On a hot and humid day, on a scheduled hike in the lowlands of the Amazon forest, we hopped out of our canoe and started on what we thought was originally just a day hike. Within minutes we hear this deep, low-pitched booming call in the distance instantaneously recognized to be the call of a red howler monkey. Our Huarani guide Ramon immediately picks up pace and with one swift movement of the machete we realize that that morning was going to be special. We quickly gathered and within seconds the three of us, Dr. Hopkins and Ramon had made an unspoken agreement that we were about to chase these monkeys down. Despite the fact that these calls could be heard for miles the volume of the howler vocalizations continued to grow louder as Ramon led us closer to their location. What’s amazing is that Ramon, armed only with a machete and the head on his shoulders, led us through the incredibly dense understory of the Amazon, and not for a second did any of us doubt his sense of direction. The three of us proceeded with laser focus moving swifter through the forest than we had at any point prior to this adventure. Before we knew it we found ourselves, panting and sweaty, standing at the base of their tree tired but in awe of the situation that had just unfolded. A moment unplanned, but a memory that won’t be forgotten.
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When the first call of the howler monkeys was heard, it felt like Christmas morning. At the time I wasn’t really focused on anything particular. It was one of our first hikes into the Amazon so I was trying to take in the amazing scenery. However, when I heard the first low-pitched booming call I immediately knew what was in the canopy only a couple hundred feet away. In a previous class taught by Dr. Moore, I had learned about Howler monkeys and their protective behavior, but I never expected to ever hear one out in the jungle. I immediately looked back at Dr. Hopkins, wide-eyed, and a big smile on my face. After a few calls, Ramon already started to pick up speed because he knew that Howler monkeys were a rare occurrence, especially for visitors like ourselves. As we started going off trail, the excitement grew bigger and bigger. Each step towards the Howlers resulted in louder, low pitched calls filling the air. I was constantly looking down at my feet so I wouldn’t fall (even though I completely wiped out going down a muddy hill) and looking up to see if I could locate the source of the sound. We tried to be as silent as we could as to not let them know that we were near, but I think that we were all on the same page that day, frequently looking back at each other, making sure that everyone stuck together (even when I fell). Overall it was one of the most memorable moments of the trip, and the classroom to field experience is something that I will never forget.
Mantled howler (Alouatta seniculus) howling in a tree
I remember I was looking at the remains of a dead spider with one of our guides when the calls started. He was explaining something to me which I remember being pretty cool, but as soon as I heard the growl of the howlers I tuned him out and my brain began churning. How could I best capture this experience both for my research project’s sake, and for my own personal fascination with this sound I had only heard on recordings that was occurring in nature before my very ears. I left my guide (rather more impolitely than I care to say) and just stood and listened in awe. This was really happening. After taking the moment in I quickly switched perspectives to how to best collect data. I opened up an audio recording that would be running for the remainder of the venture and caught the sounds of the howler monkeys just as well as some professional recordings if I do say so myself.
I caught up with my group members who were standing next to Ramon and Dr. Hopkins waiting for me to show up so that we could leave. No words were spoken, but it was clear we were going to follow Ramon towards the Howlers because he was going whether we were following or not and nothing was going to keep any of us from living out our wildest jungle dreams. Before I knew it the four of us were chasing after this native Huaorani guide swinging a machete through the dense Amazonian jungle approaching the booming roar of these howler monkeys. Now if that isn’t the most bad ass thing I’ve done in my life I’m way cooler than I thought. Now me and my group members are typically pretty boisterous and care-free stumbling around the jungle like the hopeless little Americans we are. But during this time there was a little Huaorani in all of us. We were flying through the forest gracefully and more focused than I have ever been on our final destination. We were moving at such a pace that I began sweating and panting getting drenched in the humidity that encompassed us. However, I felt no fatigue as the ever-present and increasing power of the Howler calls pulled me toward them. It seemed it would be impossible to tear my attention away from these monkeys, but I could not help but marvel at how graceful Ramon was as he streamed through his element just as excited to find the Howlers as we were. He moved with such ease it now seems that he is out of place in every other situation I’ve seen him in since. This is what he was meant to do, and I got to see him in his full glory.
This exhilarating experience is exactly what study abroad classes are supposed to present to students. I can learn all about the culture of the Huaorani and the biology and behavior of howler monkeys from a classroom, but that will never be able to replicate how it feels to experience it.
As we are on the trail I hear a loud growl filling the forest. Immediately I know it’s howler monkeys. We all begin to slowly walk towards the sound, with Ramon leading he begins to point in a direction that is off-trail. The three of us and Dr. Hopkins all look at each other, and agree to go. We all begin to move rather quickly through the forest, it grows thicker as we move closer. Taking some slips and falls along the way, I kept thinking how amazing this is. We are trekking through the amazon rainforest in pursuit of howler monkeys while being lead by a Woaroni man. This is a moment that nothing can compare to and I will remember forever.
– Julia Morrow, VT Undergraduate student, Biological Sciences
In today’s competitive research environment, developing an innovative and compelling project that makes an impact is more important than ever.
Whether focusing on issues of obesity prevention, improved decision-making about the built environment, or the effects of role models in reducing educational inequalities, researchers must demonstrate the merit of their ideas and a strong track record to secure external funding to move their research agendas forward.
The mission of the Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment (ISCE) is to support faculty to do just that. As part of its signature ISCE Scholars Program, the institute has awarded six interdisciplinary teams seed funding for 2018-2019 to prepare them to successfully compete for external funding through such agencies as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and other sources of public and private funding.
The ISCE Scholars Program provides up to $30,000 for one year of funding for interdisciplinary teams to develop their projects and enhance their chances of success with outside funding sources.
“The six new projects show the breadth and depth of social and behavioral research engaged in by faculty supported by ISCE,” said Karen Roberto, ISCE director. “Their work addresses contemporary issues at the individual, community, and societal level that require interdisciplinary approaches. It’s this kind of collaboration that attracts the attention of external funding agencies and decision makers.”
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The 2018-2019 ISCE Scholars include seed funds for a project involving GCC Faculty Affiliate, Todd Schenk:
Sustainable Renewable Energy Facilities Siting Project: Development and Testing of Sustainable Siting Process
Ron Meyers, Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Todd Schenk, Urban Affairs and Planning
Peter Sforza, Center for Geospatial Information Technology
W. Mark Ford, U.S. Geological Survey, VA Cooperative Research Unit
A rapid transition to renewable energy sources is integral to meeting greenhouse gas emissions targets and other sustainability objectives. Real or perceived issues with renewables projects include: visual/aural landscape changes, depressed property values, health impacts, inequitable distribution of compensation and benefits, procedural injustice, and impacts on wildlife. Opposition delays or stops many projects. Even when successful, developers expend significant resources defending projects in legal, political, and public relations arenas. Developers and other proponents need to identify and adopt siting processes that proactively address stakeholder concerns and engage them to facilitate consensus around proposals. This project integrates public policy, information technology, and social sciences to devise and test improved processes to better engage stakeholders in siting processes. We will develop a methodology for stakeholder engagement and process facilitation, an immersive 3-D visualization and aural model in which stakeholders can experience potential siting options and their impact, and survey instruments to measure project outcomes. A significant component of the project is the development of virtual representations for proposed siting projects using advanced computational modeling. The model approach will be tested with a hypothetical proposal for a wind farm on Virginia Tech land. Our goal is to demonstrate a proof of concept for our proposed processes and technology, increasing the potential to secure future industry funding.
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Many of the projects align with Virginia Tech’s Destination Areas and Strategic Growth Areas, including the Adaptive Brain and Behavior, Data and Decisions, Global Systems Science, Integrated Security, and Intelligent Infrastructure for Human-Centered Communities destination areas, as well as the Equity and Social Disparity in the Human Condition and Policy strategic growth areas.
Written by Evania Sempeles, Undergraduate Student, VT Biological Sciences
Adults repeat the mantra “patience is a virtue” to children in an attempt to control their disorderly behavior from an early age. Everyone has heard the phrase at some point in their lives, but not many people reflect on the words and actively practice patience.
To many, the hustle of work, school, and family pulls us in all directions yet it still feels as though we aren’t “doing enough”. We feel rushed, anxious, and stressed that we aren’t receiving results immediately. This is increasingly true in the age of quick and easy Google searches, emails, and communication literally at your fingertips. Keeping up with friends, colleagues, and coworkers can cause you to feel the pressure of society telling us to be “productive” or “busy”. In my opinion, this toxic mindset is caused by measuring our self-worth based on the monetary value of our output.
Being at the Shiripuno Lodge has given me time to decompress from the world of fast success and immediate satisfaction. Of course, not having cell service or access to the internet has been a bit of an adjustment, but the real patience comes from the lessons in the forest.
Seemingly-dead orchids that have been given tender care will sprout vibrant green stalks if given some time and a chance at a new life. This same patience can be applied when staring at an empty hummingbird feeder for hours or chasing after monkeys for days. When butterfly eggs are collected, patience is practiced every day until metamorphosis is completed and the identity of the butterfly is revealed. Patience is practiced when learning a new skill, such as basket weaving, when the sides fall apart or the pattern is forgotten and frustration sets in.
As Fernando Vaca says, “patience is nurturing”, as the jungle both teaches us valuable lessons and helps us to grow like its beautiful orchids.
Greetings from the cloud forest!! We completed the first leg of our adventure in the lowland Amazon rainforest. Toucans, tarantulas, hoatzins, scarlet macaws, and caiman…just to name a handful of the species we observed in one of the most biodiverse places on earth. The Shiripuno Lodge made us feel at home in the most remote place most folks in our group will ever experience. The rainfall was epic, even by Amazon standards. A lifetime of experiences and stories, and considerable personal growth for students as they learn more about their own capabilities by being challenged physically and mentally. Everyone was sad to leave the lowlands, but the next leg of our adventure began yesterday as we ascended into the Andean foothills of the eastern slope. A photo of the Sumaco Volcano from our drive was a precursor to our adventures to come in the cloud forest (pictured below). Nine species of hummingbirds before breakfast today…not too shabby. Look for a sequence of blog posts from the students in the coming days that describe some of our lowland adventures.
Sumaco Volcanoe is an active volcano located in the Eastern Ecuadorian Cloud Forest and Foothills, before entering into the lowlands of the Amazon Basin. Photo by Bill Hopkins.
Peter Vikesland, professor of the civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named the Nick Prillaman Professor in Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
Peter Vikesland
The professorship was established in 1986 by Prillaman, a member of the Class of 1949 who majored in chemical engineering. The professorship recognizes teaching and research excellence in the College of Engineering and is held for five years.
A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2011, Vikesland’s research involves the application of fundamental chemical principles to the study of natural and engineered systems. His present focus is on the use of nanotechnology for the detection and remediation of environmental contaminants and ongoing studies to examine the potentially damaging impacts of nanotechnology on environmental systems.
Vikesland serves as the director of the Sustainable Nanotechnology Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program, one of 14 interdisciplinary programs administered through the Graduate School. He has secured a prestigious $2.6 million National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure award and received a five-year $3.6 million Partnership in International Research and Education (PIRE) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Vikesland applies his knowledge in analytical chemistry, aquatic chemistry, and public health to a variety of topics, including the development of nano-enabled sensors for the tracking of pathogens and their DNA; determining the environmental impacts of nanoparticles as contaminants; determining the triggers and kinetics of disinfection by-product formation; and characterizing the chemical properties of aerosols. This work has been critically important to developing integrated environmental engineering designs to promote public health.
Vikesland’s research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award and he was recently elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has published 90 peer-reviewed journal articles, edited three books, and written two book chapters.
An innovative educator, Vikesland typically teaches three courses per year. In addition to developing new graduate-level civil and environmental engineering courses in Advanced Environmental Chemistry, Nanotechnology for Sustainable Engineering, and Environmental Organic Chemistry, he also regularly taught undergraduate courses in public health engineering and Introduction to Environmental Engineering. He has advised or co-advised 11 Ph.D. students and 14 master’s degree students to completion and has advised or co-advised nearly 70 undergraduate research projects.
Vikesland received his bachelor’s degree at Grinnell College and his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.
Temperatures over both the Lower 48 United States and the planet have steadily warmed in recent decades. Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in Britain, sought to illustrate this warming in the most straightforward way possible.
So he created visualizations of the course of temperature over time using strictly a series of color-coded stripes. You might mistake them for modern art, carpet patterns or perhaps flags. But they are scientific representations that unambiguously reveal a long-term warming signal.
The blue stripes portray cooler years, while the reds are hot. The darkest shades of blue and red depict those cold and hot years that were most extreme.
For the both the Lower 48 states and the planet, the progression from more blue to more red over time is crystal clear.
“I wanted to communicate temperature changes in a way that was simple and intuitive,” Hawkins said in an email. “This visualization removes all the distractions of standard graphs and allows the viewer to just see the long-term trends and variations in temperature without needing to interpret anything else.”
For the Lower 48 visualization (above featured image), you don’t need to be told that the four warmest years on record (2015, 2017, 2016, and 2012) have occurred since 2012 and that eight of the 10 warmest years have happened since 1998. The visualization shows you.
The progression from blue to red for the whole planet (below) is even more stark, due to less year-to-year and decade-to-decade variability in temperature. It plainly illustrates that the four warmest years on record happened over the last four years and that 17 of the 18 warmest years have occurred since 2001.
Visualization of the average world temperature, from 1895 to 2017, using NOAA data. Each stripe is color-coded to represent the temperature of a particular year. (Ed Hawkins)
These stripes are among many visualizations Hawkins has constructed that have resonated among science communicators. His best-known visualizations are his “climate spirals,” which debuted two years ago.
Hopkins, who directs the Global Change Center, housed in Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Science Institute, focuses much of his research on physiological ecology and wildlife ecotoxicology, particularly in the ways that wildlife are affected by human disturbances to the environment. Though he studies a variety of wildlife, much of Hopkins’ research focuses on birds.
“I’ve always been fascinated with birds,” Hopkins said. “As an undergraduate, I completed my first research internship working with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. My job was to locate bald eagle nests throughout the state. It was an unbelievable summer, and I walked away excited about birds and conservation biology in general.”
William Hopkins
Hopkins’ interest in birds ultimately prompted him to lead the charge within the College of Natural Resource and Environment to build the Research Aviary, which opened in 2015. One of few such university facilities in the region, it features 16 replicated aviary rooms and provides opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to gain research experience.
“The aviary was important to me because we have so many talented people working on bird biology at Virginia Tech. Having a space where we could have flocks of birds under more controlled conditions and study things like disease dynamics and social group interactions has really opened a lot of new research opportunities,” he said.
Hopkins’ current research focuses on the relationships between bird parents and their offspring. Working with his students, he has recently published more than a dozen papers exploring incubation behaviors in birds and how this parental behavior affects the developing embryos and fledglings.
“This work is interesting from an ecological and evolutionary perspective, but it’s also important when considering factors like human disturbance, pollution, or even severe weather events that might disrupt parental behavior,” he explained. “It has implications both for understanding basic bird biology and understanding avian conservation.”
Hopkins’ other area of research involves pollutants and their effects on birds.
“A lot of the work focuses on how birds maternally transfer pollutants to eggs and then to babies, and also important effects of pollutants on bird physiology,” he said. “Recently, we’ve been studying industrial spills and developing simple tools to assess bird health in the field. We’ve been able to apply those tools to birds affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Our research will help us assess how birds respond to large-scale disasters and better assess the ecological damage caused by these events that might otherwise go undetected.”
While much of Hopkins’ research focuses on birds, he is also interested in amphibians and reptiles, particularly snapping turtles and the eastern hellbender salamander. Much of that research follows similar themes, as Hopkins works to understand the ways that parents interact with their offspring and what implications those interactions have for the babies as they develop.
Hopkins regularly employs undergraduate and graduate students in his lab. In 2008, he established a faculty mentor program, Facilitated Learning for Developing Graduate Experiences (FLeDGE), with support from the National Science Foundation. The program facilitates reciprocal learning by pairing a graduate student or postdoctoral mentor with an undergraduate researcher for an extended 18- to 24-month research endeavor.
“The experiences I had early in my career working with birds got me excited about research and have stuck with me. If I hadn’t had someone give me that chance, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today, so I try to create research and experiential learning opportunities whenever I can,” he said.
The aviary that Hopkins oversees has already created research experiences for more than 15 undergraduate students.
“I was incredibly surprised and humbled when I found out about the award,” Hopkins said. “I look at past recipients, and I hold all of them in such high esteem. I’m honored to have my name associated with them and with Dr. Byrd.”
The Virginia Society of Ornithology’s annual outstanding scientific achievement award was established in honor of Mitchell A. Byrd, a pioneer of wildlife conservation in Virginia. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in forestry and wildlife from Virginia Tech. Byrd joined the faculty at the College of William and Mary in 1956, where he later served as chairman of the biology department, leading it to national recognition, and founded the Center for Conservation Biology. He devoted much of his career to aiding the recovery of the threatened bald eagle and peregrine falcon in Virginia.
From Vector, the Boston Children’s clinical and research innovation blog
BY KAT J. MCALPINE|
Over-prescribing has long been thought to increase antibiotic resistance in bacteria. But could much bigger environmental pressures be at play?
While studying the role of climate on the distribution of antibiotic resistance across the geography of the U.S., a multidisciplinary team of epidemiologists from Boston Children’s Hospital found that higher local temperatures and population densities correlate with higher antibiotic resistance in common bacterial strains. Their findings were published today in Nature Climate Change.
“The effects of climate are increasingly being recognized in a variety of infectious diseases, but so far as we know this is the first time it has been implicated in the distribution of antibiotic resistance over geographies,” says the study’s lead author, Derek MacFadden, MD, an infectious disease specialist and research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. “We also found a signal that the associations between antibiotic resistance and temperature could be increasing over time.”
During their study, the team assembled a large database of U.S. antibiotic resistance in E. coli, K. pneumoniae and S. aureus, pulling from hospital, laboratory and disease surveillance data documented between 2013 and 2015. Altogether, their database comprised more than 1.6 million bacterial specimens from 602 unique records across 223 facilities and 41 states.
Rising temperatures, rising antibiotic resistance
Not surprisingly, when looking at antibiotic prescription rates across geographic areas, the team found that increased prescribing was associated with increased antibiotic resistance across all the pathogens that they investigated.
But then, after adjusting for prescriptions rates and other factors, when the team mapped out the latitude coordinates and mean and median local temperatures of their data points, they found that higher local average minimum temperatures correlated strongly with antibiotic resistance. Local average minimum temperature increases of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) were associated with 4.2, 2.2 and 3.6 percent increases in antibiotic resistant strains of E. coli, K. pneumoniae, and S. aureus, respectively.
“Estimates outside of our study have already told us that there will already be a drastic and deadly rise in antibiotic resistance in coming years,” says the paper’s co-senior author John Brownstein, PhD, chief innovation officer and director of the Computational Epidemiology Group at Boston Children’s and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “But with our findings that climate change could be compounding and accelerating an increase in antibiotic resistance, the future prospects could be significantly worse than previously thought.”
Population growth = more chances for antibiotic resistance to spread?
More unsettling still were some newly-discovered associations with population density. The team found that an increase of 10,000 people per square mile was associated with three and six percent respective increases in antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative E. coli and K. pneumoniae. In contrast, population density did not appear to significantly affect the antibiotic resistance of Gram- positive S. aureus.
The Gram method of differentiating bacteria — named after the method’s inventor, a scientist named Hans Christian Gram — uses a violet dye to tell whether a bacterial species has a cell wall made up of thin or thick layers. Thicker Gram-positive bacteria, which are so-called because they retain more of the violet dye than their thinner Gram-negative counterparts, are typically more susceptible to antibiotics because despite their thickness, they lack an outer cell membrane.
“Population growth and increases in temperature and antibiotic resistance are three phenomena that we know are currently happening on our planet,” says the study’s co-senior author Mauricio Santillana, PhD, who is a faculty member in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s and an assistant professor at HMS. “But until now, hypotheses about how these phenomena relate to each other have been sparse. We need to continue bringing multidisciplinary teams together to study antibiotic resistance in comparison to the backdrop of population and environmental changes.”
MacFadden says transmission factors are of particular interest for further scientific research.
“As transmission of antibiotic resistant organisms increases from one host to another, so does the opportunity for ongoing evolutionary selection of resistance due to antibiotic use,” MacFadden says. “We hypothesize that temperature and population density could act to facilitate transmission and thus increases in antibiotic resistance.”
“The bottom line is that our findings highlight a dire need to invest more research efforts into improving our understanding of the interconnectedness of infectious disease, medicine and our changing environment,” Brownstein concludes.
In addition to MacFadden, Brownstein and Santillana, additional authors on the study are Sarah McGough and David Fisman.
This work was supported by a Canadian Institute for Health Research Fellowship, the Clinician Scientist Program at University of Toronto’s Department of Medicine and the National Library of Medicine (NIH R01 LM011965).
Some say location is everything, but when it comes to land conservation and management, it’s a landowner’s involvement and interest in working the land that matter more than residing on the property.
Clearing shrubs from grasslands is one of several conservation practices landowners can employ on their property.
The research is part of a larger effort funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to understand how private landowners in Texas employ conservation management practices on their land.
According to Rajala, this study is important because “to better understand how people manage their land, we need to better understand how they connect with their land.”
One aspect of this connection, and the focus of the study, was to determine how to define an absentee landowner and whether private landowners who do not live on their land year-round manage it differently than those who do.
“We wanted to provide clarification about what it means to be an absentee landowner,” explained Sorice, a faculty member in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation who also is affiliated with the Global Change Center housed in Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Science Institute. “The terms nonresident, part-time resident, weekend resident, or seasonal landowners have all been used to characterize different forms of absenteeism, and there is a wide range of ways to measure it.”
“As a result,” he continued, “there are inconsistent findings that inhibit a clear understanding of the relationship between absentee landowners and private lands conservation.”
Thus, the Virginia Tech researchers chose to instead focus on involvement with the land as a way to clarify the absentee landowner concept.
To understand the degree to which landowners are actively involved with managing their land, the researchers sent mail surveys to approximately 800 private landowners. The surveys included questions about whether the landowners resided full time on their land and how much time they spent managing their property and employing conservation practices.
A specific line of questioning also included the landowner’s involvement in brush management on their property. According to Rajala, “Woody plants encroaching on grasslands has become a big problem in the southern Great Plains, so in addition to asking how involved landowners are on their property, we selected woody plant reduction as the focus of our study.”
The results revealed that high percentages of both full-time and absentee landowners had noticed woody plant encroachment on their property, and both groups reported engaging in brush management efforts. Ultimately, there was little difference between the level of brush management effort reported by both groups. Instead, the differences appeared between landowners who reported being actively engaged with their land and those who did not.
“Simply knowing whether landowners reside on their land full time or how far they live from their land does not provide insight into brush management or other conservation behavior,” Rajala explained. “Good land management is less a matter of whether you live on your land and more about how involved you are in working on your land.
“There are individuals who live on their land full time who aren’t involved with land management or decision-making at all, and there are others who live 50 miles away and commute to the property to engage with the land on a daily basis,” she said.
Ultimately, the study suggests that to understand issues like woody plant encroachment and other invasive species, natural resource managers should look beyond landowner traits and focus on how they think about their land.
“It’s not the characteristic of living on one’s land that matters,” Rajala concluded. “Instead, it’s the way they think about land ownership that influences if and how they interact with it. That, in turn, influences how they will manage their property.”
This research was funded by a grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Conservation Effects Assessment Project and supported by the National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program.
For 400 consecutive months — that’s more than 33 years — the earth’s temperature has been above average, and climatologists aren’t mincing words as to why.
The dubious milestone was reported in the April edition of NOAA’s monthly global climate report. The report also states that this April had the third-highest temperatures of any April since NOAA began collecting such records in 1880.
“It’s mainly due to anthropogenic (human-caused) warming,” NOAA climatologst Ahira Sanchez told CNN. “Climate change is real, and we will continue to see global temperatures increase in the future.”
There are natural causes for warmer years, too.
“If you were to remove the human factor, you would still see a variability, but it would be up and down,” Sanchez says.
Natural factors like the warming effects of an El Niño or the cooling effects of a La Niña have an impact on global average temperatures.
2016 was the warmest year on record, and it featured a strong El Niño system.
Similarly, during significant volcano eruptions, global temperatures can go down because the ash and smog deflects solar radiation away from the earth.
When climatologists talk about temperatures and averages, they are comparing the numbers to the 20th Century averages of a given month or year. So “higher than average,” in this case, means higher than the average temperatures of the 100 years between 1900 and 2000.
The bottom line is, 18 of the warmest 19 years have occurred since 2000. While natural factors can account for some of those anomalies, NOAA scientists say the overall pattern is definitely not natural.
