
Next week, more than 100 of the nation’s most dynamic and entrepreneurial thought leaders on climate will descend on Snowmass, Colorado for four days of intense discussions revolving around the urgency of creating solutions to climate change.
American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) convenes Aug. 8-13 in Snowmass Village for its 12th annual summit. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will kick off the summit.
Mission Blue oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earl will also be featured. Rudd and Earl are among a diverse group of speakers that include author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and Rocky Mountain Institute’s Chief Scientist Amory Lovins, as well as UN Foundation’s Tim Wirth, Gen. Wesley Clark of Growth Energy, China’s “Solar King” Huang Ming and former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter of the Center for the New Energy Economy, among dozens more.
Modern Luxury Aspen magazine calls AREDAY, “The go-to destination conference for political leaders, energy billionaires, scientists, communicators and activists who want to be part of the solution to the global energy equation.” It also notes that in the past 11 years, AREDAY has grown to become, "... a global gathering that gives the Aspen Ideas Festival a complementary intellectual jamboree for those who want to influence the world."
This year’s theme is "Racing Climate Change: Green Bridge with China, the Road to Paris.” Growing global climate change challenges, coupled with the road leading up to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris this December, have thrust a multitude of critical issues toward a tipping point that requires increased momentum and urgent action, according to American Renewable Energy Institute's founders Chip Comins and Sally Ranney.
Among the 100+ participants at the conference will be CEOS of private companies and non-profit organizations, government policy makers, college professors and other educators, religious leaders, researchers, scientists, engineers, inventors, politicians, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, environmental activists, filmmakers and media.
Topics for the summit’s four-day speaker series focus on global climate issues, including bilateral leadership between the U.S. and China and the gathering of 192 countries at COP21. Speakers will address new ideas in renewable energy—solar, wind, biofuels and efficiency—as well as Earth, atmospheric, ocean and forest systems, food security, water and the rapid decline of the biosphere. Other highlights include solutions around leading-edge breakthroughs in clean tech, energy efficiency and energy storage, investment and financial opportunities, and educational initiatives.
This year’s AREDAY Summit commences with the Impact Film Festival on Aug. 8, at the Westin Snowmass. In addition, Academy Award- winning filmmaker Louie Psihoyos ("The Cove") will be screening his new documentary, "Racing Extinction," on Aug. 11.
The four-day summit speaker series, will be followed on Aug. 13 by an afternoon and evening renewable energy expo on the Snowmass Mall and an evening concert with Taj Mahal.
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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