Awww… did you miss your cool green news over the long weekend?

1. Even Henry Ford experimented with making cars from hemp. (Treehugger)
2. Are Energy Star ratings really all that meaningful? (Greenspace)
3. A new study says Africa’s civil wars are not influenced by environmental disasters like drought and heat waves. (BBC)
4. The legal showdown over Asian carp in the Great Lakes begins today. (LA Times)
5. Is a robot that moves like a snake useful for field research? See for yourself–watch snakebot climb a tree! (Ecogeek)

NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Satellite Monitoring Program monitors global sea-surface temperature using satellite-derived data, and uses this information to predict coral bleaching, which occurs when ocean temperatures are higher than normal in coral reef areas.

Last year, we helped NOAA install a sea-surface temperature (SST) buoy in Kimbe Bay to measure the actual SST in the water and beam the information back to NOAA via satellite – the first one in the Coral Triangle. NOAA has been using this information to validate the accuracy of their satellite-derived data, and so far both instruments are tracking very closely (i.e. showing the same temperature).

Recently, Mark Eakin of NOAA warned us that their monitoring devices indicated that the SST in Kimbe Bay had exceeded the bleaching threshold twice in two months (May and June), and that the reefs were at Bleaching Alert Level 1 (which means that some bleaching is expected within a few weeks).

In mid-July, the Kimbe team and I conducted a rapid survey of the reefs on the western side of Kimbe Bay with Walindi Plantation Resort.  As NOAA had predicted, there was some coral bleaching in Kimbe Bay. Most of the bleached corals were from susceptible genera like branching and plate Acropora, with a few massive and mushroom corals also bleached.  Bleaching was quite mild with 1-2% of corals bleached from 3-25m deep.  There was more bleaching in shallow water (5-10%), but this was probably related to unusually low tides at the time.

This concentration of bleaching near the surface was despite the fact that the water temperature was 30oC down to 20m or more!  That’s probably because Kimbe Bay is located in the Western Pacific Warm Pool – the warmest water in the world.  While the water is pretty warm it is not that much warmer now than it usually is at this time of year, so most corals do not appear to be very stressed by the warm sea temperatures.

However, coral bleaching can develop over a number of weeks, and our Kimbe Bay team has implemented a Bleaching Watch Program to keep a close eye on the situation in Kimbe, and they will let us know if anything changes. Fortunately, water temperatures are dropping now and the threat of bleaching seems to have passed.

If we do get a major bleaching event in Kimbe, we will implement a rapid field assessment to identify areas that appear more resistant or resilient to coral bleaching.  Our field teams will then work with local communities to ensure that these areas are included in the MPA network and protected from other threats.

(Image 1: Snorkelling over a shallow coral reef off Restoff Island in Kimbe Bay, West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. This area is one of the Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) which The Nature Conservancy helped design to protect the biodiversity of the bay. Credit: Mark Godfrey/TNC. Image 2: NOAA’s near real time SST data for Kimbe Bay, showing that SSTs (purple line) exceeded the bleaching threshold (light blue line) twice in May and June, with a Bleaching Alert 1 issued in June. You can monitor this data for Kimbe Bay and other places at NOAA’s website. Credit: NOAA.)

The following post is guest-authored by Patrick McCarthy, the director of the southwest Climate Change Initiative; Nature Conservancy Director of Conservation Programs, New Mexico.

Watching Russia struggle through a deadly summer of heat, drought and wildfires was déjà vu for many of us here in the Southwestern United States.

The scenes unfolding in news photographs – of residents and tourists outfitted with surgical masks against the famous backdrop of St. Basil’s Cathedral barely visible amid the smoke – reminded me of the summers of 2000-2003 when breathing smoke from wildfires became a frequent occurrence in Arizona and New Mexico.

During one of these wildfire outbreaks, I knew parents of a newborn baby who traveled south and stayed away for weeks to keep their child’s lungs clear of smoke from the fires – just as this month, mothers in Moscow were trying to flee the city’s acrid air with their small children, if they had somewhere else to go. The health effects of inhaling smoke and fine particles from wildfires can include eye and respiratory tract irritation, reduced lung function and worsening of asthma and bronchitis.

Arizona’s largest-ever recorded wildfire, the Rodeo-Chediski fire, occurred in June 2002, when two fires merged together, burning 467,000 acres before finally being controlled nearly three weeks later. Much of the area in Navajo County was sparsely populated, but about 30,000 people were evacuated and the ponderosa pine forest was largely lost and transformed into a different landscape.

The Arizona fire, burning simultaneously with Colorado’s Hayman fire, and many others during a succession of exceptionally warm summer droughts, was a wake-up call to many people in the Southwest that climate change was really happening.

This view is supported by concrete evidence:

• Analysis of retrospective data (actual temperatures recorded by hundreds of weather stations) shows that the Southwest is warming more rapidly than many other parts of the U.S. except Alaska. Mean annual temperature increased across most locations in the Four Corners states, with some habitats, such as alpine areas, warming more than 2 degrees F between 1951 and 2006.

• Throughout the western U.S., including Southwest forests, there has been a significant increase in uncharacteristically large and severe fires. A study of a database of Western wildfires since 1970 led by A.L. Westerling of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California found that increased spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt were associated with an increase in the frequency, duration and seasonal extent of large wildfire activity.

• Recent warming has extended the period in which bark beetles are able to reproduce, allowing them to attack drought-stressed trees in droves and resulting in widespread infestations and wholesale changes in the structure of Western forests.

• The Southwest Climate Change Initiative identified 48 cases of recent ecological change in the Southwest that may be linked to climate change.

More than half involved population declines of species, with the rest including shifts in species’ geographical distribution, timing of life events like breeding and increases in invasive species. Most were from high-elevation forested areas, such as the Jemez and Sacramento Mountains, where recent climate exposure has been particularly extreme (warm and dry).

If we allow greenhouse gases to continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, we are loading the dice and increasing the likelihood of extreme — and potentially deadly — weather events.

Even the vast, largely intact landscapes of the Southwest are at risk from climate change, especially in a region where the natural forces of fire and water drive ecosystems. Land management goals once developed for a stable environment may become irrelevant, unattainable or impractical across the rapidly warming Colorado Plateau – the high-elevation Four Corners region that is studded with national parks.

This is why The Nature Conservancy is acting now to help southwestern forests — such as the Jemez Mountains, near Los Alamos, New Mexico — to cope with rapid climate change. Using our science-based and collaborative approach, the Conservancy is working with government agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to integrate comprehensive planning for climate change into routine fire and forest management practices for federal lands and surrounding areas.

For example, in the forests of northern Arizona — a habitat of the endangered Mexican spotted owl — the Conservancy is working with the U.S. Forest Service’s Four Forest Restoration Initiative to pursue strategies such as low-intensity controlled burns and forest thinning to promote resilience. Protecting cool, moist refuges and connecting habitat patches are strategies to help the owls get where they need to go for food and nesting even as the climate changes.

The time is now to prepare our forests and our communities for what is to come. When we work to lower emissions, restore and protect our forests, and make our cities and landscapes healthier and more resilient, we do what we can to lower our collective risk for the kind of wildfire disaster we’ve seen before in the Southwest – and saw again this summer in Central Russia.

(Photo: A fire crew comprised of members from The Nature Conservancy, US Forest Service, The Arizona Land Department and the City of Flagstaff set prescribed fires to build forest resilience at the Conservancy’s Hart Prairie Preserve near Flagstaff, AZ – part of the Four Forest Restoration Initiative area. Photo Credit: Edward Smith)

Interesting times in the Great Brazilian Amazon Deforestation Debate, which, since time immemorial—actually the mid-1980s, when reliable satellite data first became available—has had academics and policymakers arguing over the stubbornly obscure relationship between economic factors, especially commodity prices, and levels of deforestation.

The period from 2008 to 2011 promises to shed some light on the topic, since it is a perfect natural laboratory for economic activity—full boom ahead up to the Brazilian economy hitting the buffers along with everyone else in late 2008, roughly a year of flatlining, and then, since the second half of 2009, a roaring recovery. The relationship between that economic yo-yoing and deforestation levels in the Amazon should be illuminating.

We are in fact  beginning to get some data and other early indicators on deforestation that are extremely suggestive. True deforestation junkies might want to look at a March blog I did on 2008-2009 deforestation levels as a scene-setter.

Brazil’s Amazon deforestation figures come out in November every year, and are always a media event. They cover the period from August of the preceding year to July of the current year, since the burning season inconveniently doesn’t match the break between calendar years.  The figures to be released in November of 2010, then, cover August 2009 to July 2010.

The final number-crunching is quite complicated, which accounts for the delay in releasing the official figures, but they are widely trailed in the Brazilian media well before they are made official – especially this year, when there is also a presidential election in November, guaranteeing the deforestation figures even more attention than usual.

Two very interesting things are clear already with the 2009-2010 deforestation figures:

1. They are very low, possibly the lowest yet recorded, somewhere not far above 5,000 square kilometers.
2. There’s a change in the pattern of deforestation—for the first time, more than half of it appears to be down to small fires. This means that small peasant farmers, rather than ranchers, were responsible. This is a major shift, since in a typical year the split has historically been more like 80/20 between ranchers and small farmers.

So what does this mean? What everyone would love to see is a year where the economy is doing well, but deforestation is going down. At first sight, that’s exactly what the 2009-2010 figures appear to show, since the “deforestation year,” from August 2009 to July 2010, coincides pretty well with Brazil’s strong economic recovery that began in the second half of 2009.

Great news, right? Unfortunately not, for two reasons.

First, there may be a time-lag: many specialists have argued that it takes around a year for economic conditions to feed through and change behaviour on the ground in the Amazon. If that’s true, what we are seeing in 2009-2010 is the delayed effect of the economic slowdown of 2008-2009. That’s an argument given force by the apparent shift in the pattern of deforestation. Peasant smallholders would be much less affected by a general economic contraction, since a good chunk of their production is for subsistence and they usually have local markets for their output, whereas ranchers and larger farmers (unless they happened to be exporting to China, which only a tiny minority in the Amazon does) would be hammered.

The second argument is potentially even more worrying. There are already signs that 2010-2011 deforestation, which we won’t know for another year, could be bad. Deforestation figures are retrospective but there is another indicator that gives you almost a real-time window into what’s happening—the number of fires recorded daily by Brazil’s space agency. These have jumped by 85% this calendar year, and there are already reports in the Brazilian press that smoke levels during the burning season in parts of the Amazon are the worst for several years. Partly this is because this year has been dryer than usual in much of the Amazon. There is always some noise in the levels caused by annual weather variations. But I think it is more than that.

The most fires have been recorded in Mato Grosso and Pará, the traditional champion states of Amazon deforestation. In another worrying trend, an intense “fire frontier” has formed in the south of the states of Maranhão and Piauí, the north of Tocantins and the west of Bahia, outside the Amazon but close to it. The fires are precisely where much of  the intact Cerrado, Brazil‘s highly biodiverse savanna, is located. All concerned, including the international environmental movement, need to step back, take a broader view (in every sense) and worry about the Cerrado, instead of only paying attention to the Amazon and tropical forests. The two are interlinked.

If I had to put my money on the table, I’d be betting that next year’s figures, covering August 2009 to July 2010, will show a big jump in deforestation. That will support the idea that deforestation follows the economy, with a lag of around a year. Most people, including me, expect Brazil to do very well economically over the next few years. Brazil has made commitments to get deforestation down dramatically as part of its national climate action plan over the next few years. We’re about to find out whether those two things can happen at the same time.

(Image: Aerial view of timber cutting near Cachoeira Reservoir. Source: Scott Warren)

The best way to start a 3-day weekend is with 5 cool links.

1. Wild chimps in Africa are outwitting hunters by deactivating their traps. (Earth News)
2. Detroit has a new way to encourage the use of electric cars. (Green Tech)
3. BP is touting the innovations arising from the Gulf oil spill. (Washington Post)
4. It wasn’t new smart meters that caused utility bills to rise, it was the heat. (Green)
5. Are organic strawberries really healthier, tastier and better for the soil? (Grist)

Luscious colors in this close-up shot of a blue dragonfly! Flickr user snoopydoobiedog captured this lovely photo and shared it through The Nature Conservancy’s Flickr Group.

See all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images — submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you — at my.nature.org.

And get inspired to take your own great nature shots — check out our favorite nature photography features, including amazing slideshows and tips from the pros.