Studying aphids offers new OAC prof an entree to climate change debate
BY ANDREW VOWLES
It's Feb. 16 — Kyoto Day, the day the global climate change accord comes into effect in Canada. Good or bad? Prof. Jonathan Newman, Environmental Biology, considers before replying: “On the whole, it's a good day.”
Calling the Kyoto agreement “an imperfect treaty, but a good first step,” Newman applauds the federal government's move to implement the accord. Ottawa has yet to develop a detailed strategy for meeting Canada's commitments under the climate treaty. But the recently arrived Guelph scientist sees hope in the country's promise to get serious about cutting emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Characteristically, Newman's enthusiasm is tempered by considerations of other currents — scientific, political, even ethical — drifting through the atmosphere of that “imperfect treaty.” He recognizes the heated and sometimes acrimonious debate that has swirled around global warming, particularly in the run-up to the accord's implementation in Canada last month.
Part of that debate was triggered by research by U of G economics professor Ross McKitrick, whose recent study of the so-called “hockey stick” model of global temperature change over the past century has cast doubt on the science underlying the argument for Kyoto itself. Referring to McKitrick and his co-author, Newman says: “They seem to have found a real problem with that piece of work.”
Layer in political issues and the problem of explaining risk and probability to a public looking for relatively simple answers, and it's little wonder that skepticism abounds over the benefits of Kyoto and even about the nature of the problem to begin with. Newman still subscribes to the consensus stated in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change embodied in Kyoto: “The body of evidence for climate change is sufficiently strong to warrant our serious attention.”
It's an issue that has claimed his attention in recent years and one that continues to occupy him here at Guelph. He studies the effects of climate change on cereal aphids and their temperate grassland surroundings.
Apart from what these insects may tell us about global warming, he says they're important to agronomists because they're serious plant pests that carry disease-causing viruses harmful to cereal crops worldwide.
“Like most ecologists, I'm more interested in questions than in systems.”
Leaving control efforts to other researchers, Newman hopes to use the aphid — and associated grasses and fungi whose toxic compounds can also poison grazing animals — as a system for tracking the effects of changes in carbon dioxide, temperature and other climate change variables. Ecologists have found that those factors affect populations of aphids, although their results have been ambiguous.
Newman's work suggests it's important to account for variables other than CO2 and temperature, including amounts of nitrogen in the system. He has developed mathematical models to predict how varying temperature and CO2 especially affects this system, using data from the U.K. Climate Impacts Program.
Until last summer, Newman's home base was England, where he was a zoology lecturer at Oxford University. That posting was actually a return engagement. Following his undergraduate and PhD studies in biology and ecology at the State University of New York, he had landed a post-doc at Oxford, then returned to the States for a faculty position at Southern Illinois University.
This semester, Newman will give research lectures in various departments and units on topics ranging from education to climate change to the ethics of animal use. His interest in bioethics overlaps with that of his partner and Oxford colleague, Prof. Georgia Mason. Last spring, Mason was offered a Canada Research Chair in Animal Welfare at U of G, which prompted Newman to look for a position here as well.
Explaining his interest in bioethics, he says solving environmental problems involves more than just science.
“Climate change research can answer questions about what might happen, and bioethics can address the question of what we ought to do about what might happen.”
