An Air Force sergeant refuels a transport plane (via Pew Environment Group)

Climate policy may be a minefield in U.S. politics, but the Pentagon sees liabilities of a different kind and is forging ahead with plans to reduce the military’s carbon footprint and prepare for climate impacts.

In my April feature for the Daily Climate, “Military sees threats, worry in climate change,” I cover how the Armed Forces are running on solar power and biofuels, aiming for net-zero energy use, and otherwise planning for energy security and climate change.

Faced with criticism from some Republican members of Congress, former and current military leaders say preparing climate change isn’t about greening Defense programs; it’s a matter of national security:

“The severe weather effects of climate change aren’t going to start conflicts per se,” McGinn said. But it will put added pressure on political, religious, economic and ethnic fault lines, particularly in fragile societies. “It’s not a pretty picture for the United States.”

Researchers suspect climate change could be an even greater catalyst than military planners have anticipated. Solomon Hsiang, a post-doctoral researcher studying social responses to climate change at Princeton University, linked large-scale climate patterns, such as El Niño, to a rise in civil conflicts.

Hsiang and his colleagues determined that social unrest is 6 percent more likely to deteriorate into warfare during periods of El Niño activity, which tends to bring drought and extreme weather, such as cyclones and floods that slam the tropics. This periodic, global climate shift, which previews projected climate transformations, has played a role in one out of every five civil conflicts since 1950, making it as significant as any geopolitical or economic factor, according to Hsiang.

A companion story offers a tour of “The new geopolitics of global warming,” gathering insight from several prominent military energy planners. Not surprisingly, it’s a sobering review. For instance, regarding the energy risks in the Middle East, analysts aren’t only preoccupied with Iran:

The region’s major energy trade route runs just off the Yemeni shoreline, making it vulnerable to attack or blockade by pirates or other insurgent groups. “It’s seven miles from the Yemen coast to the shipping lane. You can row out, and you don’t even need an onboard motor,” said Neil Morisetti, a rear admiral in Britain’s Ministry of Defense and the U.K.’s climate and energy security envoy.

Both stories have also been published online by Scientific American (here’s the feature and hotspot sidebar) and Mother Nature Network.

Scary Halloween weather along the East Coast (NASA)

This year’s rash of severe weather has scientists scrambling to understand the connection between increasing emissions and natural disasters. While attending the World Climate Research Programme Open Science Conference in late October, I spoke with several prominent climate scientists about the various efforts devoted to detecting heatwaves, tornadoes, drought, and hurricanes and linking the extreme events to global warming.

My article for the Daily Climate, with the Seagal-inspired title, “Extreme Measures: The Push to Make Climate Science Relevant,” focuses on the push to attribute and predict extreme events, which should eventually provide better information for policymakers and disaster managers.

The story also ran online with Scientific American and Climate Central.

Stephen Schneider

When Stephen Schneider died in July 2010, the climate science community lost one of its leading and most articulate voices, but colleagues and a new generation of researchers are carrying forth his spirit and approach to understanding and explaining the impacts of climate change.

This August, hundreds of Schneider’s fellow scientists gathered in Boulder to remember him and also share their own research exploring the topics that he helped bring attention to with policymakers and the public. My September 2011 article for Miller-McCune, “A Discernible Human Influence: Schneider and Climate Change,” recounts the personal and intellectual impacts Schneider had on his colleagues and explores how scientists are tackling the latest and largest questions surrounding climate science and policy.

Up in the Air

Climate Change Compounds Threats to Birds

Red knots in Delaware Bay, New Jersey (Photo: NJ DEP)

Each spring the red knot, a shorebird with a rust-colored belly, transects the globe, flying from the southern tip of South America to the northern reaches of the Arctic. Midway through this flight, the birds lay over at the Delaware Bay, where they refuel by gorging on tens of thousands of horseshoe crab eggs.

In the 1990s, this age-old migration ran into trouble when red knot populations began crashing. Evidence pointed largely to shellfish overharvesting, but recent observations by birders and researchers have revealed an additional threat from climate change: Warmer temperatures are prompting the horseshoe crabs to lay their eggs earlier in the year, meaning less food for the migratory birds when they arrive at the bay.

These findings and other research about the impact of climate change on birds are the focus of the 2010 State of the Birds report, issued by scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, The Nature Conservancy, federal agencies and other organizations. The group’s 2009 report found that roughly one-third of bird species in the United States are endangered or are in serious decline.

The 2010 report examines the vulnerability of birds to future threats, says Ken Rosenberg, director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The report finds that birds most imperiled by past changes such as habitat loss—particularly seabirds, shorebirds and island birds (especially those in Hawaii)—are also the species most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. For example, the scientists warn that rising sea levels will destroy key habitat for many marine birds.

On a positive note, the report suggests that many forest and grassland birds have already begun to adapt to climate shifts by relocating, in direction or elevation, to habitats more to their liking.

David Mehlman, director of the Conservancy’s migratory bird program, says the report’s analyses will help identify emerging risks to birds so that proactive steps can be taken to curb threats. “We need not only to protect where biodiversity is now, but where we think it’s going in the future,” he says.

In coordination with the report, the U.S. Department of the Interior is launching a network to pool climate research and to promote conservation strategies for threatened birds. This collaboration, Rosenberg says, “takes bird conservation to a new level.”

— Joshua Zaffos

Growing populations and the altering climate and weather patterns are placing more people in risky situations, and making more individuals vulnerable to natural disasters. After attending a talk by Lori Peek, a sociology professor at Colorado State University, about the lag in research on how traumatic events affect families, I started pursuing this story to understand what we know — and what we have dispelled — when it comes to protecting and meeting the long-term needs of disaster victims and refugees.

My article, “After the Aftermath,” appears in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. I spoke with university researchers and nonprofit officials who have worked with and studied the impacts of the Sichuan earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and several other major tragedies and disasters. One of the key pieces that has researchers’ attention is the lack of understanding toward helping children through such events:

Hurricane Katrina didn’t flatten hundreds of schools, as happened last year in China, but the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding displaced 163,000 children 19 years old or younger. The hurricane flung kids across the country during the haphazard evacuation; 5,100 juveniles were reported missing in the weeks that followed, and it would take seven months to reunite them with their families.

Children are a particularly understudied population in terms of disaster research, and while some people believe kids can prove exceptionally resilient, the harsh consequences of Katrina suggest less promising outcomes. “We have very little good research on mass displacement and natural disasters,” says Lori Peek, a sociology professor at Colorado State University. “But I think we’re going to see a lot more of it, so I think we need to learn more about what went wrong.”

Peek has conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with adults and children who landed in Colorado after Katrina. She’s also spoken to individuals who have returned to the Gulf region. Field studies of displaced children by a dozen researchers, including Peek, reveal magnified risks of emotional and social suffering, not to mention increased mental health problems.

Children displaced by Katrina face overcrowding at new schools and discrimination from new peers. They are tuned in to their families’ financial instability and crave the friends and relatives who once formed their social network. “In Colorado, people want to know, ‘Are they better off?’ That’s really difficult [to say] because what does ‘better off’ mean?” Peek says.

“The Legacy of Katrina’s Children,” a paper authored by David Abramson and colleagues at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, found that children affected by the storm were more likely to exhibit reduced academic performance, to lose access to health care and to develop clinical mental health problems and behavioral disorders than other children.

“We think [disasters and displacement] have an enormous impact on kids,” Abramson says.

Congress has heeded warnings from researchers like Abramson and Peek, creating a National Commission on Children and Disasters that first met in October 2008. During an August 2009 Senate hearing, the commission chair, Mark Shriver, an official with Save the Children, told policymakers, “We’ve spent more time, energy and money on pets than we have on kids.”

And the panel isn’t even set to make policy recommendations until late 2010. (The commission did share some initial recommendations in a October 2009 draft report for the president and Congress.)

I won a third-place award for science reporting from the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for this cover story.