Shock: The whole "slightly warmer weather is bad for northern trees" hypothesis may be flawed

In Warming North, Some Trees Thrive as Others Ail - NYTimes.com

In a new study, a team led by researchers from the tree-ring lab at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has found that white spruce trees on the edge of the tundra in Alaska’s far north have thrived in the past 100 years, and especially the last 50, in the face of sharp Arctic warming.

Elsewhere, of course, forests are having a much tougher time dealing with a changing climate and other factors. The Arctic climate is prone to big swings and is a region where plants, particularly, have evolved the ability to spread and retreat as conditions change.

Whether the issue is forests or frogs, the response of ecosystems to rising temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations and changing rainfall remains as complicated, and variegated, as the planet itself. Another case in point is the study in California that found plant communities shifting down slopes in a warming century, against conventional wisdom (apparently because precipitation is the prime driver, not temperature).

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“I was expecting to see trees stressed from the warmer temperatures,” said study lead author Laia Andreu-Hayles, a tree ring scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “What we found was a surprise.”

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Julie Brigham-Grette, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, focused on past climate and ecological changes, wrote:

Just a quick note to say that the paleoclimate data for earlier warm periods 125,000 years ago and even 8-10,000 years ago in northern Alaska (paleoclimate warmer than now, [from] different forcings) document the northward advance of the treeline from Nome to Barrow, Alaska, and the Canadian border at different times of change in Earth’s orbital parameters (without a significant change in CO2).

The rate of change in the past was as fast as modern times. However it’s clear that now, modern [changes] forced by higher CO2 are accelerating at rates faster than historical and paleo records would suggest. While we know that treeline can be climatically “elastic” in the space of both latitude and altitude, i.e., moving north and south and up and down with topography, this paper raises important issues about rates of ecological adaption, rates that are being tested by contemporary rates of change forced by human activities.

If warmth is so bad for trees, why aren't there trees north of the Arctic treeline?

Climate scepticism rare in developing nation media - study - AlertNet

LONDON (AlertNet) – Climate sceptics have gained a significant foothold in right-leaning U.S. and U.K. print media but are virtually absent in news reports in key developing world nations such as China, India and Brazil, a new Oxford University study shows.

That’s in part because fossil-fuel lobby groups are weaker in many of those countries, and homegrown climate skeptics simply fewer. But it’s also because many developing countries have more first-hand experience with the impacts of climate change, suggests the report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

China’s government, for instance, has “a very clear position, that climate change is real,” said Rebecca Nadin, director of the British Council’s climate change and sustainability programme in China, and one of the authors of the report.