Research Report: National Climate Change 2012

Barbara Rose Johnston is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Political Ecology and occasional lecturer at UCSC. Barbara is an environmental anthropologist who studies the relationships between environmental crisis and human rights. Her current work explores the community dynamics of water resource management; and, the human environmental impacts of the United States Nuclear Weapons Testing Program as conducted in the Marshall Islands.

Gary Lagerloef began his career in oceanography as an undergraduate and obtained his Bachelors Degree from Florida Institute of Technology (1971). In the years 1972-1975, he served in the U.S. Coast Guard where he taught marine science at the Coast Guard Academy while earning a Masters Degree in Oceanography at the University of Connecticut. He spent the next nine years working for NOAA, about half that time as a seagoing officer on research ships in the Pacific and half at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, WA where he met his wife, Marcia. Dr. Lagerloef completed a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography at the University of Washington in 1984 and later worked in private sector marine science. From 1988-1990, he served as Physical Oceanography Program Manager at NASA in Washington DC in the ocean science remote sensing program. In 1995, he co-founded Earth and Space Research, a non-profit scientific research institute in Seattle where he has developed several research projects devoted to studies of the upper ocean dynamics and climate variability using satellites. In December 2003, Dr. Lagerloef was appointed by NASA to lead the Aquarius/SAC-D satellite mission as Principal Investigator (launch date in 2009). He played a major role in gaining approval for this program, which will study the interactions between the ocean circulation, global water cycle and climate by measuring ocean salinity from space. The Aquarius mission is being developed in an international partnership with Argentina's space agency, Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales, and is the first NASA satellite mission dedicated to measuring ocean salinity.

L. Hunter Lovins is President of Natural Capitalism Solutions, based in Longmont, Colorado. She is Chief Insurgent of the Madrone Project with offices in Berkeley CA, and consults for scores of industries and governments worldwide, including large and small companies such as the International Finance Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, Interface, Clif Bar, Wal-Mart and the government of Afghanistan. Named Millennium TIME Magazine Hero of the Planet in 2000, Newsweek Magazine called her the “Green Business Icon.” She also plays polocrosse, is a team roper and barrel racer, and is member of the Boulder County Mounted Search and Rescue Team.

Michael MacCracken has been Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute in Washington DC since 2002; he was also elected to its Board of Directors in 2006. Both of these positions are held on a volunteer basis. Dr. MacCracken received his B.S. in Engineering degree from Princeton University in 1964 and his Ph.D. degree in Applied Science from the University of California Davis/Livermore in 1968. His dissertation used a 2-D climate model to evaluate the plausibility of several hypotheses of the causes of ice ages. Following his graduate work, he joined the Physics Department of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as an atmospheric physicist. His research in the ensuing 25 years included numerical modeling of various causes of climate change (including study of the potential climatic effects of greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols, land-cover change, and nuclear war) and of factors affecting air quality (including photochemical pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area and sulfate air pollution in the northeastern United States). At LLNL, he also served as division leader for atmospheric and geophysical sciences from 1987-1993 and as deputy division leader from 1974-1987. From 1993-2002, Dr. MacCracken was on assignment as senior global change scientist to the interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in Washington D.C., also serving as its first executive director from 1993-1997. From 1997-2001, he served as executive director of the USGCRP's National Assessment Coordination Office, which coordinated the efforts of 20 regional assessment teams, 5 sectoral teams, and the National Assessment Synthesis Team (which was constituted as a federal advisory committee) that prepared the national climate impacts assessment report that was forwarded to the President and on to the Congress in late 2000. During this period with the Office of the USGCRP, Dr. MacCracken also coordinated the official U.S. Government reviews of several of the assessment reports prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he was a co-author/contributing author for various chapters in the IPCC assessment reports. When Dr. MacCracken's assignment with the Office of the USGCRP concluded on September 30, 2002, he simultaneously retired from LLNL. In addition to his activities with the Climate Institute, he served on the integration team for the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment from 2002-2004. Dr. MacCracken is also near completing a 4-year term (2003-2007) as president of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS), members of which are the national academies of science or their equivalent in about 50 nations. As president of IAMAS, Dr. MacCracken also serves on the executive committees of International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) and the Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research (SCOR). From 2004 to 2005, he served on a panel of the Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment that prepared a report on what is known about the likelihood and consequences of an asteroid or comet impact, and from 2004-2007 on a scientific expert group convened by Sigma Xi and the UN Foundation at the request of the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development to suggest the best measures for mitigating and adapting to global climate change. Dr. MacCracken is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a member of the American Meteorological Society, the Oceanography Society, and the American Geophysical Union, among other organizations. His affidavit relating global climate change and impacts on particular regions was recently cited favorably by Justice Stevens in his opinion in the recent decision in Massachusetts et al. versus EPA.

Dan Mensher is a clinical professor of law and staff attorney at the Pacific Environmental Advocacy Center (PEAC). His work focuses on water quality and hazardous waste remediation. Dan graduated from Lewis & Clark Law School, and then clerked for the Oregon Court of Appeals. Before law school, he received his M.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied issues of water quality, resource management, and subsistence economies in Alaska and Africa.

Richard H. Moss is a Senior Staff Scientist with the PNNL Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland and Visiting Senior Research Scientist at Maryland's Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center. His research interests include development and use of scenarios, characterization and communication of uncertainty, and adaptation and vulnerability to climate change. He chairs the US National Academy of Science's standing committee on the "human dimensions" of global environmental change and serves on the editorial board of Climatic Change. Moss is active in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and currently serves as a review editor for the Fifth Assessment Report. Previously Moss served as Director of the Office of the US Global Change Research Program/Climate Change Science Program (2000-06), Head of Technical Support Unit for the IPCC impacts, adaptation, and mitigation working group (1993-99), and on the faculty of Princeton University (1989-91). During a business leave of absence from 2006-2009, he served as Vice President/Managing Director for Climate Change at WWF and Senior Director for Energy and Climate at the U.N. Foundation. Moss has been a lead author or editor of a number of assessments, reports, and research papers. He led preparation of the US government's 10-year climate change research plan (2003) for which he was awarded DOE's "Distinguished Associate" award. He was Co-Chair of the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impacts and Climate Assessment (2002-2011). He was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2006 and a fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program in 2001. He received an M.P.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University (Public and International Affairs) and his B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, MN.

Melissa Powers is an Associate Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School. She teaches energy law, climate change law, the Clean Air Act, torts, and administrative law. Her research interests include energy law (with a specific focus on laws designed to promote renewable energy), domestic policies aimed at mitigating climate change, and U.S. pollution control laws. She is also interested in comparative law study in each of these areas. Melissa Powers is a co-chair of the Research Committee of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law, an international organization dedicated to increasing collaboration between environmental law scholars around the globe and in expanding the capacity of environmental law teaching and research in developing countries. Melissa has also taught as a visiting professor at several schools, including the University of Trento, Italy, in 2008 and 2011, the University of Navarra, Spain, in 2011, and the University of Maine School of Law in 2007. Melissa began her legal career as an attorney at public interest environmental law firms doing pollution control litigation. From 2003-2008, Melissa was a Clinical Professor at the Pacific Environmental Advocacy Center (PEAC), the environmental law clinic at Lewis & Clark.

My career in academics is increasingly providing me with the platform I seek to make a significant difference in mitigating human abuse of the natural world. One obvious academic opportunity is personal contact with students. But more importantly I am increasingly able to help inform colleagues, aides to policy makers, and the general public about the crises in biological conservation. As I said in the introduction to a scientific symposium I recently convened, academics hold privileged positions with much respect, but we must stop pretending to be above the battle since that only abdicates to interest groups our power to shape policies that could help slow habitat degradation. I also argued that we must steer our research to where the problems take us, not just work on what is traditionally valued by the disciplines or those who fund the disciplines. In our society, academics are given the freedom to enhance our understanding of nature. Unfortunately, however, too many scientists seem to keep their insights and understanding within their community (e.g., popular articles are rarely counted toward — and often subtracted from — promotions). Yet, policy makers and the general public need the information obtained by academics to make appropriate decisions. My research involves developing theory, detecting general patterns, and determining possible mechanisms that create the patterns. I let the problem be my guide, and work with theory, mathematical models, field studies or laboratory analyses as needed. Because very little ecological work is done on a large-scale (e.g., roughly 80 percent of ecological studies reported from 1980 to 1986 had study areas roughly the size of a tennis court), little validated theory exists that will help us understand why species occur where they do and are absent in other regions. I derived a graphical model that predicts how environmental factors shape the ranges of birds. To test this model, I used empirical data to generate computer-drawn maps of bird ranges and abundance’s and used these maps to quantify how the vast majority of speciesí range limits are strongly associated with isopleths of various environmental factors. By coupling physiological information from the literature with my biogeographic data, I additionally determined that the location of several birds northern range limits are consistent with the following hypothesis: birds extend their winter ranges only as far north as raising their resting metabolic rates about 2.5 times their basal rates will allow them to maintain necessary body temperature. (Jared Diamond dubbed this the 2.5 Rule [1988, Nature 337:692-693].) Preliminary results from follow-up field and laboratory work over the past four years indicate that temperature greatly influences the shape of many birds winter ranges. Furthermore, an interdisciplinary pilot project with climologists suggest that year-to-year changes in the shapes of these ranges correspond surprisingly well with year-to-year variation in minimum temperature. All of this work suggests that projected global warming will have significant impact on the ranges of birds. Indeed, it most probably will cause a tearing apart of biological communities; those species directly affected by temperature will be able to expand rapidly while those limited by vegetation may not be able to expand until the plants themselves disperse. The consequences of such disruptions of communities could be catastrophic, e.g., the balance between competitors and between predators and prey could lead to drastic reductions in some population

Deborah L. Swackhamer manages WRC's research and educational programs, including overseeing the Water Resources Research Institute grants program for the U.S. Geological Survey and developing research and educational opportunities for the center. She is a professor of environmental chemistry in the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health and holds the Charles M. Denny Chair of Science, Technology, and Public Policy in the University's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Swackhamer also chairs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board and is a member of the International Joint Commission of the U.S. and Canada. She chairs the Editorial Advisory Board of the "Journal of Environmental Monitoring," published by the Royal Chemical Society and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Chemical Society's, “Environmental Science and Technology”. Swackhamer was appointed by Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to serve as the Higher Education Representative to Minnesota's Clean Water Council. She also serves on the National Research Council Committee on U.S.G.S. Water Resources Research for the National Academy of Science. Swackhamer received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Grinnell College and a master's degree and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in water chemistry and limnology and oceanography. She joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 1987. She has studied the processes affecting the behavior and fate of persistent organic compounds including PCBs, dioxins, and pesticides in the Great Lakes for the past 20 years, including sediment accumulation, source determinations, water column processes, and foodweb bioaccumulation. Her current research is focused on exposures and impacts of endocrine disruptors, and on developing policies for the state for the sustainable management of water resources.