Reporter's notebook: A Costa Rica journal
Monitor contributor Moises Velasquez-Manoff set down some on-the-spot observations as he and Monitor photographer Andy Nelson traversed this tiny Latin American country investigating the effects of climate change.
from the June 21, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
May 14: Dump data, save wildlife
Five days per month, Steven Whitfield, a PhD candidate at Florida International University, walks a staked-out plot of land in the old-growth jungle at La Selva Biological Station and Reserve in the lowlands of central Costa Rica.
He catches, measures, and marks the lizards or frogs he finds. It's hot, often raining, and always near 100 percent humidity. Ordinary pens and pencils stop writing. One has to have a special kind of paper, the scientists tell me, to write in these conditions – one that maintains friction. They have it. I don't.
But what's important – why we're here – are the long-term declines in both amphibian and reptile populations at La Selva.
After analyzing data spanning three decades, Mr. Whitfield and his colleagues have found that, much to their surprise, populations of those creatures are about one-quarter of what they were almost four decades ago.
Many hypotheses have been put forward as to why this is happening, global warming among them. But the analysis shows the importance of something else: keeping long-term records.
One hears this over and over again in discussions among the scientists here at La Selva – the importance of long-term studies and access to the work of previous scientists, both of which are crucial in catching gradual shifts driven by climate.
Yet sharing past research isn't automatic.
Someone joked that no one should be able to conduct studies here unless they make at least a 20-year commitment. But barring that, the scientists talk of creating a database open to everyone, where every researcher funded by a government grant will be required to "dump" his or her data, making it forever available to future researchers.
May 16: 'Seeing' the invisible
To be a science writer these days is to be intimately familiar with the number 380. It is the number of carbon dioxide molecules for every 1 million molecules of mostly nitrogen and oxygen blowing by in the air at any given moment. That's about a third more than the preindustrial CO2 level of 280 parts per million (ppm). And by century's end, the current 380 ppm is forecast to become 500.
With measurable shifts in climate and species already evident at 380, the vast majority of scientists say 500 is something to be avoided at all costs – unless we want to see much of Florida, Bangladesh, and New York City under water.
In other words, you could say that 380 is a celebrity of a number.
So imagine my surprise when, high above an old-growth jungle called La Selva ("the jungle" in Spanish), I saw 380 measured in real time.
We were near the top of a 132-foot tower made of aluminum tubing. The tower is part of an experiment measuring CO2 levels at different heights in the jungle. Measuring devices housed in white plastic boxes suck in small amounts of air and then beam it with a particular frequency of infrared radiation. Being a greenhouse gas, CO2 absorbs some of the radiation. A sensor records how much infrared makes it through the air sample. From the amount missing, a computer calculates the air's CO2 concentration.
Some 20 feet above the jungle canopy, with howler monkeys barking (they're very territorial and we were definitely in their territory), the CO2 level was jumping between 382 and 379 ppm.
I'd written the number many a time, bored people with it at parties, fretted over it, and explored its many disturbing ramifications.
But I'd never seen it. Perched on a tower dripping from the fine rain and vibrating with the easterly wind, I was "seeing" it – an invisible gas – for the first time.
In an instant, something I'd only known abstractly suddenly became concrete. Much of the so-called excess CO2 – about 100 of the 380 ppm – came from smokestacks and tailpipes thousands of miles away. And yet, 380 ppm was measurable here in a rain forest on the isthmus between North and South America, just as it was measurable in the US, China, Antarctica – anywhere on earth. What scientists call humanity's great experiment with climate change is not in a laboratory somewhere. It's right in front of us no matter where we go, surrounding us and filling our lungs with each breath. It is inescapable.
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