A world phone book of life on earth revolutionizes biology, influencing international environmental policy. Its main thrust is the worldwide electronic information network Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a single Internet database pooling widely scattered data on Earth's species. Sponsored by Paris-based research Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development it encompasses the 29 most industrialized nations. Molecular biology and gene sequencing started in an era of electronic systems. Natural history began centuries ago and stayed behind. No single place records scientific names of all species. To know all the specimens of a particular bird you write to all the museums that may have a specimen, then go to the museums and look at labels and cards. The network should be a boon to biology students, researchers and nations rich in species but with small or no collections of their own. While most species occur in developing countries almost all significant collections are in Europe and North America.
The idea is to put information scattered in museums, universities, journals, drawers and card files together, available to everybody. The global network will include domestic biodiversity of participating countries and data on stored materials collected worldwide. The database must adapt for greater understanding of organisms and redefined categories. Countries including Australia, Britain, Canada and the U S already offer online information on their main domestic species. Even in these countries biodiversity inventories are incomplete. Many historical collections, like those in Britain, France, Germany and Russia, often dating to the 1700s, are not entered in computer records. For example the British Natural History Museum, owning one of the world's largest collections, has only a few of its millions of specimens in computer catalogs. The daunting task costs $5 per specimen to digitize it. The network won't compile or organize its own species inventories but will pull together national and local databases in countries interested in digitizing their collections. Quite a few want to use this initiative to get the ball rolling.
Weaving together existing records is complex. Existing, diverse databases aren't based on common methods. They need a road map with compatible systems, like a world phone book with the same codes, matching collections seamlessly. In the past, different countries and cultures developed different methods of classifying, naming or definng species. Many species have duplicate names. Computerizing them requires weeding out ambiguity, entering named species and their synonyms. This is of value to scientists and policymakers. Preparing a new law, say to protect a species, must have no ambiguity. Databases jointly making up the global center will remain the property of institutions that own and provide the data and link them to the Internet rather than start a central database from scratch.
Several countries bid for the seat, offering accommodations. The final decision still pends. Specialists with an initial $3 million budget set up a secretariat and work program moving biodiversity information from cuneiform to computer. The budget expects to grow, provided by member countries. During preparatory meetings several countries did not want the new center to compete with other international programs compiling biological information, including the Clearing-House Mechanism for recording species, created in 1992 as part of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. Critics say the mechanism, tailored to the least advanced countries, was intended as little more than an archive and is slow in starting. An understanding was reached that this new facility will concentrate on digitizing information.
The idea is not to duplicate or compete but to help the Clearing-House Mechanism. The fundamental point is to provide a measuring stick for basic questions on the world's species. Among the questions: Are new species evolving? Are many being lost? What exists today? The center will have an open-ended membership. After richer countries provide data and pay for the infrastructure poorer countries can join, paying lower fees. This will provide access to computers with a large online reference including images and details of their domestic specimens, now housed in museums, libraries and zoos of rich nations. Economic planners and industry, including pharmaceutical companies doing biological prospecting, also may find the data useful. Most challenging is the next stage, vertical links, when the project will try to link species databases with others dealing with soil, climate, human populations and the like. Say you want to know the effect of a pesticide on a species. You'll see what climate the species lives in, what else is in the ecosystem and how teh chemicals affect it. Vertical links will be worthwhile but difficult. The project's first phase will take years to go online. The broader project should grow and evolve indefinitely. Even in its embryonic phase it will make a difference. Initial focus is to get data from tags and drawers into computers and include images.
Warning of more global warming
Global warming research becomes a major scientific industry in fields ranging from atmospheric physics to biology. Experts are increasingly convinced CO2 from burning fossil fuels is at least partly responsible for the marked warming of recent years. Almost every climate model says warming accelerates. The next decade could bring the same amount of warming as in the 1900s. Will global warming bring fewer fish and icebergs? More rain? A damper New York City?
* Rainier California winters. Average temperatures will rise 2 - 7 degrees F over the 2000s, especially bad for California if sea level rises 1 - 3 feet. Heavier rain and higher seas would increase coastal damage during storms like El Nino.
* Global warming could threaten Pacific ecosystems, especially fish benefiting West Coast economy. Data shows big marine ecosystem changes from tropics to poles. Records since 1992 show a precipitous salmon decline. They're smaller and thinner.
* Absence of icebergs in the Grand Banks shipping lanes off Newfoundland might be an early warning sign of global warming.
* New York City will suffer repeated flooding in the 2000s as global warming raises the sea level, soaking subways and turning parts of Brooklyn into wetlands.
Why California cools
Global warming seems unreal in Northern California, shivering through chillier summers. Its coast will likely remain cool in summer thanks to cold Pacific currents. Cold water is associated with La Nina following warm-water El Nino of winter 1997-98. Short-term cooling can't obscure long-term signals: It's getting warmer. New global warming projections indicate it might be even worse than originally foreseen. Scientists expecting an average planetary temperature rise of 1.4 - 6.3 degrees F over the 2000s now look at a 2.3 - 7.2 degree rise. That 1-degree difference might seem slight. It equals the entire amount of rise in average global temperature over the 1900s. Climate projections worsen partly from increased success in controlling another pollutant: sulfur dioxide. While CO2 warms the atmosphere SO2 cools it. Until recently, experts hoped SO2 would counterbalance global warming. Hope fades as nations establish tighter controls on SO2 emissions. For that reason slightly higher rates of warming and sea level rise related to warming are expected. In the 2000s rates in temperature and sea level rise might occur up to 7 times as fast as in the 1900s.
More rain ahead
California has increased winter precipitation. When the world gets warmer, oceans evaporate more moisture and the atmosphere holds more moisture. It's got to come out somewhere. The trick is to figure out where. Climate models indicate California is one of those places. Computer models indicate high-altitude cooling accompanying lower atmosphere global warming. As upper air cools, noctilucent clouds common in polar latitudes appear farther south. The wispy, silver-blue clouds, composed of tiny ice crystals, resemble cirrus clouds but are far higher, 50 miles up. A noctilucent cloud drifted over Boulder, farthest south such a cloud was recorded. Southerly drifting noctilucent clouds, miners' canaries of global warming, signal bad times ahead with dramatic upper atmospheric cooling effects far greater than predicted. National response to global warming remains sluggish and divided. Congress ignores scientists' warnings. Climatologists agree that global warming is real and could greatly disrupt society. For too long, a vocal minority denying climate change has had Congress' ear.
Change over centuries
Paleoclimatologists exploit everything from antarctic ice to ancient pollen to determine Earth's average temperature fluctuation over centuries. Beliefs that climate changes slowly change profoundly on examining polar ice. Its chemistry shows prehistoric climate repeatedly underwent rapid changes, sometimes in less than a decade. Climate could change significantly in one lifetime. Since the Industrial Revolution began the amount of atmospheric CO2 rose markedly as has Earth's average temperature. Scientists blame the former for the latter. Human influence on climate will accelerate in the future. In theory power plant CO2 could be collected, liquefied and dumped on the ocean floor, remaining indefinitely in eternal darkness, prevented from escaping to the surface by crushing pressures of overlying water. Would it work? A beaker of liquefied CO2 was lowered 2 miles to the Pacific floor. Observed by remote camera, slushy ice formed in the bottom of the beaker. CO2 blobs spilled onto the seafloor, rolling out of camera range. Might CO2 harm undersea ecosystems? A passing fish thought of eating a CO2 blob, sniffed it and became dizzy.
Ice meltdown seen as natural
Global warming suspected in slow collapse of Antarctic sheet
The massive West Antarctic ice sheet may melt down completely in a process triggered thousands of years ago, not from global warming. Increasingly documented melting and recent icebergs breaking off from Antarctica increases concerns that human-induced climate change could damage Antarctica's ice sheet. The ice sheet's future may have been predetermined when the grounding line, the boundary between floating ice and ice thick enough to reach the sea floor, retreat was triggered in early Holocene times 10,000 years ago. The line receded 800 miles since the last ice age, withdrawing an average 400 feet a year the past 7,600 years. Melting rates since early Holocene compare to today's rate. Collapse appears part of an ongoing natural cycle probably caused by rising sea level initiated by melting Northern Hemisphere ice sheets at the end of the last ice age. Continued shrinking of the ice sheet, perhaps even complete disintegration, could well be inevitable. The ice sheet's disappearance is of concern because of estimates that its complete melting could raise sea level 15 - 20 feet, swamping low-lying coastal communities. At current rates of melting it will take 7,000 years.