Terra

OSU climate scientist Phil Mote and colleagues are calling attention to the need for a national strategy to adapt to climate change. Part of a Congressionally mandated report called America’s Climate Choices, their recommendation is the latest call for adaptation going back more than 20 years. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, NOAA and Environment Canada co-sponsored conferences across the continent on regional trends and what adaptation would mean from the Pacific Northwest to New England and Eastern Canada.

Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to lower average winter precipitation in western Washington and northwestern Oregon, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

In 2008, Oregon’s Climate Change Integration Group (co-chaired by Mark Abbott, OSU dean of the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences) issued a report pointing to the need for an adaptation strategy to address community resilience, public health and other concerns. In 2009, the New England Aquarium held a symposium on coastal adaptation strategies looking at environmental and economic issues. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency maintains a website on climate change adaptation, calling attention to human health, ecosystems, agriculture and energy. And the Pentagon continues to regard climate change as a national security threat to which planners must respond.

These calls for action may increasingly fall on deaf ears. The Pew Research Center reported in 2009 that a declining portion of the American public accepts the seriousness of climate change. However, another view comes from Oregon Sea Grant, which has found that coastal communities in Oregon and Maine are concerned about climate-related issues such as sea level rise and flooding. The Oregon Global Warming Commission takes a solve-the-problem approach by offering tips on ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

Just like politics, climate changes and thus adaptation strategies are ultimately local. A recent report by OSU scientist Chris Daly and colleagues in the International Journal of Climatology concluded that topography makes the difference between environmental business as usual and changes that are extreme.

That does not reduce the need for a national strategy. As Mote and his colleagues note, adaptation to changes in wildfire patterns, agricultural pests, water availability, storm frequency and public health risks will be required to guide public and private investments. People who depend on natural resources for a living will have to adjust or find other ways to survive. The rest of us rely on their success. At stake is whether our children will have the basic necessities of life — enough food and water, adequate health care and an environment that supports and enriches their lives.

By Angela Yeager

When OSU’s Megan McClelland found out that a news story about her had made its way onto the Internet Movie Database, the go-to website for anything movie-related, she exclaimed, “Wow, should I start getting ready for the movie business now?”

Not quite Megan, but the bubbly OSU researcher who is almost as well-known for her scholarly output as she is for her popular classes in early childhood development is becoming a prominent figure in the debate on school readiness. There are two schools of thought around early childhood education: one that centers on rigorous academic studies and the other that believes the best education of very young children is centered on developing skills such as listening, socializing, playing and controlling impulses.

Megan, who belongs in the latter category, has developed a game called the Head-to-Toes task that is modeled after Simon Says, only kids are supposed to do the opposite of what they are told. She has published multiple studies showing that a child’s ability to master this task is associated with academic success later in life. Her next goal is to take the study national and do a large, controlled intervention.

Megan’s enthusiasm for her subject comes from a passionate desire to help kids succeed. The recent birth of her first child only drives her to do more. She is now on the forefront of a national movement to study self-regulation, defined as a child’s ability to pay attention, listen and regulate behavior. Her graduate students have taken up the cause as well, publishing on everything from one teacher’s success with self-regulation in Taiwan to a national study on how self-regulation made the difference on test scores for at-risk kids.

Megan does not hold back when it comes to her research and its implications for policy. She believes that teachers and parents need to “put away the flash card” and stop using products such as Baby Einstein, which have not been shown to have any positive effects on children.

“These self-regulation skills are good predictors of later success in a variety of academic subjects,” says Megan, associate professor in human development and family sciences. “When we teach and reinforce self-regulation first, academic achievement follows.”

Megan has made a DVD demonstrating the Head-to-Toes task, although when word got out to teachers, she was flooded with requests and simply couldn’t keep up with the demand of making copies with her own resources. Her dream would to see it distributed nationally – so perhaps one day she will end up in the movies, if not in a theater, in a school near you.

Some links:

A video of Megan talking about her work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83LCucnevUo

Ellen Galinsky http://www.momsrising.org/blog/closing-the-achievement-gap/

Oregonian article: http://blog.oregonlive.com/themombeat/2008/11/setting_limits_around_televisi.html

National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116896&org=SBE&from=home

Oregon State professor Scott Ashford visited Chile after its February 2010 earthquake.

We’re overdue. If the Cascadia subduction zone behaves as it has in the past, an 8.0 to 8.5 earthquake and a resulting tsunami have a good chance of striking the Pacific Northwest in the next 50 years. That’s the take-home message from OSU marine geologist Chris Goldfinger’s studies of offshore debris flows. He has identified up to 38 such events in the last 10,000 years. At the April 2010 meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Portland, Voice of America correspondent Tom Banse talked with Goldfinger and University of Washington emeritus geophysicist Steve Malone about predicting the next Big One. Read Banse’s account here.

As science defines what’s at stake, what can we do? Oregon Sea Grant’s Pat Corcoran offers tsunami preparedness advice here. Meanwhile, engineers at OSU’s Hinsdale Wave Lab are testing a proposed tsunami evacuation structure for the City of Cannon Beach. Hinsdale engineers previously evaluated the consequences of a tsunami striking Cannon Beach’s neighbor, the City of Seaside. See a video of those tests here and an Oregon Sea Grant video about how research is improving disaster planning for coastal communities.

The New York Times featured a thoughtful op-ed on earthquake engineering on March 27 by Peter Yanev, author of Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country. And if you really want to delve into the faults under the Pacific Northwest, read OSU emeritus geologist Robert Yeats’ book Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest. You can order it here.

Tropical rain forests capture our imaginations with their breathtaking beauty and diversity. But acre for acre, when it comes to absorbing and storing carbon from the air, they can’t beat the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. At a time when landowners are beginning to see cash for carbon, that means opportunity.

The science of carbon sequestration – the process of absorbing carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere for long periods of time – is young. OSU scientists Beverly Law and Mark Harmon are among the leaders in that field, but how their work translates into policy is still a matter of hot debate.

Meanwhile, if you want a stake in this arena, you have options. You can support The Climate Trust, the Portland-based nonprofit that is investing in forest-based carbon storage in Deschutes County, the state of Washington and elsewhere. Through the Pacific Forest Trust, Green Mountain Energy will sell you carbon credits for $19.95 a ton, based on a 100-year plan for the Van Eck forest in Northern California (payments for 185,000 metric tons of carbon credits have reached nearly $2 million, according to Christine Harrison, PFT communications director). And if you are a family-forest landowner, you can learn more about Woodlands Carbon of Salem, one of two pilot projects supported by the American Forest Foundation to assemble and sell carbon credits.

OSU researchers and Extension foresters are in the thick of the emerging science. They run monitoring programs and develop computer models. They assist Woodlands Carbon by calculating carbon uptake and conducting workshops on forest planning. They take a leading role in national and international public policy studies for the U.S. Forest Service, the State Department and the United Nations. They focus on economics, land use and carbon monitoring. Their work could contribute to a comprehensive carbon accounting system, which will be a crucial part of an international program known as REDD, Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, the most successful outcome of the recent climate talks in Copenhagen.

The forest carbon story wouldn’t be complete without wood products and their role in reducing the carbon footprint of industrial economies. As OSU Professor Jim Wilson and his colleagues have demonstrated, wood takes less energy to produce than concrete, plastic or steel. They have shown that over their life cycle, products from sustainably managed forests will be part of a comprehensive solution to climate change.