The new all-electric Nissan Leaf. (Photo: Josh Cassidy)

This week, California officials are voting on the toughest new regulations in the country to promote cleaner cars. If passed, by 2025, 15% of new cars and trucks sold in the state would have to be powered by batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or other technology that produces little or no air pollution.

These kind of tough mandates have been tried before and they failed. But officials are confident that era of electric vehicle as finally arrived in California. That’s becoming the case in the Bay Area, which has been a strong market for advanced cars since the first Prius came out a decade ago.

“This is a Prius V,” says Joe Testa at Downtown Toyota in Oakland, showing one of several new Prius models that Toyota is releasing this year. “It’s the longer, wagon style, so it has a little more room.” Testa says there’s already a waiting list for the new Prius Plug-in, which comes out in March.

Toyota came out with hybrids ahead of other carmakers, maybe because the company anticipated changes in the market. Or, as some believe, it was due to a California state agency.

“We have been at the forefront of encouraging, and some would people would say forcing, new technologies. The Prius hybrid electric vehicle is an example of that,” says Tom Cackette. Chief Deputy Director of the California Air Resources Board.

California’s Clean Car History

Cackette says to see California’s legacy of shaping national car policy, you have to go back to 1975. The state had a growing smog problem, so the air board required cars to have catalytic converters. The federal government followed. California then tightened air pollution rules for cars. And tightened them again. “And almost in every case, the federal government would follow two, three, four, five years later.”

Today, new cars emit 99 percent less smog than cars did in the 1960s. “It’s probably the most successful environmental program in the world,” says Cackette.

Now, California has a new goal: dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change. Transportation accounts for 40% of the state’s emissions. “The number one strategy to reduce greenhouse gases is these car standards,” he says.

The proposed standards would cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars in half by 2025. “We actually worked very closely under the federal government under the Obama Administration and we’ve jointly developed the standards. So they won’t just apply in California. But they’ll apply nationwide.”

Meeting these tougher standards will raise car prices by about $1900, but Cackette says those costs would be offset by fuel savings.

Jumpstarting Electric Car Sales

On top of that, California is taking an even bolder step, requiring automakers to sell increasing numbers of clean cars in the state. By 2025, they’d have to sell almost a million and half vehicles that run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.

The thing is – California has tried this before. And it didn’t work. “I guess I would call it a little too visionary perhaps,” says Cackette. In 1990, the Air Resources Board mandated that 10 percent of new car sales be “zero emission” cars by 2003.

“Obviously that didn’t happen. The price of gas was cheap in those times. The price of the technologies were high,” he says. The air board loosened the rules to include hybrid cars and cleaner gasoline engines, which he says drove carmakers to develop them faster.

Now, Cackette believes that technology has come of age. Nissan is selling the all-electric Leaf and Chevy is selling the Volt, a plug-in hybrid. And there’s another big difference.

Automakers Onboard

“The car manufacturers were adamantly opposed to the concept of government telling them they needed to build a new type of technology. That’s changed.”

“You are seeing more agreement between automakers and California and the federal government,” agrees Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington DC.

“Automakers have invested billions of dollars in these technologies. And so in some ways we have similar interests. Our interest in recouping our investment is now aligned with the societal imperative to get more of these vehicles on the road,” she says.

Bergquist says meeting the mandate calling for carmakers to sell a certain number of clean vehicles will ultimately depend on consumers. “There’s still a concern about what the consumer acceptance of these technologies is going to be and that can make a mandate very scary.”

Groups Push for Tougher Rules

“We think California could be bolder,” says Don Anair is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group that supports even stronger clean car rules.

“We need that technology to advance for the technology cost to come down and make these vehicles accessible to more and more consumers. By having a more aggressive standard, that gives more certainty to investors that California is committed.” Anair wants to see tougher standards sooner rather than later, since it takes 15 years on average for the entire fleet of cars on the road to turn over.

If the new rules are successful, electric cars could be adopted at a much faster pace. Tom Cackette of the Air Resources Board says they’re doing all they can to encourage consumers to buy them, including funding a popular rebate program and working with companies to build an electric car charging infrastructure.

“Right now, you’ve got to sort of have a jumpstart to this whole process and in the absence of a jumpstart, there’s a chance that it will fail,” he says.

A projection of how zero emissions vehicles like electric cars will be 87% of all cars on the road in California by 2025. Source: California Air Resources Board.

Right on the heels of California Wine Month and the beginning of grape harvest, comes Ken Burns latest documentary: Prohibition. The six hour series, which airs on PBS stations October 2nd, takes us back to an infamous thirteen year time period in our nation’s history when the commercial production and sale of alcohol was banned. For those not glued to the prohibition era TV series Boardwalk Empire, the 18th Amendment was passed in 1920 at the urging of the temperance movement.

Prohibition agents. Photo: Library of Congress

California’s wine industry, which had recently rebounded from a major pest infestation and was poised for great things, was devastated by Prohibition. Vineyards were ripped up and a majority of the more than six hundred wineries were shuttered. The few that remained open did so by producing wine for religious purposes. Beaulieu Vineyard was one of them. Founder Georges de Latour was a Catholic and a friend of the archbishop of San Francisco. Latour cut a deal to sell wine to all the priests in the diocese.

Prohibition was supposed to curb alcohol consumption, but instead the party went underground, giving rise to a thriving criminal economy run by bootleggers and gangsters. Port cities, like San Francisco, managed to stay pretty wet during those dry years, thanks to illegal liquor brought ashore in the dead of night, carried on ships from Canada. The roaring twenties saw the rise of a new breed of young women, known as "flappers," while beer, wine and spirits—some bootlegged, some made in basement stills flowed in hundreds of backroom speakeasies.

Flappers in the prohibition era. Photo: ©Scherl / Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / The Image Works

After years of lawlessness, the 18th Amendment was eventually repealed. You can still visit remnants of the prohibition era throughout the Bay Area. Some former San Francisco speakeasies still remain and dozens of wineries survived Prohibition.

Called “Ghost Wineries” some have become homes, others used as barns or shopping complexes in Yountville and St. Helena. A handful of wineries have been restored and now have a second life including Freemark Abbey, Far Niente, Hall Wines and Storybook Mountain Vineyards in Calistoga.

Freemark Abbey 1898. Photo courtesy of Freemark Abbey

We’ve come along way since the dry days of Prohibition, in just seventy five years the state’s award winning wine industry has built itself up to be a world leader with more than 3,300 bonded wineries. But a new threat looms — this one from mother nature. Research shows that California's prime wine producing areas could shrink dramatically over the next three decades from climate change.

Find out much more about the past and future of California wines at California Academy of Sciences Prohibition NightLife this Thursday evening. You can purchase tickets online for the event or buy them at the door. QUEST will be screening the segment on wine and climate change featured below and serving up wines for warmer temps. Also, Cal Academy will be leading mixology classes and screening a sneak peak of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary on Prohibition. Can you think of a better way to commemorate the end of the 18th Amendment than with a cocktail party and wine tasting?

This post was originally published on KQED's Bay Area Bites.

"Napa Wineries Face Global Warming"

California Academy of Sciences
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This post was originally published on KQED's Bay Area Bites.

 Jim Wolpert’s Alternative Varietals - References ( pdf ) Jim Wolpert’s Alternative Varietals - References

Climate change and invasive species threaten Lake Tahoe just as restoration funding dwindles. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

Over the last 15 years, more than a billion dollars has been spent to protect Lake Tahoe's clear waters from runoff and erosion. Now, new threats to lake's clarity are emerging, just as restoration funding is drying up.

Researchers from UC Davis are hot on the trail of one of those threats. On a recent late summer morning, Katie Webb and a team from UC Davis's Tahoe Environmental Research Center went looking for it on a boat near South Lake Tahoe.

"So what we're looking for is a metal clam corral," Webb says, pulling on her scuba gear. The "clam corral" is a wire basket that holds clams living on the lake bottom. Webb swims down to it and attaches a rope, so the team can pull it on board.

The clams inside are Asian clams, an invasive species. They were not a welcome visitor when they were discovered in Lake Tahoe in 2002. Webb and her team are monitoring these corralled clams to see how fast the population is growing.

"So you can see this individual is number 11," she says, pointing to a tiny number super-glued on its shell. They use the numbers to track individuals over time. "We can see how much they've grown since we checked them in February and it should be a lot. They grow a lot in the summertime," Webb says.

"What they do is somewhat disturbing," says Geoff Schladow, director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center. Asian clams filter massive amounts of lake water and that's where the problem starts.

"Of everything they filter, they consume about 10 percent of it and 90 percent they excrete. So their excretions are like these huge nutrient bombs," Schladow says.

UC Davis researcher Katie Webb holds an Asian clam from their population study. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

With thousands of clams per square meter in some parts of the lake, their "nutrient bombs" help create algae blooms.

"So you have this bright green, stringy algae, sort of clinging to the bottom, a few tens of yards from the beach. People would be astounded to see this cause it looks like any place but Tahoe," he says.

In the face of this invasion, a team from UC Davis has been experimenting with rubber mats that suffocate Asian clams on the lake bottom. So far, the treatment looks promising.

Tahoe Basin Building Boom

Keeping the lake blue – and not green – has been a rallying cry for both environmental groups and Tahoe's tourism industry. Forty years ago, scientists could see 100 feet into the lake. Today, the clarity has decreased significantly to 64 feet.

"We're essentially like a bowl and what happens on the land affects the water," says Julie Regan of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. The agency oversees development on both the California and Nevada sides.

"What happened on the land in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that we had a lot of development – rampant overdevelopment," she says. Tahoe hosted 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley. Casinos went up. Building was booming. And soon, the region had a runoff problem.

"It's driveways. It's houses. What you cover on the land then interferes with the soils ability to filter runoff. That's what's causing clarity loss," says Regan.

Over the past 15 years, local agencies have tried to stop this decline with $1.5 billion of federal, state and local money. They've preserved open space and built projects to control erosion and filter runoff.

"In 2008 we got the news from the scientific community that we had stopped the slide and decline of lake clarity. That was great news," says Regan.

Scientists See Climate Change Impacts

In 2010, however, researchers at UC Davis found the second worst clarity level ever recorded. Geoff Schladow says runoff isn't the only culprit.

"What we've had just in the last few years is this explosion, this large increase in algae and they seem to be concentrated right near the surface," says Schladow.

These algae are invisible to the eye, but they're the right size to make the water look cloudier. Normally, they're competing with large algae near the surface. But Schladow says that's changing. Algae are heavier than water, so they gradually sink.

"The algae in the past tended to be mixed by the wind every few days. So if you're a large algae and you sank down 50 or 100 feet, you could be brought up again into the light by mixing."

Recently, the lake hasn't been mixing as much. The reason, Schladow thinks, is that the surface waters of the lake have gotten warmer with climate change. Warmer water is lighter than the cold, dense water at the bottom of the lake. So it's little bit like oil and water. The layers of the lake are more resistant to mixing.

"Now when we have less mixing, the large algae sink out. All we're left with are the small ones. And so their numbers are going up," says Schladow.

After decades of conservation work to reduce runoff, a lot of people are disappointed to see climate change posing a new threat to Lake Tahoe's clarity.

Schladow thinks it's not hopeless. "It's a call to redouble what we're doing, not to give up and walk away. It's now needed not just to restore clarity but to ward off what may be some pretty uncomfortable and disturbing features of climate change."

Restoration Funds Running Out

After an unprecedented influx of restoration funding, resources are now running low. Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act of 2011 in Congress to authorize more, but has said she's not optimistic about getting it passed.

"We know the funding picture could potentially be bleak, so we're looking to any strategy that we can to keep this momentum going in terms of restoration," says Julie Regan of TRPA.

On top of that, Nevada is threatening to end its forty-year partnership with California by pulling out of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, unless concessions are made about its voting power on new development. Regan says it's just one more challenge that will make the next few years a critical time for Lake Tahoe's future.

How can California cattle ranches pull carbon out of the atmosphere? Photo courtesy of Becca Ryals.

What if we could pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it underground? Well, plants do this every day—through photosynthesis. Plants take CO2 from the air and incorporate it into their tissues. When their leaves drop to the ground, or bits of their roots slough off, or they die and decompose, the carbon from the plants’ tissues goes into the soil. Researchers from UC Berkeley are working with cattle ranchers in Marin County to figure out how to increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil. I spoke to Berkeley grad student Becca Ryals to learn more about the Marin Carbon Project.

Becca and other students in her advisor Whendee Silver’s lab, in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at Berkeley, had been studying the effects of climate change on the carbon in soil. They were taking soil samples from California’s rangelands to see how much carbon is stored—or sequestered—in the soil, and why carbon storage varies so much from place to place. The cattle ranchers, on whose land the researchers were working, wanted to know how their land management practices could increase carbon sequestration in their soils. The ranchers’ questions were the catalyst for the next step in Becca and her colleagues’ research.

They did an experiment to see whether adding compost affects the amount of carbon stored in the soil. They set up a study in 2008 in two places—Nicasio Ranch, in Marin county, and the Sierra Foothill Research and Extension Center in the Sierra Valley. At each site, in some areas they added a half-inch thick layer of commercially available compost, made from yard waste and food scraps, to the soil. In other areas, they left the soil alone.

Compost is added to the soil at a cattle ranch, part of the Marin Carbon Project. Photo courtesy of Becca Ryals.

When they returned to the plots a few months later, they found that the plots with compost had a 50-70% increase in grass production. The compost had fertilized the grass and increased its growth. The ranchers were happy to see the increase in grass production—there was more forage for their cattle.

The boxed areas were treated with a ½ inch layer of compost; the grass there grew thicker for 3 years after the compost was added. Photo courtesy of Becca Ryals.

Becca and her colleagues expected that after a year, the effect of the compost would have worn off. They were wrong. When they went back the next year, the grass production was still up 50-70%. They went back three years after the compost was added, and they could still see its effects—grass production was still up by 50-70%. The compost acted as a slow-release fertilizer. They’re continuing to monitor the plots: for how long will the compost added in 2008 continue to benefit the grass, the soil, and the ranchers?

Becca and her colleagues took multiple soil samples from the different plots, and found that in the compost-treated plots the amount of carbon in the soil had increased by about 20%. This is a huge increase in the world of soil carbon. Some of this carbon comes directly from the compost, and some is there because of the increase in grass production—grass dies and the carbon from its tissues enters the soil.

Marcia DeLonge, a post-doc in Becca’s lab, is looking at whether the type of compost matters. She’s comparing the effects of yard waste/food scrap compost and compost made from cow manure—which is readily available at her field sites, three dairies in Marin County. Their work has become well known to local ranchers, and they received offers from so many ranchers to do the study on their land that they had difficulty choosing their field sites.

The Marin Carbon Project is starting to talk with ranchers and local agencies about a carbon market—using the researchers’ findings, they can monitor the amount of carbon in the soil, and ranchers can be rewarded for the carbon sequestered on their property.

Becca, Whendee, and her lab-mates share their research findings with ranchers through presentations at public venues. The ranchers ask them questions, and the researchers figure out how they can answer them, by designing new studies and asking more questions.

Becca enjoys the science: “There are interesting, challenging questions,” she says. But “I really like working with the ranchers and seeing the research findings applied to everyday land management decisions.”

Her work also gives her an appreciation for local food. “When I see Point Reyes Blue Cheese,” Becca says, “I know that rancher. I saw those soils.”

Lake Tahoe may hold mysteries. Photo: Santappa.

A few weeks ago, scuba divers in Lake Tahoe found the body of a man who had drowned in the lake 17 years ago. Still in its wetsuit, the body was very well preserved. Because the water in this high alpine lake is so cold, decomposition is very slow. This fact has spawned rumors, the most famous of which involves Jacques Cousteau and still makes me shudder, years after I first heard it. Apparently, years ago, Cousteau went scuba diving in Lake Tahoe. He emerged from the water shaken, but not with cold. He said, “The world is not ready for what I have seen.”

What did Cousteau see? Maybe the bodies of unlucky gamblers who crossed the Mafia in 1950s Reno. Or maybe it was Tahoe Tessie, the Loch Ness likeness of the lake. But, in its coverage of the recent discovery, the LA Times said that Cousteau never actually visited Lake Tahoe. The Cousteau story may be a myth, but it is no less chilling, because the physical conditions of the lake are such that bodies could still be drifting beneath the surface.

At 1645 feet (depending on the level of water in the basin), Lake Tahoe is the second deepest lake in the US. (Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest in the country. The world record goes to Russia’s Lake Baikal, which is some 5,369 feet deep.) Lake Tahoe is located between two fault zones, and it formed through a tectonic combo of uplift and subsidence. The Sierra Nevada mountains rose up on the west and the Carson Range rose up on the east. The rock underneath the lake sank down to form a flat-bottomed basin called a graben. The word is German for “grave” and refers to the lake’s low-lying nature—and perhaps also to whatever Cousteau purportedly saw underwater.

Lake Tahoe is cold. The temperature at the surface of the lake varies, from a low of about 40 degrees in February or March to a high of about 75 degrees towards the end of the summer. Below the surface, the temperature is a chilly 39 degrees. In the winter, when the surface and the deep waters are relatively close in temperature, the wind blowing across the surface of the lake mixes the water. This brings oxygen from the surface layer down to the depths, and nutrients from the depths up to the surface.

In 2010, the mixing occurred from the surface down to about 550 feet, because the surface of the lake remained relatively warm throughout the winter. In previous years, mixing has occurred down to about 1500 feet. Since the 1970s, the surface layer of the lake has gotten warmer in the summer, and it retains that heat throughout the winter. Just like in the ocean, stratification—a warm surface layer that is distinct from the cold bottom layer—means it is hard to get the surface and deep waters to mix.

Lake Tahoe is famous for its clear waters. But, as UC Davis’s recently released Tahoe: State of the Lake Report explains, the lake is not as clear as it used to be. In the 1960s, you could see down to a depth of about 100 feet, but now you can see down to only about 70 feet. The lake has become cloudier because nutrients enter the lake via 63 rivers and streams, and those nutrients fuel the growth of algae. And, global warming plays a role: the warm surface of the lake gives a particular species of microalgae a competitive advantage, and the tiny bodies of the microalgae cloud the water.

The clarity of the lake, and its invasive species, will be on the agenda today at the Lake Tahoe Environmental Summit. Nevada Senator Harry Reid and California Senator Dianne Feinstein will both be at the Homewood Resort, discussing Lake Tahoe’s economic and ecological challenges.

Climate change could dramatically affect the microclimates that have made California wine country so successful.

You've probably heard of the wines that made Napa and Sonoma famous, like Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. But what about Negroamaro or Nero d'Avola?

They're wine grapes that are well-adapted to hotter climates – the kind of conditions that California may be facing as the climate continues to warm. But for wineries that have staked their reputations on certain wines, adapting to climate change could be a tough sell.

Talk to any wine lover in California and they'll tell you how lucky they are to live in such rich wine-producing region. Take the recent meeting of the San Francisco Wine Lovers Group at Toast wine bar in Oakland, where the favorites are California Pinot Noir, Russian River Zinfandel, and Napa Cabernet.

In fact, the type of grape – or varietal – is how most of us think about wine.

"That's the big problem," says Andy Walker, a grape breeder in Viticulture and Enology at the University of California-Davis. "We've spent the last 100 years emphasizing varieties and we've really marketed those names very effectively."

Walker is strolling through UC Davis's test vineyard, where hundreds of different wine grapes from around the world are grown. The vast majority are unknown to consumers, because most wineries focus on only a handful of grapes. "Chardonnay, cabernet, merlot, pinot noir – those would make up probably a large percentage," he says.

Those are all French varieties, mostly suited for cool climates. California is warm by comparison and thanks to climate change, it's expected to get a lot warmer. Extreme heat can be the enemy of good wine. "It destroys acidity primarily and it changes color and aromatics," says Walker.

According to a recent study from Stanford University, about two degrees of warming could reduce California's premium wine-growing land by 30 to 50 percent. That could happen as soon as 2040. Water supply is also expected to be an issue.

"I think the interesting thing for me as a breeder is to take advantage of this and say, OK, here's a chance now to change thought and let's actually readapt varieties to California," he says.

Andy Walker walks through UC Davis's test vineyard.

But in many circles, grape breeding is a dirty term, according to Walker.

"Viticulture is the most backward form of horticulture that exists. We use these varieties that haven't been changed for decades, for millennia in some cases. And it really doesn't make any sense."

The problem starts in today's vineyards. If you look at rows of Pinot Noir vines, you aren't just looking at the original varietal. You're looking at clones. That's because vines are grown from a branch that's taken off an existing plant.

"Pinot noir is being propagated year after year after year. This essentially means that grapes have not been having sex very much," says Sean Myles , a geneticist at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College.

He says breeding is key for other crops, since farmers need seeds to plant every year. Wine grapes miss this opportunity to develop adaptability and disease resistance, since vines don't grow from seeds

"That means that we're not allowing the genetic material to be shuffled anymore. That genetic material is now standing still in time. And while the pathogens are evolving, the pinot noir is not," says Myles.

Andy Walker says there's plenty of genetic diversity out there for breeding, if you wanted to make today's varieties more heat tolerant or drought resistant. But there's a very big problem. Once your breed your pinot noir with something else, you can't call it pinot noir anymore.

"The last decision that hardest. Can we market this variety? We know it produces exceptional wine. We know the quality is better. But the next step is can we actually market it," says Walker.

That's a deal breaker for many vineyards, who think consumers won't buy varieties they don't recognize. Walker says looking ahead to climate change, there are already varieties out there today from Italy and Spain that would do well in a warmer California. "We could produce Barbera instead, or Negroamaro or Nero d'Avola from southern Italy and we'd be far better ahead."

These lush reds are popular in Italy but not so well known to Californians. Walker says it'll come down to marketing. "I don't think it's the consumer that's gonna make the shift. They have to be directed."

"I think it's really a pull from consumers," says Nick Dokoozlian, a Vice President at E & J Gallo Winery, the largest family-owned winery in the US. "In most cases, we're responding to consumer demand for a cultivar."

Dokoozlian says Gallo has been testing new wine varieties throughout its vineyards and has found some promising grapes. "The problem is we can't necessarily sell those varieties. Consumers aren't aware of them. The marketing aspect of climate change and the adaptation to climate change, really, the hurdles on the marketing side are much, much more significant."

Since vineyards can last up to 30 years, he says switching varieties is a major financial gamble. "The wine business is an extremely capital intensive business. The financial risk of planting the wrong variety in the wrong place is pretty significant."

Still, given the temperature and water supply changes projected for California, Dokoozlian sees the market shifting eventually. "I'm looking forward to having world-class California Nero d'Avola soon."

The Golden Gate Bridge, in its summer cloak of fog. Photo: kqedquest.

Another foggy morning. Why is the Bay Area so foggy in summer? To answer that question, look west—at the Pacific Ocean.

If you’ve ever tried to swim at the beach in Northern California, your chattering teeth will tell you that the water is cold. This cold water makes fog form. The cold water cools down the air above it, and cool air can’t hold as much moisture as warm air. The moisture condenses into fog.

The water along the coast of California is cold for a couple of reasons. First, the California Current brings cold water from Alaska southward along the coast. And second, cold water from the deep ocean comes up to the surface through a process called upwelling. From March through September, wind blows southward along the coast. This wind, combined with the rotation of the earth, creates surface currents that move water from the coast out into the ocean. Something has to fill in the space that was left behind when the surface waters moved out to sea. So water from the deep ocean is sucked to the surface.

The water from the deep ocean is full of nutrients. Upwelling is super important for ocean dwelling creatures—the nutrients in the water feed the phytoplankton and move on up the food web. The lush kelp forests along the California coast exist because of upwelling. And the water from the deep ocean is really cold, which makes fog form over the areas of upwelling.

The fog rolls in from the ocean onto land in the morning as the rising sun heats up the land. Warm air rises, and something has to fill its place—the foggy air that’s hanging out above the ocean.

So to summarize, summer winds create upwelling, fog forms over the cold water, summer sun heats the air above the land and makes it rise, and the fog gets sucked in.

However, the amount of fog has declined by 33% over the past 60 years. UC Berkeley professor Todd Dawson talks about this in QUEST’s Science on the SPOT: Science of Fog. Fog is declining in part because upwelling along the coast has weakened, thanks to global warming.

Warmer air temperatures are heating the surface layer of the ocean. As the surface layer gets warmer and thicker, it becomes harder for the cold deep water to mix with the warm surface layer. This weakens the upwelling. Weak upwelling means less fog is produced.

Someone (though maybe not Mark Twain) once said that the coldest winter they ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. That San Francisco summer was cold because of the fog. Which brings to mind another (potential) Twain quote: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” San Francisco is getting less and less foggy, thanks to global warming, and so far we aren’t really doing anything about it.

Grasses blow in the wind near Toms Point in Marin County, on the east side of Tomales Bay. Most of the grasses in the photo are exotic. Photo: Brody Sandel.

Full disclosure here: Brody, Emily and I were all grad students together in the same lab at UC Berkeley. So when Emily told me she had a new paper, I was curious to see what it was all about. It turns out their study is really cool. It looks at the interaction of two major world-changers: invasive species and climate change. Their paper talks about exotic species—species that are not native to a particular habitat but are not necessarily detrimental, and noxious weeds—species that are somehow disruptive, because they outcompete native species or alter the habitat. Noxious weeds are what we would also call invasive plants.

Brody and Emily’s study draws on existing datasets on current plant distribution across the state, plant traits, and current and future climate. They mapped the distribution of all the different species in California grasslands, using data from the Jepson Manual (the bible of California plant life), and a few other sources, to fill out an 800-cell grid of the state. They looked at the traits of the species—including how tall the plants are, whether they are annual or perennial, how much of their leaf mass comes from nitrogen, and the size of their seeds—and examined how the traits relate to the climate where the plants live today. Especially important was the proportion of exotic species in each of the grid cells. Then they turned up the temperature. They predicted the proportion of exotic species in each grid under climate change scenarios: higher average temperatures and less available water.

They found that as the temperature increases and water availability decreases, the proportion of exotic species increases. And, the proportion of noxious weeds increases. Higher temperatures favor traits that tend to be possessed by exotic species, such as tall plants with big leaves and annual lifestyles. These are the same traits that made the plants successful invaders in the first place. For example, a tall plant extends above a short plant, stealing its light. But burly exotic plants like Holcus lanatus outcompete native species for light. And generally, plants with big seeds grow to be hearty seedlings, which are better competitors than scrappy little seedlings grown from modest sized seeds. This study predicts that noxious weeds will become even more prevalent, because they have traits that will serve them well under the conditions of climate change. The changing climate acts as a filter, straining out the native species.

The noxious weed Holcus lanatus, a.k.a. “The Hulk,” so named because it towers above native grasses and outcompetes them for light. Photo courtesy of Brody Sandel.

Years ago, I asked a grad student friend why she studied grasslands. I just couldn’t understand the appeal of a field of grass—it seemed boring. My friend Tasha explained that she just loved the way grasses look when they blow in the wind. A few weeks later, I went with her to her field site near Point Reyes, and I immediately understood the aesthetic appeal of grasslands. If you’re picturing a green manicured lawn with short little blades of grass, toss that idea right now. Instead, think of taller grasses, shin height or higher, in all shades of green, brown, gold and even purple. Think of the colors shifting as the wind blows. It is really a beautiful sight. California’s grasslands are expected to expand as the climate changes. But the inhabitants of these grasslands won’t be the grasses that were there 100 or 200 years ago. Instead, there will be a bunch of weeds blowing in the wind.

To learn more about the interplay between California’s native plants and exotic species, check out the California Native Plant Society, the California Invasive Plant Council, or take a workshop with the Jepson Herbarium at UC Berkeley.

The team of international scientists published a grave assessment of current threats and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life. If the current trajectory of damage continues, the world's ocean is at high risk of entering an unprecedented phase of extinction of marine species.
The greatest threat the group concluded was climate change leading to ocean acidification.

Ocean acidification is a direct result of the absorption of carbon dioxide by the ocean. This threatens all marine animals and plants that secrete calcium carbonate as part of their structure. Ocean acidification can prevent marine animals, from snails to plankton to corals, from building their protective shells.

Historically and before the presence of humans, three factors have been present in every mass extinction event: low oxygen levels (hypoxia) and the absence of oxygen (anoxia) causing ocean dead zones; ocean warming; and acean acidification. Thanks to modern technology, we have accelerated and exacerbated the conditions leading to the historical marine extinctions. Already one quarter of the world’s coral reefs have vanished and another one third are endangered. Ninety percent of many some of the ocean’s great fish have vanished. Species like sharks contribute to the health of the ocean yet are being systematically and unsustainably fished.

These climate and marine experts found strong evidence that the effects of the three factors, coupled with other human induced impacts such as overfishing and nutrient runoff from farming have already caused a dramatic decline in ocean health.

The last great extinction event occurred 55 million years ago, where over half of all deep sea species became extinct. It has been determined that the rate of carbon absorption in the ocean is already greater than the conditions leading to that event.

It was concluded that these impacts are synergistic and the rate of degeneration is far faster than previously predicted. The report urges strong and rapid action by governments to reduce carbon emissions such as those urged by the last IPCC report, better manage our fisheries – especially those of the high seas, and increase marine reserves to serve as pockets of resilience.

The conclusions are serious indeed yet it also offers solutions, many of which we can deal with in our daily lives. As citizens, we can work for ocean health by driving less, eating only sustainable seafoods, minimizing run off from detergents and fertilizers and supporting marine protection.

The ocean and ocean life are too important to lose through negligence or ignorance.
As one of the co-authors of the event Dr. Dan Laffoley stated, “The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now, today and urgent.”

The ocean is our planet’s heartbeat, and the future heartbeat for billions of humans. Lets keep it beating.

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San Francisco's Pier 39 is home to only a few sea lions this summer.

I spent Saturday sightseeing in San Francisco with a friend visiting from out of town, and I thought I’d check in on the sea lions at Pier 39. Just a few years ago, there were about 1600 of them, slithering on and off the wooden docks, basking in the sun, and barking at one another. Then in 2009, most of them swam away, as QUEST blogger Amy Gotliffe explained. The sea lions’ favorite food, herring, was in short supply, so they went to Oregon to feast on anchovies and salmon. Now the herring are making a comeback—will the sea lions return too?

This weekend the floating wooden palates at Pier 39 were mostly bare; there were perhaps a dozen sea lions. We would expect the sea lion numbers to be low this time of year, herring or no herring. In the summer, sea lions travel down south (the Channel Islands, San Diego, Baja) to breed. But there were still fewer sea lions at Pier 39 than in summers past.

Sea lions will eat a lot of different prey items: octopus, squid, small sharks. But their bread and butter is herring, which have been hard to find in recent years. The herring fishery is the only fishery still in operation in San Francisco Bay, and it closed during the 2009/2010 season (December through April), because there were so few fish. This year, the herring fishery opened again, but with a lower quota than in the past, to allow the fish to recover.

There are a few hypotheses about why the herring numbers dipped so low in 2009. First, herring lay their eggs in the brackish waters of the estuaries around San Francisco Bay. Each female fish can lay up to 50,000 eggs, which are a prized commodity in Japan. However, the years leading up to 2009 were drought years, so the estuaries were saltier than usual. That may have affected the herrings’ spawning success. Second, the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill may have affected herring health. Researchers found oil-soaked embryos, which were deformed. Third, herring declines may be the result of climate change. As surface waters get warmer, there is less mixing with cold, nutrient-rich water from the bottom of the ocean. There are also big patches of the ocean that have very little oxygen. These hypoxic zones are deadly to their inhabitants, and are affecting many marine species.

However, the herring appear to be making a comeback, possibly because the past few years have been wet and the estuaries are sufficiently fresh, or because the spilled oil has been flushed from the Bay. Time will tell whether the sea lions follow their food and return to Pier 39. I hope they come back—along with the twists and turns of Lombard Street and the Golden Gate Bridge, the Embarcadero’s sea lions are one of my favorite San Francisco treasures to show off to visiting friends.

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