete espresso extract, were incubated alongside a shortened form of the tau protein for up to 40 hours. As the concentration of espresso extract, caffeine or genistein increased, fibrils were shorter and didn’t form larger sheets, with the complete extract showing the most dramatic results. Shortened fibrils were found to be non-toxic to cells, and they did not act as “seeds” for further aggregation. In other experiments, the researchers observed that caffeine and the espresso extract could both bind pre-formed tau fibrils. Although much more research is needed, the team says that their preliminary in vitro findings could pave the way toward finding or designing other bioactive compounds against neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)
Analysis of Global Positioning System (GPS) time-series data from nearly 100 large earthquakes worldwide has provided evidence for the existence of a precursory phase of fault slip occurring two hours before seismic rupture. “If it can be confirmed that earthquake nucleation often involves an hours-long precursory phase, and the means can be developed to reliably measure it, a precursor warning could be issued,” writes Roland Bürgmann in a related Perspective. The ability to predict large earthquakes has been a longstanding yet elusive goal. Short-term earthquake prediction – the ability to issue a warning from minutes to months before a quake occurs – relies on a definitive and observable geophysical precursor signal. Previous retrospective studies of several large earthquakes have suggested that a precursory phase of slow aseismic slip can be observed in faults before a mainshock. However, the relationship between these observations and seismic ruptures is poorly understood as they don’t directly precede an event and occur frequently without being followed by an earthquake. As a result, the existence of a clear precursory signal capable of predicting large earthquakes remains uncertain. Here, Quentin Bletery and Jean-Mathieu Nocquet present a systematic global search for short-term precursory fault slip before large earthquakes. Using global high-rate GPS time series data from 3,026 geodetic stations worldwide, Bletery and Noquet measured fault displacement up to two hours before 90 different magnitude 7 and above earthquakes occurred. Statistical analysis of the data revealed a subtle signal consistent with a period of exponential acceleration of fault slip near the eventual earthquake’s hypocenter beginning roughly two hours before the rupture. According to the authors, the findings suggest that many large earthquakes start with a precursory phase of slip or that the observations represent the tail end of a much longer and more difficult-to-measure process of precursory slip. Although the study offers evidence of a precursory signal heralding large earthquakes, Bletery and Noquet note that currently deployed earthquake monitoring instrumentation lacks the coverage and precision required to identify or monitor for precursory slip at the scale of individual earthquakes. “Although the results of Bletery and Nocquet suggest that there may indeed be an hours-long precursory phase, it is not clear whether such slow-slip accelerations are distinctly associated with large earthquakes or whether they could ever be measured for individual events with the accuracy needed to provide a useful warning,” writes Bürgmann.
IMAGE: A LARGE PORTION OF GREENLAND MELTED ABOUT 416,000 YEARS AGO—PERHAPS A BIT LIKE THE MODERN GREENLAND LANDSCAPE SHOWN IN THIS PHOTO—AND BECAME ICE-FREE TUNDRA, OR BOREAL FOREST, A NEW STUDY IN THE JOURNAL SCIENCE SHOWS. THE RESULTS HELP OVERTURN A PREVIOUS VIEW THAT MUCH OF THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET PERSISTED FOR MOST OF THE LAST TWO AND A HALF MILLION YEARS. INSTEAD, MODERATE WARMING, FROM 424,000 TO 374,000 YEARS AGO, LED TO DRAMATIC MELTING. THIS FINDING INDICATES THAT THE ICE SHEET ON GREENLAND MAY BE MORE SENSITIVE TO HUMAN-CAUSED CLIMATE CHANGE THAN PREVIOUSLY UNDERSTOOD—AND WILL BE VULNERABLE TO IRREVERSIBLE, RAPID MELTING IN COMING CENTURIES.view more
CREDIT: JOSHUA BROWN
Summary:
• A large portion of Greenland was an ice-free tundra landscape—perhaps covered by trees and roaming woolly mammoths—in the recent geologic past (about 416,000 years ago), a new study in the journal Science shows.
• The results help overturn a previous view that much of the Greenland ice sheet persisted for most of the last two and a half million years. Instead, moderate warming, from 424,000 to 374,000 years ago, led to dramatic melting.
• At that time, the melting of Greenland caused at least five feet of sea level rise, despite atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide being far lower than today (280 vs. 420 ppm). This indicates that the ice sheet on Greenland may be more sensitive to human-caused climate change than previously understood—and will be vulnerable to irreversible, rapid melting in coming centuries.
• The scientists—from the University of Vermont (UVM), Utah State University, and fourteen other institutions—used sediment from a long-lost ice core, collected at a secret U.S. Army base in the 1960s, to make the discovery. They applied advanced luminescence and isotope techniques to provide direct evidence of the timing and duration of the ice-free period.
A Green Land
During the Cold War, a secret U.S. Army mission, at Camp Century in northwestern Greenland, drilled down through 4560 feet of ice on the frozen island—and then kept drilling to pull out a twelve-foot-long tube of soil and rock from below the ice. Then this icy sediment was lost in a freezer for decades. It was accidentally rediscovered in 2017 and shown to hold not just sediment but also leaves and moss, remnants of an ice-free landscape, perhaps a boreal forest.
But how long ago were those plants growing—where today stands an ice sheet two miles thick and three times the size of Texas?
An international team of scientists was amazed to discover that Greenland was a green land only 416,000 years ago (with an error margin of about 38,000 years).
Their new study was published in the journal Science on July 21, 2023.
Bulletproof Evidence
Until recently, geologists believed that Greenland was a fortress of ice, mostly unmelted for millions of years. But, two years ago, using the rediscovered Camp Century ice core, this team of scientists showed that it likely melted less than one million years ago. Other scientists, working in central Greenland, gathered data showing the ice there melted at least once in the last 1.1 million years—but until this study, no one knew exactly when the ice was gone.
Now, using advanced luminescence technology and rare isotope analysis, the team has created a starker picture: large portions of Greenland’s ice sheet melted much more recently than a million years ago. The new study presents direct evidence that sediment just beneath the ice sheet was deposited by flowing water in an ice-free environment during a moderate warming period called Marine Isotope Stage 11, from 424,000 to 374,000 years ago. This melting caused at least five feet of sea level rise around the globe.
“It's really the first bulletproof evidence that much of the Greenland ice sheet vanished when it got warm,” says University of Vermont scientist Paul Bierman, who co-led the new study with lead author Drew Christ, a post-doctoral geoscientist who worked in Bierman’s lab, Professor Tammy Rittenour from Utah State University, and eighteen other scientists from around the world.
Understanding Greenland’s past is critical for predicting how its giant ice sheet will respond to climate warming in the future and how quickly it will melt. Since about twenty-three feet of sea-level rise is tied up in Greenland’s ice, every coastal region in the world is at risk. The new study provides strong and precise evidence that Greenland is more sensitive to climate change than previously understood—and at grave risk of irreversibly melting off.
“Greenland’s past, preserved in twelve feet of frozen soil, suggests a warm, wet, and largely ice-free future for planet Earth,” says Bierman, a geoscientist in UVM’s Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources and a fellow in the Gund Institute for Environment, “unless we can dramatically lower the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Into the Light
The team’s new study in Science, combined with their earlier work, is causing a major and worrisome rethinking of the history of Greenland’s ice sheet. “We had always assumed that the Greenland ice sheet formed about two and a half million years ago—and has just been there this whole time and that it’s very stable,” says Tammy Rittenour, a scientist at Utah State University and co-author on the new study. “Maybe the edges melted, or with more snowfall it got a bit fatter—but it doesn't go away and it doesn't dramatically melt back. But this paper shows that it did.”
At Rittenour’s lab, sediment from the Camp Century core was examined for what is called a “luminescence signal.” As bits of rock and sand are transported by wind or water, they can be exposed to sunlight—which, basically, zeros out any previous luminescence signal—and then re-buried under rock or ice. In the darkness, over time, minerals of quartz and feldspar in the sediment accumulate freed electrons in their crystals. In a specialized dark room, Rittenour’s team took pieces of the ice core sediment and exposed them to blue-green or infrared light, releasing the trapped electrons. With some advanced tools and measures, and many repeated tests, the number of released electrons forms a kind of clock, revealing with precision the last time these sediments were exposed to the sun. “And the only way to do that at Camp Century is to remove a mile of ice,” says Rittenour, “Plus, to have plants, you have to have light.”
These powerful new data were combined with insight from Bierman’s UVM lab. There, scientists study quartz from the Camp Century core. Inside this quartz, rare forms—called isotopes—of the elements beryllium and aluminum build up when the ground is exposed to the sky and can be hit by cosmic rays. Looking at ratios of beryllium and other isotopes gave the scientists a window onto how long rocks at the surface were exposed vs. buried under layers of ice. This data helped the scientists show that the Camp Century sediment was exposed to the sky less than 14,000 years before it was deposited under the ice, narrowing down the time window when that portion of Greenland must have been ice-free.
Under Ice
Camp Century was a military base hidden in tunnels under the Greenland ice sheet in the 1960s. One strategic purpose of the camp was a top-secret operation, called Project Iceworm, to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles under the ice near the Soviet Union. As cover, the Army claimed the camp was an Arctic science station.
The missile mission was a bust, but the science team did complete first-of-its-kind research, including drilling a nearly mile-deep ice core. The Camp Century scientists were focused on the ice itself—part of an effort to understand Earth’s past ice ages and warm periods, the interglacials. They took little interest in the twelve feet of sediment gathered from beneath their ice core. Then, in a bizarre story, the ice core was moved in the 1970s from a military freezer to the University at Buffalo—and then to another freezer in Denmark in the 1990s. There it was lost for decades—until it was found again when the cores were being moved to a new freezer. More about how the core was lost, rediscovered in some cookie jars, and then studied by an international team gathered at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Environment can be read here: Secrets Under the Ice.
Sea Level
Camp Century is 138 miles inland from the coast and only 800 miles from the North Pole; the new Science study shows that the region entirely melted and was covered with vegetation during Marine Isotope Stage 11, a long interglacial with temperatures similar to or slightly warmer than today. With this information, the team’s models show that, during that period, the ice sheet melted enough to cause at least five feet, and perhaps as much as twenty feet, of sea-level rise. The research, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, lines up with findings from two other ice cores collected in 1990s from the center of Greenland. Sediment from these cores also suggest that the giant ice sheet melted in the recent geologic past. The combination of these earlier cores with the new insight from Camp Century reveal the fragile nature of the entire Greenland ice sheet—in the past (at 280 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 or less) and today (422ppm and rising).
“If we melt just portions of the Greenland ice sheet, the sea level rises dramatically,” says Utah’s Tammy Rittenour. “Forward modeling the rates of melt, and the response to high carbon dioxide, we are looking at meters of sea level rise, probably tens of meters. And then look at the elevation of New York City, Boston, Miami, Amsterdam. Look at India and Africa—most global population centers are near sea level.”
“Four-hundred-thousand years ago there were no cities on the coast,” says UVM’s Paul Bierman, “and now there are cities on the coast.”
Deglaciation of northwestern Greenland during Marine Isotope Stage 11
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
21-Jul-2023
Greenland has greener history than previously thought, says USU Geoscientist
Tammy Rittenour and colleagues report much of the Artic island's ice melted as recently as 416,000 years ago, which has implications for sea-level rise
IMAGE: IN THE UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY LUMINESCENCE LAB, GRADUATE STUDENT HAWKE WOZNICK USES SIEVES TO PREPARE SEDIMENT SAMPLES FROM GREENLAND'S CAMP CENTURY FOR OSL DATING. USU GEOSCIENCES PROFESSOR TAMMY RITTENOUR AND COLLEAGUES REPORTED FINDINGS ABOUT THE SAMPLES IN THE JULY 20, 2023, ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL 'SCIENCE.'view more
CREDIT: USU/LEVI SIM
LOGAN, UTAH, USA -- New analysis of samples collected from underneath Greenland’s ice sheet reveal the Arctic island was much greener as recently as 416,000 years ago. The findings overturn previous views that Greenland’s continental glacier, which covers about 80 percent of the 836,3000-square-mile land mass, has persisted for the last two and a half million years.
“We’re discovering the ice sheet is much more sensitive to climate change than we previously thought,” says Utah State University geoscientist Tammy Rittenour. “This is a foreboding wake-up call.”
Rittenour, with colleagues from the University of Vermont and fourteen other institutions, reports findings in the July 20, 2023, issue of the journal Science. Their research is supported by the National Science Foundation.
A greener Greenland means the island’s formidable-appearing ice sheet – nearly two miles thick in places – is not as stable as it appears.
“We had always assumed the ice sheet has remained about the same for nearly 2.5 million years,” says Rittenour, professor in USU’s Department of Geosciences. “But our investigation indicates it melted enough to allow the growth of moss, shrubs and buzzing insects during an interglacial period called Marine Isotope Stage 11, between 424,000 to 374,000 years ago.”
The melting caused at least five feet of sea-level rise around the globe, she says. “Some of our model scenarios suggest sea levels up to 20 feet higher than today.”
“It was an unusually long period of warming with moderately elevated levels of carbon dioxide – CO2 – in the atmosphere,” Rittenour says. “What’s alarming about this finding is today’s CO2 levels are 1.5 times higher.”
Even if humans abruptly stopped activities that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, she says, “we’d still have inflated CO2 levels for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years to come.”
That’s an uneasy realization, she says, with current rates at which Greenland’s ice sheet is thawing.
“And that’s not taking Antarctica and other glacial areas into consideration,” Rittenour says. “The deglaciation has implications for the entire globe and is especially sobering for our coastal mega-cities, where so much of the world’s population resides.”
The team’s analysis is a continuation of research started several years ago, when the scientists happened upon samples collected from an extraordinary, Cold War-era military project.
“In 1960, the U.S. Army launched a top-secret effort called Project Iceworm in northwestern Greenland to build a network of mobile nuclear launch sites under the ice sheet,” Rittenour says. “As part of that project, they also invited scientists and engineers to conduct experiments in a highly publicized ‘cover’ project, known as Camp Century, to study the feasibility of working and carrying out military missions under ice and in extreme-cold conditions.”
Hampered by brutal blizzards and unstable ice conditions, Project Iceworm’s cavernous underground bunker and tunnels were abandoned in 1966. But sediment samples collected at the bottom of a more than 4,000-foot-long ice core extracted from the site have yielded the surprising information about Greenland’s not-so-distant geologic past.
The frozen soil samples from the base of the Camp Century ice core were forgotten in a freezer for decades, until recently re-discovered.
“We have very few samples from below the Greenland ice sheet, because most drilling missions stop when they reach the base of the ice,” Rittenour says. “These re-discovered Camp Century sediments represent a unique, unspoiled time capsule of past conditions.”
While the frozen soil sat in a freezer for more than 60 years, science technology advanced. Rittenour, who is director of the USU Luminescence Laboratory, was invited to help date the sediment.
“Because the samples remained frozen and largely untouched, I was able to use luminescence dating to determine the last time they were exposed to sunlight,” she says. “If researchers had examined the sediments in the past, we couldn’t have run any of the analyses we did for this paper.”
Rittenour says today’s investigative technologies enable researchers to distill a good record of what’s happened in Greenland and other parts of the world.
“These once lost, Cold War relics from a top-secret nuclear military base carved within the ice are continuing to tell their secrets, and forewarn us of the sensitivity of Earth’s climate,” she says. “If we can lose the far northwest portion of the Greenland ice sheet under natural conditions, then we’re treading dangerous waters given current elevated greenhouse gas conditions.”
Utah State University Geosciences Professor Tammy Rittenour, pictured in July 2023 at Iceland’s Langjökull ice cap, studies the paleoclimatology of extreme environments throughout the globe.
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)
Sediments recovered from the base of the Camp Century ice core show that northwestern Greenland was ice-free during a period of history known to have exhibited some of the lowest global ice volumes -- the Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11 interglacial period. The absence of ice at that location means that the Greenland Ice Sheet must have contributed more 1.4 meters of sea-level equivalent to global sea level during the interglacial – a period in which average global air temperature was similar to what we’ll soon experience, given human-caused climate warming. The climate conditions of past interglacials – periods during Earth’s climatic history characterized by warmer global temperatures and reduced global ice coverage – provide opportunities to better understand how Earth’s cryosphere will respond to our warming climate and contribute to sea level rise. However, well-dated sedimentary records from areas formally ice-free during interglacial periods are rare or difficult to obtain due to present-day ice cover. One notable exception is the Camp Century ice core from northwestern Greenland, which contained rare frozen subglacial sediments suggesting that the region was ice-free at some point during the Pleistocene. Using luminescence dating and cosmogenic nuclide data, Andrew Christ and colleagues analyzed the sediments and found they were deposited by flowing water in an ice-free tundra environment during the MIS 11 interglacial (~416 thousand years ago) after first being exposed at the surface and to sunlight less than 16,000 years earlier. Then, to better understand the deglaciation of Greenland during MIS 11, Christ et al. used an ensemble of ice sheet models and found that for the Camp Century location to be ice-free, melting of the ice sheet would have contributed to at least 1.4 meters of sea-level equivalent to the global mean sea level of the interglacial, which was between 6 and 13 meters higher than present. “If moderate warmth for 29 [thousand years] during MIS 11 resulted in significant ice loss from Greenland, then rapid, prolonged, and considerable anthropogenic Arctic warming will likely cause melting of the [Greenland Ice Sheet], raise sea level, and trigger additional climate feedbacks in the coming centuries,” write Christ et al.
In Africa, climate change impacts are experienced as extreme events like drought and floods. Through the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (which leverages expertise from USG science agencies, universities, and the private sector) and the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center, it has been possible to predict and monitor these climatic events, providing early warning of their impacts on agriculture to support humanitarian and resilience programming in the most food insecure countries of the world.
Science is beginning to catch up with and even get ahead of climate change. In a commentary for the journal Earth’s Future, UC Santa Barbara climate scientist Chris Funk and co-authors assert that predicting the droughts that cause severe food insecurity in the Eastern Horn of Africa (Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia) is now possible, with months-long lead times that allow for measures to be taken that can help millions of the region’s farmers and pastoralists prepare for and adapt to the lean seasons.
“We’ve gotten very good at making these predictions,” said Funk, who directs UCSB’s Climate Hazards Center, a multidisciplinary alliance of scientists who work to predict droughts and food shortages in vulnerable areas.
In the summer of 2020, the CHC predicted that climate change, interacting with naturally occurring La Niña events, would bring devastating sequential drought to the Eastern Horn of Africa. The region normally has two wet seasons a year — spring and fall. An unprecedented five rainy seasons in a row failed. Eight months before each of those failures, the CHC anticipated droughts. Fortunately, agencies and other collaborators paid heed to those early warnings and were able to take effective actions, Funk said. Within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the forecasts helped motivate hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance for millions of starving people.
These efforts were a far cry from similar predictions of sequential droughts that the researchers, collaborating with the USAID-supported Famine Early Warning Systems Network, made for the same region ten years earlier. Predictions that went largely unheeded. “More than 250,000 Somalis died,” Funk said. “It was just really horrible.”
At the time, he said, the available forecasts weren’t able to predict rainfall deficits in this region. While the models said East Africa would become wetter, observations showed substantial declines in the spring wet season. And to be fair, he added, the group’s long-range weather prediction capabilities were still in their infancy. “We made an accurate forecast, but we didn’t understand very well what was going on scientifically,” Funk said. “Now, following our success in 2016/17, and extensive outreach efforts, the humanitarian relief community appreciates the value of our early warning systems.”
In the intervening 10 years, the researchers have worked to discern and understand the broad, often distant mechanisms that drive drought in the Eastern Horn of Africa and create accurate, tailored forecasts for the region. They built on research showing that increased rainfall around Indonesia, caused by anthropogenic increases in sea surface temperatures, resulted in less moisture flowing on to the East African coast during the rainy months. These changes in moisture flows drive back-to-back droughts. But as climate change increases western Pacific sea surface temperatures, it becomes more and more possible to predict devastating water shortages.
“We’ve published about 15 scientific papers on this topic,” Funk said, “and we’ve forecasted dry seasons in 2016-2017, which helped prevent a famine that year.” As he discusses in his book “Drought, Flood, Fire (Cambridge University Press, 2021),” “climate change amplifies natural sea surface temperature variations, which opens the door to better forecasts.”
In the new commentary and a longer paper currently at preprint stage, also coming out in Earth’s Future, the co-authors highlight, respectively, the opportunities associated with these long range outlooks, and the physical mechanisms explaining the predictability.
“To reduce the impacts of climate extremes, we need to look for opportunities,” said CHC Specialist and Operations Analyst Laura Harrison. “We need to pay attention to not just how climate is changing, but how these changes can support more effective predictions for droughts and for advantageous cropping conditions. As a community, we also need to foster communication about successful resilience strategies.”
"Flooding still happens, drought still happens, people still get hurt, but we can try to reduce the harm."
With climate models that can predict extreme ocean states at eight-month lead times, and weather forecasts that can make projections at two weeks and at 45 days, CHC scientists and researchers now can provide actionable information to collaborators on the ground to help local farmers anticipate and plan for dry conditions.
“We’re working with this group called Plant Village, who is providing agricultural advisories to millions of Kenyans, and helping them take actions that can help make their crops more drought-resistant,” Funk said.
This proactivity is something Funk and collaborators hope will become a bigger part of climate change strategy for the Eastern Horn of Africa, as their models predict more of these drought-forming conditions in the region’s future. A better local understanding of the mechanisms that result in droughts, and investments in early warning systems and adaptation measures, may initially be costly, they said, “but are relatively inexpensive when compared to post-impact, response-based alternatives such as humanitarian assistance and/or funding safety-net programs.”
Education and participation can build trust and ultimately increase resilience. The CHC is building on what they learned in East Africa, and using it to feed partnerships in other parts of the world. In southern Africa, for example, they are collaborating with the Zimbabwe Meteorological Services Department and the Knowledge Impact Network to support the development of actionable climate services.
“Understanding that climate change makes extremes more frequent is really empowering because now we can try to anticipate those bad effects,” Funk said. “Flooding still happens, drought still happens, people still get hurt, but we can try to reduce the harm.”
