Office of Biological and Environmental Research Weekly Report

April 27, 2009

 

Is the Climate Warming or Cooling?   The debate surrounding climate change and concerns for global warming are complicated by publications, websites, and blogs that often cite decade-long climate trends, e.g., from 1998-2008, in which the earth’s average temperature dropped slightly as evidence that the global climate has stopped warming and begun to cool.  In a forthcoming paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Review Letters, David R. Easterling of the National Climatic Data Center and Michael Wehner of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory note that due to natural climate variability it is likely to have periods as long as a decade or two of “cooling” superimposed on the longer-term warming trend.  The authors studied the occurrence of decade-long trends in globally averaged surface air temperature using observed climate data from 1901-2008 and the CMIP3 archive of climate model simulations of the 20th century and found short periods of global cooling.  Similarly, computer simulations of 21st century climate showed that negative decadal trends are possible although the likelihood of such occurrences decreases into the future.  Easterling and Wehner conclude that selectively analyzing climate records to highlight short periods of either global cooling or exaggerated warming can be misleading in the context of the longer, sustained warming caused by human induced emissions of greenhouse gases.

 

Reference: Easterling, D.R and M.F. Wehner, Is the climate warming or cooling? Geophysical Review Letters doi:10.1029/2009GL037810, in press. (accepted 30 March 2009)

 

Media Interest: Yes

Contact: Anjuli Bamzai, SC-23.1, (301) 903-0294

 

PNNL Scientist Chosen as the Henry Darcy Distinguished Lecturer.  Each year an outstanding ground water professional is chosen by a panel of scientists and engineers as the National Ground Water Research and Education Foundation’s (NGWREF) Darcy Lecturer to share his or her work with their peers and students at Universities throughout the country and internationally.  The 2010 honoree, the 24th and the first from a DOE Laboratory, is Dr. Timothy Scheibe, a staff scientist in the Hydrology Technical Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  Scheibe has made major contributions to the field of groundwater modeling.  His multidisciplinary and integrative approaches to computational modeling have brought new insights into the scaling of geochemical processes affecting contaminant transport and innovative methods to couple genome-based mechanistic understanding of biological processes with traditional groundwater modeling codes.

Media Interest: No

Contact: Robert T. Anderson, SC 23.1, (301) 903-5549

 

Predicting Biological Behaviors.  The cover article for the March 2009 issue of The Scientist highlighted advances made by three DOE scientists developing systems biology approaches to computationally simulate responses of microbes to changes in their environment.  Dr. Nitin Baliga (Institute for Systems Biology) and his collaborators developed a computer model that could predict molecular level responses of a free-living cell to genetic and environmental changes.  Remarkably, the model was able to predict responses to changes that were different from the experimental data used to construct the model.  The key to these insights is the normal interconnectedness of biological systems, for example changes in temperature affect solubility.  The ability to link and predict novel biological responses represents an important step toward the ultimate goal of an in silico model of cell behavior. While the investigators focused on microbial systems involved in environmental processes of interest to DOE, the methodology has broad applications to all biological systems and is a major step forward in the burgeoning field of systems biology.

Media Interest:   No

Contact:  Arthur Katz (SC-23.1, 3-4932) and Susan Gregurick (SC-23.1, 3-7672)

 

Human Versus Natural Causes of the mid-1970s Climate Anomaly.  Observations indicate there was a significant shift in the mid-1970s from cooler to warmer tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs), part of a pattern of basin-wide SST anomalies with impacts that extended globally.  The cause of these SST anomalies has been a topic of scientific debate in the climate research community.  In a recent paper, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory analyzed observations and climate model simulations showing that the 1970s climate shift in the Pacific was a combination of warming due to human-produced greenhouse gases superimposed on what was likely an internally-generated natural decadal fluctuation of the Pacific climate system.  Determining the relative roles of human influence versus naturally-occurring internal variability is important for understanding observed climate fluctuations and for the new field of decadal climate prediction.  This new field will attempt to estimate regional climate anomalies over the next several decades with contributions from both inherent climate variability and external forcing from human activities.

 

Reference:  Meehl, G. A., A. Hu, and B.D. Santer, 2009:  The mid-1970s climate shift in the Pacific and the relative roles of forced versus inherent decadal variability, J. Climate, 22, 780--792. 

 

Media Interest:  No

Contact: Anjuli Bamzai, SC-23.1, (301) 903-0294

 

Lucy Shapiro to receive Gairdner International Award.  Lucy Shapiro, director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, has been announced as a recipient of the Canada Gairdner International Award.  Considered one of the most prestigious awards in biomedical science, the prize is given by the Toronto-based Gairdner Foundation to honor individuals who have made outstanding and original contributions to medical research.  The Shapiro Lab studies genome expression and cell cycling in an asymmetrically organized one-celled bacterium called Caulobacter crescentus.  Caulobacter is of particular interest to DOE because of its ability to reduce a number of metal ions, including uranyl ion. The Award carries a $100,000 cash prize, and will be presented in Toronto in October.

Media Interest: No.

Contact: Daniel Drell, SC-23.2, (301) 903-4742

 

Ant Symbionts May Provide New Approaches to Biofuels Synthesis.  Leaf-cutting ants are well known “agriculturalists,” cultivating fungus gardens capable of efficiently breaking down lignocellulosic plant material and converting it to food for ant colonies.  Cameron Currie, a University of Wisconsin microbiologist at the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), is studying the complex interactions between ants, their cultivated fungi, and the microbial communities that colonize their nests.  A news commentary in the April 2nd issue of the journal Nature describes Currie’s research and his collaborative effort with the DOE Joint Genome Institute to sequence microbial community genome fragments from ant colonies.  The aim of this approach is to prospect for new lignocellulose degrading enzymes that could be further developed for biofuels production.  “The idea is that the ants’ long evolutionary history may help us in our attempts to break down plant biomass,” says Currie. 

Media Interest:   No

Contact:  Joseph Graber, SC-23.2, (301) 903-1239