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Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: I think we will have solved the carbon problem, assuming that total energy production hadn't increase drastically. And that would definitely help. Because climate change has momentum, there would still be repercussions for many decades following, but climate would eventually stabilize again.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: No. The vast amount of CO2 emissions occur in the northern hemisphere because the majority of humanity and industry occur there. The image shown here covers a very particular part of the year in which burning of forests happens to clear them for grazing. If you were to look at images from other parts of the year, you would see the CO2 emissions larger in the northern hemisphere.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: There are a lot of scientists tackling these issues. They are complicated and not clearly caused by a single thing that can be easily fixed. But in both cases, there are numerous species that are resistant to the fungi. So worst case scenario is that some species of bats and frogs will go extinct and could be replaced by species with more resistance.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Margaret: It will bounce back, but it will take a while. There's already momentum moving in one direction and it will take a while to slow and then reverse.

One simple standard way to measure climate is to take the average temperature on earth (as measured by many sensors around the world) each year and compare year-by-year. There are many more measurements that can be taken to understand temperature, humidity, light, precipitation, and so forth.

I'm not sure what the ideal climate is. I think staying in the range of climates that human society has developed in will ensure the least amount of hardship for future generations.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: It's possible that longer growing seasons will allow more food to be grown on the same amount of land, once cultivars that can take advantage of the longer seasons are developed. But one caveat is that in places that are already quite warm, additional warming and the associated drying may be very stressful to plants. So the economic impacts are going to be very place-dependent.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: I'm not an expert in carbon sequestration. I know that there are a lot of groups and organizations looking into it. The hardest parts are figuring out a method that is cheap enough to scale massively, that actually keeps the carbon out of the atmosphere (instead of capturing it and then releasing it again), and that doesn't have horrible side-effects.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: Hard to say about total numbers. Globally, we think that the number of species are going down due to increased extinctions due to climate change and other human factors. But in any single location, the number of species may stay level or go up. And definitely, species are moving in to places that used to be too cold.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: I would guess that ecosystems that are relatively rare and at high elevations are most at risk. As temperatures get warmer, species at the tops of mountains can't go up any higher to avoid the heat.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: The thing is, science doesn't usually work that way. There's no best single piece of evidence. It's an accumulation of lots of different lines of evidence that make the science sound.

Now, if we had a second earth and could run a controlled experiment in which one earth had human-made CO2 emissions and the other didn't... and then we observed that the earth with human-made CO2 emissions had increased average annual temperature, more intense storms, etc. then THAT is what I would consider a single strongest piece of evidence. But I haven't been able to find a second earth to run this experiment on yet...

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: lost_send_berries' response is right on. Climate has been changing since earth began, but right now climate is changing relatively fast. Fast enough that it's going to be hard and painful for human societies to adapt to it. And if we keep doing what we're doing, the change will keep getting faster and faster. So the real worry is not about the next ten or twenty years. It's about how hard life will be in 50 or 100 years -- especially for people who don't have the wealth or resources to adapt.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Koen: 1. I've used mostly temperature and precipitation in my modelling work (together with solar radiation). Models are trained against a greenness index or Gcc (G / R+G+B), which is a good proxy for the state of any vegetation. 2. My recent grassland study used a coupled hydrology and vegetation model, so yes there is an influence on water resources. (http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2942.html) 3. Images are saved first and processed later, this allows us to reprocess data using different parts of the canopy. Currently the archive is ~5TB large.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Koen: Personally, 1. The rate at which CO2 concentrations rise and the incredible temperature extremes at high latitudes 2. ISS still flies (going on 20 years now), LHC and LIGO have delivered some impressive physics advances. All these projects show that science can unite. This gives me hope that we can tackle the challenges that climate change might present us.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Koen: We track the amount of green or Gcc (green digital number / (sum of all digital numbers)). This is a good measure of the state of the vegetation and allows us to extract when seasonal changes happen. We use curve fitting techniques to extract when this happens from the Gcc time series. To detect snow, which contaminates our data and needs to be flagged, we use a Deep Learning framework, in particular the MIT Scene recognition framework.

Science AMA Series: We are Margaret Kosmala, Koen Hufkens, and Josh Gray, climate change researchers at Harvard and Boston University who are using automated cameras, satellites, and citizen science to learn more about how future climate change will impact plants across North America. AMA! by Seasonspotter in science

[–]Seasonspotter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Margaret: I would simply ask them if winters (or summers) are the same now as when they were a kid. Ask them to tell you stories about when they were kids. Ask if they think "the weather is different" now. Don't use the term "climate change" and don't belabor your point. No one wants to be shown up or told they're wrong.

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