Herself’s Houston Garden

Sure, the hawkmoth does a good job of pollinating the plant, Nicotiana attenuata, which grows in the Western United States and flowers at night. But the hawkmoth has this annoying habit of leaving behind its eggs, which develop into caterpillars that like nothing better than to eat the plant.

So N. attenuata strikes back in a novel way, according to scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. As they describe in Current Biology, it shifts the time of its flowering to mornings and attracts a different pollinator, a hummingbird. (NYT Science, Plant switches pollinators when caterpillars strike)

Download the paper

National Science Foundation-funded scientists working in an ice-free region of Antarctica have discovered the last traces of tundra–in the form of fossilized plants and insects–on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began a relentless drop millions of years ago.

An abrupt and dramatic climate cooling of 8 degrees Celsius, over a relatively brief period of geological time roughly 14 million years ago, forced the extinction of tundra plants and insects and tranformed the interior of Antarctica into a perpetual deep-freeze from which it has never emerged. . . [ read more Anatarctic fossils paint a picture of a much warmer climate]

14 million years ago, the Antarctic temperatures dropped 46′F over a period of 200,000 years killing off the mosses, early plants and animals leaving us the frozen continent we have today.

Interestingly many of the mosses and algae have survived to continue to grow on Earth to this day. And of considerable important to us now is that even during the warming spell that occurred 3.5 million years ago, when temperatures were much warmer than they are now, much of the ice remained.

Current global warming scientists have been claiming that the climate will rapidly change, ice caps melting in 20 or so years, coastal cities drowning in the rising seas. It might not take that long.

. . .
The proof of an extreme cooling within a short number of years 12,700 years ago was attained in sediments of the volcanic lake “Meerfelder Maar” in the Eifel, Germany. The seasonally layered deposits allow to precisely determine the rate of climate change.

With a novel combination of microscopic research studies and modern geochemical scanner procedures the scientists were able to successfully reconstruct the climatic conditions even for individual seasons. And so it was particularly the changes in the wind force and direction during the winter half-year, which caused the climate to topple over into a completely different mode within one year after a short instable phase of a few decades. . . . [ read more Tracking down abrupt climate change ]

We know that the ocean currents, which keep Europe and the west coast of the United States mild can and have changed rapidly in the past. We think rapid climate change has to do with the turning on and off of this current.

The amount of salinity in the ocean can alter currents. Large amounts of fresh water from melting ice caps might do this. We just don’t know.

See also:
The science of abrupt climate change