Abstract
We have learned a lot about the effects of climate change by studying the Western Mountains. Some of us see them as a grand “natural experiment”. Our “lab” is one of the most diverse on Earth, in that from west to east and north to south across the Western Mountains, there is more ecological variation than almost anywhere else on the planet. The setting for this natural experiment that we are observing has two elements, one of which persists throughout, the mountains themselves, and one that changes constantly, the climate. The chapters that follow address topics sequentially that are the core of mountain ecology: water, forests, disturbances like fire and insect outbreaks, wildlife, human influences, and the interactions of all of these. We will see much scientific language in the chapters that follow. To make it more accessible I define thoroughly the most important words and phrases.
Sky, rock, sunlight, snow
The eternal wind rising
Follow the faint trail
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- 1.
As far as we know, that is, over the period of Earth’s history for which we have figured it out. See Chapter 3 for details.
- 2.
Yes, there are other living things besides plants and animals, some of which can survive harsher conditions. My biological focus will be plants and animals.
- 3.
A good synopsis of this function is at http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/mountain_partnership/doc/POLICY_BRIEFS/SDGs_and_mountains_water_EN.pdf.
- 4.
I define ecosystem here as some collection of biological and physical elements that interact in ways that we can observe. For most of this book, these elements will be associated with tangible places, such as forests, meadows, or rivers. “Mountain ecosystems” will comprise all of them.
- 5.
For example, my colleagues and I in the Western Mountain Initiative, which I mentioned in the preface. But we are not the only ones.
- 6.
I don’t mean “biodiversity” per se, for which the Amazon and other rainforests would be the winners. Rather it is all the players in our story: climate and weather, topography, rivers, forests, wildlife, fish. Read on.
- 7.
This often means comparing how many people who took the drug either were free from cancer or just still alive at the end of the experiment vs. those same numbers for those who thought they were taking the drug but were given a fake (“placebo”).
- 8.
The most vulnerable ones. By the end of your read, you should have a good idea which ones these are.
- 9.
With the exception of the aforementioned (but rare) volcanoes.
- 10.
Many of you may need even less introduction to the Western Mountains than I thought I might need when I started writing. This chapter focuses mostly, but not entirely, on their features of most relevance for our story. I hope that you may learn something new, even about your favorite range.
- 11.
But not “why you should believe it”. As I said in the Preface, those seekers will have to look elsewhere.
- 12.
See Chapter 6 for a fuller definition.
- 13.
For example, the time between when a book is written and when it is published.
- 14.
Of course, they may also be wrong because the science has improved in the interim, or because the research was conducted poorly. I will not address these issues here.
- 15.
Roughly, to the 2060s–2080s, beyond which my personal view is that at the rate of increase in global temperatures (fast) and of the response of societies (slow), the predictability of (Western USA) mountain ecology is effectively zero. The biologically informed reader could argue that some (micro)organisms evolve almost as fast as we breathe. Indeed, but this is not in response to warming climate, so I am ignoring it in this book.
- 16.
A colleague of mine once reminded visiting agency officials and journalists that “Glaciers don’t vote Democrat or Republican; they’re just ice”, regarding the shrinking and disappearance of glaciers across the West.
- 17.
Just as no matter what else is going on, what you observe won’t violate the law of universal gravitation or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If it does, check your algebra.
- 18.
Yes, bacteria, viruses, and cancer clones evolve much more rapidly than larger organisms, to the detriment of our health and our medical treatments and the health and survival of other large organisms. I will treat the rapid changes in micro-organisms as a constant factor here, while conceding that there are many subtleties in evolutionary change in response to changing climate.
- 19.
But this term is often depredated. You may read the expression “assisted migration” in the conservation literature. What they usually mean is assisted dispersal: permanent relocation.
- 20.
A graph that shows how the number of species in a specific area changes with the area, i.e., the more land, or water, the more species.
- 21.
The phrases “correlation is not causation” and the Latin post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) are ever-present cautions to those making scientific inferences. True feedbacks, by definition, involve at least some causation, or influence, although causes and effects can be many and complex. In our example in the text, a delayed feedback to climate change from biomass burning is the change in reflectance of the land surface (albedo) from loss of vegetation, either to reflect more solar radiation (negative feedback) or less (positive feedback).
- 22.
There are probably about as many definitions of disturbance as there have been definers. This relieves us of any need to pay homage to a particular one. Instead, we choose one that helps us focus on its relationship to climate change.
- 23.
Upper latitudinal treeline is evident in the Northern Hemisphere; in the Southern Hemisphere there are no land masses where it would fall, in the Southern Ocean.
- 24.
Just to be clear, “westerly” winds are winds out of the West, or “west winds”. So they are not “blowing in a westerly direction” (an awkward phrase all too often encountered).
- 25.
By definition, no process is without at least one limiting factor. If it were, it would be infinite.
- 26.
Geographers will notice that “small scale” in ecology means the opposite of what it does in geography, i.e., a larger-scale map covers a smaller extent than a smaller-scale map.
- 27.
These objects of study can be in the domain of space, or time, or both. An example of the spatial domain is a landscape with different mapped features such as patches of forest, grassland, and rock and ice. In the temporal domain, we study time series (repeated measurements, usually at regular intervals [grain] for some period of time [extent]). In both cases, observations closer to each other may be more similar than those further apart. This property is auto-correlation.
- 28.
In reality, the curve in this example extends infinitely far in both directions, but the probability of being in the “tails” gets smaller and smaller the farther one extends. To adjust for this, uncertainty bounds are often given percentages of the number of possibilities they include, and stated as “confidence intervals”. For example, a 99% confidence interval will include (for all practical purposes) all but 1% of the values, whereas the narrower 95% confidence interval will “miss” 5%.
- 29.
For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, often uses such categories as the primary means to communicate uncertainty, while providing numerical equivalents of the categories for those interested. Links to all the IPCC reports can be found on their website: http://www.ipcc.ch/.
- 30.
Full disclosure: colleagues and I have published research in this area, but it is not accepted by everyone (yet). For example, see D. McKenzie and J.S. Littell. 2017. “Climate change and the eco-hydrology of fire: will area burned increase in a warming western USA?” Ecological Applications 27:26–36. This is a scientific re-statement of the reason that Death Valley, CA, USA, is not constantly on fire from being so hot and dry.
- 31.
But not always. As an example (OK a bit afield), researchers knew that gravitational waves “should” exist. They were predicted by one of the most solid theories of all time: General Relativity. So the attribution was easy; they came from interacting massive objects. But their detection did not occur until 2018, 100 years after the theory that “attributed” them, because they are so faint in the surrounding noise.
- 32.
Note from this example that by increasing the signal you may not increase the signal-to-noise ratio, which is key. Your speaker may raise his or her voice thereby creating disproportionately more feedback in the system. This issue arises often in the Earth sciences.
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McKenzie, D. (2020). Introduction: What Persists, What Changes. In: Mountains in the Greenhouse. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42432-9_1
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