TV Coverage of Cycling Races Can Help Document the Effects of Climate Change (phys.org)

Researchers from Ghent University were able to detect climate change impacts on trees in Belgium by analyzing nearly four decades of archive footage from the Tour of Flanders. The findings were published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Phys.Org reports: Focusing on trees and shrubs growing around recognizable climbs and other 'landmarks' along the route of this major annual road cycling race in Belgium, the team looked at video footage from 1981 to 2016 obtained by Flemish broadcaster VRT. They visually estimated how many leaves and flowers were present on the day of the course (usually in early April) and linked their scores to climate data. The ecologists found that the trees had advanced the timing of leafing and flowering in response to recent temperature changes. Before 1990, almost no trees had grown leaves at the time of the spring race. After that year, more and more trees visible in the television footage -- in particular magnolia, hawthorn, hornbeam and birch trees -- were already in full leaf. These shifts were most strongly related to warmer average temperatures in the area, which have increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius since 1980.

Comments

Re: Climate change

[Anonymous Coward]

It changes four times a year. They're called seasons you libtards.

The planet has been warming since the end of the ice age which was about 12,500 years ago. If Yellowstone goes up we'll have another ice age. Those are scientific facts like 9-11 being a controlled demolition. ae911truth org

Re:Climate change

[Kaenneth]

It's the fault of stupid, short-sighted hippies like Greenpeace that we are stuck on fossil fuels instead of atomic energy.

Blah blah blah

[blindseer]

Yet another story about how the world is getting warmer. I'll get excited when I see the federal government start building nuclear reactors to replace the coal power we have now.

Nothing is safer than nuclear. Nothing has a lower CO2 footprint than nuclear. If it wasn't for the government bureaucracy holding up the issuance of licenses then we'd be seeing new nuclear reactors going online at a rate of about one per month.

Here's my conspiracy theory. I am admitting up front that this is approaching tin foil hat territory. The government doesn't want to actually solve the problem of global warming, they just want to be able to use the threat of global warming as an excuse for what they want to do.

I look at the EPA estimates on where the CO2 the USA produces comes from. 34% is electricity. Okay then, go hand out some nuclear reactor licenses and get those coal plants replaced. I find it impossible to believe that the government has not been able to find anyone capable of producing a nuclear power plant for 40 years. We get 20% of our electricity from nuclear power now so it's not like we don't know how to do it. Add in some wind, hydro, maybe even some solar and we can be on the path to taking CO2 production from electricity down to the level of a rounding error. I'm guessing if we really put our minds to it we could get a new nuclear reactor online at a rate of one per month very quickly. I say this because there was a time when the USA had half the population it has now and was able to build them at a rate of one every two months. Keep the paperwork to a sane level and we can keep the cost of electricity the same as it is now.

The next largest chunk of CO2 production in the USA is transportation, also about 34%. This is a more difficult problem because people can't merely be told to buy a new energy efficient vehicle. What happens though with the shift of electricity from coal and natural gas to nuclear then natural gas gets real cheap. While natural gas as a fuel isn't perfect it still gives half the CO2 output than gasoline per mile. I'm not sure the government needs to really do much on getting people to buy a natural gas car but merely set the rules on how to make them safe to drive. This has been done for a large number of vehicles used in commercial fleets so just make it clear to the auto makers that offering these same cars to the public will not meet resistance by regulators. This might mean road funding not being from gasoline taxes any more, so have people pay for the roads through sales taxes or something.

Here's another tin foil hat theory. No one is more addicted to gasoline vehicles than the federal government. The government makes more money through road taxes than the oil companies do in selling the fuel. The only way to break that addiction is to wean off the taxes.

Of course electric cars will play a part but passenger cars are not near as much a tax income for the government as over the road trucks, same goes for CO2. We haven't figured out long haul trucking on electricity yet, but we know how to make natural gas burn. No need for subsidies to make this work, just shift the electricity market from natural gas with nuclear power, make it clear that natural gas for transportation won't have any regulatory barriers beyond what already exists, and the market will move naturally.

There, a plan to more than halve the CO2 output from the USA. Making that happen could take less than a decade once it gets started and with proper motivation.

Don't give me more about the problems. I want solutions. Telling me the trees look different on a bicycle race is nice and all but let's get this done already.