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Yellow fever killing thousands of monkeys in Brazil 

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Yellow fever killing thousands of monkeys in Brazil 

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Strier, a University of Wisconsin anthropology professor, has recently been studying the monkeys in southeastern Brazil along with Brazilian scientists. They have found the monkeys are dying at an alarming rate due to Yellow Fever. They are continuing their studies of the brown howler monkeys and expanding them to observe how the monkeys social groups have changed now that so many  of them have died.
The scientists have also discovered that Yellow Fever can now easily spread to different patches of the forest, despite the distances between them. The dead monkeys can also alert people and villages when Yellow Fever is present, because they are affected first.
Strier still has hope that the howler monkey population will recover and she eager to study the changes in their social behaviors.

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In a vulnerable forest in southeastern Brazil, where the air was once thick with the guttural chatter of brown howler monkeys, there now exists silence.

Yellow fever, a virus carried by mosquitoes and endemic to Africa and South America, has robbed the private, federally-protected reserve of its brown howlers in an unprecedented wave of death that has swept through the region since late 2016, killing thousands of monkeys.

Karen Strier, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of anthropology, has studied the monkeys of this forest since 1983. She visited the reserve -- her long-term study site near the city of Caratinga -- in the state of Minas Gerais, in January of 2017. "It was just silence, a sense of emptiness," she says. "It was like the energy was sucked out of the universe."

Using what in some cases are decades of historical data, Strier and a team of Brazilian scientists focused on studying primates in Brazil's patchwork Atlantic Forest are poised to help understand and manage what happens next. They have never seen monkeys perish in such numbers, so quickly, from disease.

With her Brazilian counterpart Sérgio Lucena Mendes, a professor of animal biology at the Universidade Federal de Espirito Santo, and their former postdoctoral researcher, Carla Possamai, Strier is ready to census the monkeys that remain at the reserve, comparing the new data to prior censuses performed in the forest. They also plan to study how the surviving brown howler monkeys regroup and restructure their societies, since their existing social groups have been destroyed.

Strier's study forest, just 4 square miles in size, is a land-locked island of green surrounded by agricultural and pasture lands. How yellow fever showed up here is a mystery, and the monkeys in the forest have nowhere else to go. Less than 10 percent of Brazil's Atlantic Forest remains intact and much of it exists only as small patches in a fragmented landscape.

"I am very surprised at the speed with which the outbreak is advancing through the landscape and by how the virus can jump from one patch of forest to another, even if they are hundreds of meters apart," says Mendes. "It is also surprising that it is spreading across such a large geographic region."

The way yellow fever has spread also concerns Brazilian health officials. As of mid-March 2017, they have confirmed more than 400 human cases of the disease, mostly in Minas Gerais, causing nearly 150 human deaths. The Brazilian Ministry of Health is investigating another 900 possible cases and concern is mounting that it will spread to cities, threatening many more people.

Brazilian authorities also want to protect the monkeys from people who fear the animals may be spreading the disease. "We need to show that they help inform when the virus arrives in a region, because being more sensitive than humans, they die first," Mendes explains.

A dead monkey is like a canary in a coal mine, alerting public health officials that a pathogen may be present, mobilizing preventative and precautionary efforts. So, what does it mean when so many have perished?

"No one really knows the consequences for the other primates or the forest when nearly the entire population of an abundant species dies from disease in just a few months," says Strier. "We are in a position to learn things we never knew before, with all the background information that we have collected."

Nearly two decades ago, Strier helped expand and secure protection for the primates at her study forest, which include four monkey species: the brown howler, the black capuchin, the buffy-headed marmoset and, Strier's animal of interest, the critically-endangered northern muriqui.

It is too soon to say whether the howler monkey population can recover but Strier remains optimistic, in large part because of a career spent studying and helping conserve the brown howler's main competitor, the muriquis. "The muriquis have shown us that it's possible for small populations of primates to recover if they are well-protected," says Strier.

When she first arrived at her study forest, known as RPPN Feliciano Miguel Abdala, there were just 50 muriquis. By September 2016, there were nearly 340, representing one-third of the species' total known population. The animals reside in just 10 forests in southeastern Brazil and nowhere else in the world. Strier's efforts and those of her colleagues have helped restore their numbers.

She is relieved that, so far, the muriquis appear to be less susceptible to yellow fever. "It was really tense -- scary -- to go into the forest, knowing the howlers were gone but not knowing how bad things might also be for the muriquis," Strier recalls.

Her long-term studies have revealed that muriquis have a lifespan of more than 40 years and she has known some of the individual muriquis in the forest their entire lives. Strier can recognize individuals based on natural differences in their fur and facial markings.

Now, in the face of ecological tragedy, she and her colleagues have an opportunity to study how the muriquis adapt in a forest nearly devoid of their competitors.

"It's like a controlled natural experiment, but one you would never plan to do," Strier says. "My happy hypothesis is that the muriquis are out foraging, feasting on all the best fruits and leaves that the howlers used to eat. Will they eat more of their favorite foods, or travel less? Will their social order change? Will they form smaller groups?"

She has documented that kind of behavioral flexibility before. In the late 1980s and early 90s, the muriquis began splitting into smaller groups. In the early 2000s, as their population grew, they began spending more time on the ground, rather than in the trees, often consuming fallen fruits and even half-eaten "leftovers" under the trees.

"I feel like I am 20 years old again" she says. "I have so many questions that are important to answer, for the primates, their Atlantic forest habitat, and for the people that share their world."

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monkeys; ecology research; endangered animals; trees; nature; extinction; virology; soil types

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Yellow fever killing thousands of monkeys in Brazil

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In a vulnerable forest in southeastern Brazil, where the air was once thick with the guttural chatter of brown howler monkeys, there now exists silence. Yellow fever, a virus carried by mosquitoes and endemic to Africa and South America, has robbed the private, federally-protected reserve of its brown howlers in an unprecedented wave of death that has swept through the region since late 2016, killing thousands of monkeys.

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Asian dust providing providing key nutrients for California's giant sequoias 

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Asian dust providing providing key nutrients for California's giant sequoias 

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Dust from the Gobi Desert and the Central Valley in California has been providing phosphorus to many plants in the Sierra Nevada. There is very little phosphorus in the Sierra Nevada and it has been a mystery as to how plant life thrived there so far. However, scientists have recently discovered how the California ecosystem is providing phosphorus to these plants. The scientists also studied how climate change would affect these dust patterns, and found that the dust would spread to more mountain regions.

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Dust from as far away as the Gobi Desert in Asia is providing more nutrients than previously thought for plants, including giant sequoias, in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, a team of scientists, including several from the University of California, Riverside, have found.

The scientists found that dust from the Gobi Desert and the Central Valley of California contributed more phosphorus for plants in the Sierra Nevadas than bedrock weathering, which is breaking down of rock buried beneath the soil. Phosophorus is one of the basic elements that plants need to survive, and the Sierra Nevadas are considered a phosphorus-limited ecosystem.

"In recent years it has been a bit of mystery how all these big trees have been sustained in this ecosystem without a lot of phosphorus in the bedrock," said Emma Aronson, an assistant professor of plant pathology and microbiology at UC Riverside. "This work begins to unravel that mystery and show that dust may be shaping this iconic California ecosystem."

Aronson is a co-author of a just-published paper in the journal Nature Communications about the research. Two other scientists with UC Riverside ties are co-authors: Chelsea Carey, a former post-doctoral researcher in Aronson's lab; and Jon Botthoff, a field technician at the university's Center for Conservation Biology.

The study may help scientists predict the impacts of climate change which is expected to increase drought and create more desert conditions around the world, possibly including California. If that happens, based on these findings, scientists expect a lot more dust moving in the atmosphere, and likely bringing phosphorus and important nutrients to far flung mountainous ecosystems.

Nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus regulate the distribution of life across Earth's surface. Therefore it is important to understand the different sources of nutrients, including underlying bedrock and wind-spread dust. Quantifying the importance of dust, which is sensitive to changes in climate and land use, is crucial for predicting how ecosystems will respond to global warming and greater use of the land.

Little is known about the role of dust in mountainous forest ecosystems, such as the Sierra Nevadas. To change that, the researchers quantified the relative importance of dust and bedrock in ecosystem nutrient supply across four sites of increasing elevation, from about 1,300 to 8,800 feet, in the Sierra Nevadas, just east of Merced.

They then combined dust they collected with existing erosion data at the same location. They captured the dust using homemade dust collectors, which consisted of non-stick bundt pans filled with glass marbles to keep the dust from blowing out. The pans were attached to 6-foot poles to prevent dust kicked up by the researchers from entering the pans.

The researchers studied the isotopic signatures in several elements in the dust to determine the place of origin of the dust. The isotopes act a fingerprint for source of origin.

The percentage of Asian dust ranged from 20 percent on average at the lowest elevation, to 45 percent on average at the highest elevation. The percentages were higher at the higher elevation sites because dust tends to travel high in the air stream and not fall unless it hits an object, such as a mountain.

The researchers found that the amount of dust from Central Valley sources was greater at lower elevations compared to higher elevations. That was expected, but they also found that more Central Valley dust was entering higher elevations later in the dry season than just after the spring rains.

"Considering we took our measurements in 2014, in the middle of the drought, this makes us think that the drought is a factor here." Aronson said.

The researchers believe their findings will hold true for other mountainous ecosystems around the world and have implications for predicting forest response to changes in climate and land use.

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nature; ecology research; endangered plants; soil types; storms; severe weather; ecology; ecosystems

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Asian dust providing key nutrients for California's giant sequoias: Researchers find that dust from the Gobi Desert is providing more phosphorus than previously thought for plants in the Sierra Nevadas

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Dust from as far away as the Gobi Desert in Asia is providing more nutrients than previously thought for plants, including giant sequoias, in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, a team of scientists, including several from the University of California, Riverside, have found.

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Large Sections of Australia's Great Reef are Now Dead, Scientists Find

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Large Sections of Australia's Great Reef are Now Dead, Scientists Find

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Large portions of the Great Barrier Reef are now dead due to over heated water, and many more sections are bleached, a sign of dying. Two thirds of the reefs are dead, and this was predicted to happen thirty years from now. The death of the reefs is yet another sign of global warming and climate change. If the earth were to lose its largest coral reefs, there would be no more fish for the people in those countries as well as reduced tourism. Not only did the increasing water temperatures lead to the death of the reefs, but also an El Nino weather pattern which happened in 2016.
The bleached sections of the reef may be able to recover with cooler water temperatures, however it will take time. The Australian has introduced efforts to restrict human activity and lower water temperatures, but a global effort will be needed to help the Great Barrier Reef. The coral may be able to save itself by moving towards the poles and cooler waters. Even though El Nino has ended the temperatures remain high enough to kill the coral.

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SYDNEY, Australia - The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world's most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears.

But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble.

Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef's most visited areas of color and life.

"We didn't expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years," said Terry P. Hughes, director of a government-funded center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead author of a paper on the reef that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature. "In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs - literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead."

The damage to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world's largest living structures, is part of a global calamity that has been unfolding intermittently for nearly two decades and seems to be intensifying. In the paper, dozens of scientists described the recent disaster as the third worldwide mass bleaching of coral reefs since 1998, but by far the most widespread and damaging.

The state of coral reefs is a telling sign of the health of the seas. Their distress and death are yet another marker of the ravages of global climate change.

If most of the world's coral reefs die, as scientists fear is increasingly likely, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with huge sums from reef tourism. In poorer countries, lives are at stake: Hundreds of millions of people get their protein primarily from reef fish, and the loss of that food supply could become a humanitarian crisis.

With this latest global bleaching in its third year, reef scientists say they have no doubt as to the responsible party.

They warned decades ago that the coral reefs would be at risk if human society kept burning fossil fuels at a runaway pace, releasing greenhouse gases that warm the ocean. Emissions continued to rise, and now the background ocean temperature is high enough that any temporary spike poses a critical risk to reefs.

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Mature stands of clonal staghorn corals on Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef could be seen destroyed by heat stress on Feb. 26, 2016, at left, and colonized by algae just a few weeks later on April 19, at right. Credit Photographs by Terry Hughes et al./Nature

"Climate change is not a future threat," Professor Hughes said. "On the Great Barrier Reef, it's been happening for 18 years."

Corals require warm water to thrive, but they are exquisitely sensitive to extra heat. Just two or three degrees Fahrenheit of excess warming can sometimes kill the tiny creatures.

Globally, the ocean has warmed by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century, by a conservative calculation, and a bit more in the tropics, home to many reefs. An additional kick was supplied by an El Niño weather pattern that peaked in 2016 and temporarily warmed much of the surface of the planet, causing the hottest year in a historical record dating to 1880.

It was obvious last year that the corals on many reefs were likely to die, but now formal scientific assessments are coming in. The paper in Nature documents vast coral bleaching in 2016 along a 500-mile section of the reef north of Cairns, a city on Australia's eastern coast.

Bleaching indicates that corals are under heat stress, but they do not always die and cooler water can help them recover. Subsequent surveys of the Great Barrier Reef, conducted late last year after the deadline for inclusion in the Nature paper, documented that extensive patches of reef had in fact died, and would not be likely to recover soon, if at all.

Professor Hughes led those surveys. He said that he and his students cried when he showed them maps of the damage, which he had calculated in part by flying low in small planes and helicopters.

His aerial surveys, combined with underwater measurements, found that 67 percent of the corals had died in a long stretch north of Port Douglas, and in patches, the mortality reached 83 percent.

By luck, a storm stirred the waters in the central and southern parts of the reef at a critical moment, cooling them, and mortality there was much lower - about 6 percent in a stretch off Townsville, and even lower in the southernmost part of the reef.

But an Australian government study released last week found that over all, last year brought "the highest sea surface temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef on record."

The shadow of an airplane fell on bleached coral in the northern Great Barrier Reef in March 2016. Credit James Kerry/ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

Only 9 percent of the reef has avoided bleaching since 1998, Professor Hughes said, and now, the less remote, more heavily visited stretch from Cairns south is in trouble again. Water temperatures there remain so high that another round of mass bleaching is underway, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority confirmed last week.

Professor Hughes said he hoped the die-off this time would not be as serious as last year's, but "back-to-back bleaching is unheard-of in Australia." The central and southern part of the reef had already been badly damaged by human activities like dredging and pollution.

The Australian government has tried to combat these local threats with its Reef 2050 plan, restricting port development, dredging and agricultural runoff, among other risks. But Professor Hughes's research found that, given the high temperatures, these national efforts to improve water quality were not enough.

"The reefs in muddy water were just as fried as those in pristine water," Professor Hughes said. "That's not good news in terms of what you can do locally to prevent bleaching - the answer to that is not very much at all. You have to address climate change directly."

With the election of Donald J. Trump as the American president, a recent global deal to tackle the problem, known as the Paris Agreement, seems to be in peril. Australia's conservative government also continues to support fossil fuel development, including what many scientists and conservationists see as the reef's most immediate threat - a proposed coal mine, expected to be among the world's largest, to be built inland from the reef by the Adani Group, a conglomerate based in India.

"The fact is, Australia is the largest coal exporter in the world, and the last thing we should be doing to our greatest national asset is making the situation worse," said Imogen Zethoven, campaign director for the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

Australia relies on the Great Barrier Reef for about 70,000 jobs and billions of dollars annually in tourism revenue, and it is not yet clear how that economy will be affected by the reef's deterioration. Even in hard-hit areas, large patches of the Great Barrier Reef survived, and guides will most likely take tourists there, avoiding the dead zones.

The global reef crisis does not necessarily mean extinction for coral species. The corals may save themselves, as many other creatures are attempting to do, by moving toward the poles as the Earth warms, establishing new reefs in cooler water.

But the changes humans are causing are so rapid, by geological standards, that it is not entirely clear that coral species will be able to keep up. And even if the corals do survive, that does not mean individual reefs will continue to thrive where they do now.

A photograph taken March 6 just off Cairns on the Great Barrier Reef shows a coral reef suffering from bleaching. The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing a second straight year of mass coral bleaching, scientists said. Credit Biopixel Pty Ltd., via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Coral reefs are sensitive systems, built by unusual animals. The corals themselves are tiny polyps that act like farmers, capturing colorful single-celled plants called algae that convert sunlight into food. The coral polyps form colonies and build a limestone scaffolding on which to live - a reef.

But when the water near a reef gets too hot, the algae begin producing toxins, and the corals expel them in self-defense, turning ghostly white. If water temperatures drop soon enough, the corals can grow new algae and survive, but if not, they may succumb to starvation or disease.

Even when the corals die, some reefs eventually recover. If water temperatures stay moderate, the damaged sections of the Great Barrier Reef may be covered with corals again in as few as 10 or 15 years.

But the temperature of the ocean is now high enough that global mass bleaching events seem to be growing more frequent. If they become routine, many of the world's hard-hit coral reefs may never be able to re-establish themselves.

Within a decade, certain kinds of branching and plate coral could be extinct, reef scientists say, along with a variety of small fish that rely on them for protection from predators.

"I don't think the Great Barrier Reef will ever again be as great as it used to be - at least not in our lifetimes," said C. Mark Eakin, a reef expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in Silver Spring, Md.

Dr. Eakin was an author of the new paper and heads a program called Coral Reef Watch, producing predictive maps to warn when coral bleaching is imminent. Even though last year's El Niño has ended, water temperatures are high enough that his maps are showing continued hot water across millions of square miles of the ocean.

Kim M. Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the writing of the new paper, described it and the more recent findings as accurate, and depressing. She said she saw extensive coral devastation last year off Kiritimati Island, part of the Republic of Kiribati several thousand miles from Australia and a place she visits regularly in her research.

With the international effort to fight climate change at risk of losing momentum, "ocean temperatures continue to march upward," Dr. Cobb said. "The idea that we're going to have 20 or 30 years before we reach the next bleaching and mortality event for the corals is basically a fantasy."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Great Barrier Reef Is Imperiled, Much of It Dying or Dead. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Large Sections of Australia's Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find

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SYDNEY, Australia - The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world's most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears. But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble.

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Trump Lays Plan to Reverse Obama's Climate Change Legacy

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Trump Lays Plan to Reverse Obama's Climate Change Legacy

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President Trump plans to stick to his campaign message, and reverse the climate change policies that Obama put in place. He also plans on reducing the EPA's budget by 31%. These regulations will make it impossible for the U.S. to meet the standards set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. Trump has asked the EPA director, Pruitt, to rewrite the Clean Power Plan, who's goal was to shut down coal power plants and replace them with solar farms. The administration has made many statements recently that are not accurate. Trump promised the coal miners their jobs back, when the reality is that the demand for coal has been shrinking for a long time. Trump also wants to decrease the social cost of carbon, which will provide more reasons for the administration to ignore climate control. There are still many legal issues regarding the rollback of Obama's regulations that Trump has ignored so far.

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WASHINGTON - President Trump is poised in the coming days to announce his plans to dismantle the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's climate change legacy, while also gutting several smaller but significant policies aimed at curbing global warming.

The moves are intended to send an unmistakable signal to the nation and the world that Mr. Trump intends to follow through on his campaign vows to rip apart every element of what the president has called Mr. Obama's "stupid" policies to address climate change. The timing and exact form of the announcement remain unsettled, however.

The executive actions will follow the White House's release last week of a proposed budget that would eliminate climate change research and prevention programs across the federal government and slash the Environmental Protection Agency's budget by 31 percent, more than any other agency. Mr. Trump also announced last week that he had ordered Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, to revise the agency's stringent standards on planet-warming tailpipe pollution from vehicles, another of Mr. Obama's key climate change policies.

While the White House is not expected to explicitly say the United States is withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and people familiar with the White House deliberations say Mr. Trump has not decided whether to do so, the policy reversals would make it virtually impossible to meet the emissions reduction goals set by the Obama administration under the international agreement.

In an announcement that could come as soon as Thursday or as late as next month, according to people familiar with the White House's planning, Mr. Trump will order Mr. Pruitt to withdraw and rewrite a set of Obama-era regulations known as the Clean Power Plan, according to a draft document obtained by The New York Times. The Obama rule was devised to shut down hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired power plants and freeze construction of new coal plants, while replacing them with vast wind and solar farms.

The draft also lays out options for legally blocking or weakening about a half-dozen additional Obama-era executive orders and policies on climate change.

At a campaign-style rally on Monday in the coal-mining state of Kentucky, Mr. Trump told a cheering audience that he is preparing an executive action that would "save our wonderful coal miners from continuing to be put out of work."

Experts in environmental law say it will not be possible for Mr. Trump to quickly or simply roll back the most substantive elements of Mr. Obama's climate change regulations, noting that the process presents a steep legal challenge that could take many years and is likely to end up before the Supreme Court. Economists are skeptical that a rollback of the rules would restore lost coal jobs because the demand for coal has been steadily shrinking for years.

Scientists and climate policy advocates around the world say they are watching the administration's global warming actions and statements with deep worry. Many reacted with deep concern to Mr. Pruitt's remarksthis month that he did not believe carbon dioxide was a primary driver of climate change, a statement at odds with the global scientific consensus. They also noted the remarks last week by Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, in justifying Mr. Trump's proposed cuts to climate change research programs.

"As to climate change, I think the president was fairly straightforward: We're not spending money on that anymore," Mr. Mulvaney said at a White House briefing.

"The message they are sending to the rest of the world is that they don't believe climate change is serious. It's shocking to see such a degree of ignorance from the United States," said Mario J. Molina, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist from Mexico who advises nations on climate change policy.

The policy reversals also signal that Mr. Trump has no intention of following through on Mr. Obama's formal pledges under the Paris accord, under which nearly every country in the world submitted plans detailing actions to limit global warming over the coming decade.

Under the accord as it stands, the United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse pollution about 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. That can be achieved only if the United States not only implements the Clean Power Plan and tailpipe-pollution rules, but also tightens them or adds more policies in future years.

"The message clearly is, 'We won't do what the United States has promised to do,'" Mr. Molina said.

In addition to directing Mr. Pruitt to withdraw the Clean Power Plan, the draft order instructs Attorney General Jeff Sessions to request that a federal court halt consideration of a 28-state lawsuit against the regulation. The case was argued before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in September, and the court is expected to release a decision in the coming months on whether to uphold or strike down the rule.

According to the draft, Mr. Trump is also expected to announce that he will lift a moratorium on new coal mining leases on public lands that had been announced last year by the Obama administration.

He is also expected to order White House economists to revisit an Obama-era budgeting metric known as the social cost of carbon. Economists and policy makers used the metric to place a dollar cost on the economic impact of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution: about $36 per ton. That measure formed the Obama administration's economic justification for issuing climate change regulations that would harm some industries, such as coal mining, noting that those costs would be outweighed by the economic benefits of preventing billions of tons of planet-warming pollution.

Eliminating or lowering the social cost of carbon could provide the Trump administration the economic justification for putting forth less-stringent regulations.

The draft order would also rescind an executive order by Mr. Obama that all federal agencies take climate change into account when considering any form of environmental permitting.

Unlike the rollback of the power plant and vehicle regulations, which could take years and will be subject to legal challenges, Mr. Trump can make the changes to the coal mining ban and undo Mr. Obama's executive orders with the stroke of a pen.

White House staff members and energy lobbyists who work closely with them say they have been expecting Mr. Trump to make the climate change announcements for weeks, ever since Mr. Pruitt was confirmed to head the E.P.A. on Feb. 17, but the announcement has been repeatedly rescheduled. The delays of the one-page announcement have largely been a result of disorganization and a chaotic policy and planning process, said people familiar with that process who asked to speak anonymously to avoid angering Mr. Trump.

One reason for the confusion, these people said, is internal disputes about the challenging legal process required to dismantle the Clean Power Plan. While Mr. Trump may announce with great fanfare his intent to roll back the regulations, the legal steps required to fulfill that announcement are lengthy and the outcome uncertain.

"Trump's announcements have zero impact," said Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. "They don't change existing law at all."

Much of that task will now fall to Mr. Pruitt.

"To undo the rule, the E.P.A. will now have to follow the same procedure that was followed to put the regulations in place," said Mr. Lazarus, pointing to a multiyear process of proposing draft rules, gathering public comment and forming a legal defense against an expected barrage of lawsuits almost certain to end up before the Supreme Court.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Plans Would Reverse Obama Legacy. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Trump Lays Plans to Reverse Obama's Climate Change Legacy

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WASHINGTON - President Trump is poised in the coming days to announce his plans to dismantle the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's climate change legacy, while also gutting several smaller but significant policies aimed at curbing global warming.

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We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is it Worth the Cost

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We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is it Worth the Cost

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Scientists now have the capability of resurrecting extinct species, however, it will come at a cost. The millions of dollars it would take to recreate a species, could be put towards species that are on the edge of extinction now.
However, there are scientists, such as the ones at Revive and Restore, that believe an de-extinction effort must have long term benefits that outweigh the costs. There is a lot of controversy over the benefits of reintroducing some species, however, it is clear that it will cost millions of dollars to do so. There are also concerns that habitat loss will prevent the new species from ever being successful.

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With enough determination, money and smarts, scientists just might revive the woolly mammoth, or some version of it, by splicing genes from ancient mammoths into Asian elephant DNA. The ultimate dream is to generate a sustainable population of mammoths that can once again roam the tundra.

But here's a sad irony to ponder: What if that dream came at the expense of today's Asian and African elephants, whose numbers are quickly dwindling because of habitat loss and poaching?

"In 50 years, we might not have those elephants," said Joseph Bennett, an assistant professor and conservation researcher at Carleton University in Ontario. Dr. Bennett has spent his career asking hard questions about conservation priorities. With only so much funding to go around, deciding which species to save can be a game of triage.

Recently, he and a team of colleagues confronted a new question: If molecular biologists can potentially reconstruct extinct species, such as the woolly mammoth, should society devote its limited resources to reversing past wrongs, or on preventing future extinctions?

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A stuffed male passenger pigeon that was offered at auction in 2015. The species is one of three that the group Revive & Restore aims to bring back using biotechnology. Credit Rob Stothard/Getty Images

In a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution this month, the researchers concluded that the biodiversity costs and benefits almost never come out in favor of de-extinction.

"If you have the millions of dollars it would take to resurrect a species and choose to do that, you are making an ethical decision to bring one species back and let several others go extinct," Dr. Bennett said. "It would be one step forward, and three to eight steps back."

But his team's findings do not fully resonate with all scientists. Some who are engaged in de-extinction efforts say that Dr. Bennett's analysis, and others like it, are too far removed from actual developments in the field.

One leading group in the field is Revive & Restore, a nonprofit initiative to rescue extinct and endangered species through genetic engineering and biotechnology. The San Francisco-based group is working to bring back the passenger pigeon, woolly mammoth and heath hen.

A woolly mammoth skeleton that was auctioned in 2009. Scientists have proposed splicing mammoth genes into Asian elephant DNA to bring the extinct mammals back to life. Credit Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Conservation is central to Revive & Restore's mission, said Ben Novak, the organization's lead researcher and science consultant, and there could be ecological benefits to restoring lost species. In some cases, he said, living species are endangered partly because of "the lack of an ecological partner or some link in the food web."

"Any de-extinction effort must have long-term benefits that outweigh the costs," Mr. Novak said.

He added that it is not accurate to assume, as Dr. Bennett does, that funding for de-extinction and conservation is a zero-sum game, noting that all of the funding for Revive & Rescue's biotechnologies comes from private donors or institutional grants outside the realm of conservation efforts.

De-extinction may certainly have long-term gains, Dr. Bennett acknowledged, but he fears they are a luxury the world cannot currently afford. By some estimates, 20 percent of species on Earth now face extinction, and that may rise to 50 percent by the end of the century.

In their study, Dr. Bennett and his collaborators tried to approximate the costs of re-establishing and maintaining 16 species that went extinct in the last millennium, including the Lord Howe pigeon and Eastern rat-kangaroo from Australia, and the laughing owl and Waitomo frog from New Zealand. The researchers selected these animals because they could estimate what it would cost to conserve them based on proposed government expenditures to save similar living species that are endangered.

Revive & Restore also aims to bring back the extinct Heath hen. "Any de-extinction effort must have long-term benefits that outweigh the costs," said Ben Novak, the organization's lead researcher. Credit C. Horwitz

Based on the price of conserving the endangered Chatham Island warbler from New Zealand, for instance, they determined that managing a new population of the extinct Chatham bellbird would cost $360,000 in the first year.

Because the price of genetically reconstructing extinct species is still unknown (although it could cost tens of millions of dollars), the scientists focused on how much it would cost just to reintroduce and maintain these particular species in the wild once they had already been engineered.

In New Zealand, the researchers calculated, the funds required to conserve 11 extinct species would protect three times as many living species. In New South Wales, reviving five extinct species was similar to saving more than eight times as many living species.

The problem with this analysis, said Stewart Brand, co-founder of Revive & Restore, is that "these are all species that would never be considered seriously for de-extinction in the first place," either because their ecological roles can be approximated by another living species or because the benefits of restoring them are not great enough to warrant the costs.

An illustration of an extinct huia, once found in New Zealand. The researchers who analyzed reviving extinct species found that many more living species could be conserved for the same cost. Credit Encyclopaedia Britannica, via Getty Images

He argued that Revive & Restore strictly assesses its de-extinction projects, through its own criteria and international guidelines, to ensure that they are worth doing and consistent with preserving existing biodiversity.

The passenger pigeon, for instance, was a keystone species that helped regenerate Eastern deciduous forests by landing on trees in giant flocks, breaking down their branches and excreting layers of rich fertilizer that allowed new trees to grow - a role that other birds likely cannot fill. On top of that, Mr. Brand said, the passenger pigeon has unique symbolic value as "one of the great stories of extinction."

But other scientists agree with Dr. Bennett that spending money on de-extinction is wasteful, even for a case like the passenger pigeon. Paul Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, and author of the controversial book "The Population Bomb," said that conservation is vastly underfunded and there is no guarantee that restoring extinct species will work.

To restore the passenger pigeon, Dr. Ehrlich said, you would need a large breeding population - with possibly more genetic diversity than can be gleaned from the 1,500 or so pigeons preserved in museum collections - and even then there may "not be enough habitat left for them anyway."

Dr. Bennett said "he wouldn't want to close the door on de-extinction forever." There may be some instances where it is worthwhile, he acknowledged, and pursuing it will advance research on genetic technologies.

"If someone wants to work on de-extinction because it's technically fascinating, that's fine," he said. "But if the person is couching de-extinction in terms of conservation, then she or he needs to have a very sober look at what one could do with those millions of dollars with living species - there's already plenty to do."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Steep Price for Bringing Animals Back. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is It Worth the Cost?

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With enough determination, money and smarts, scientists just might revive the woolly mammoth, or some version of it, by splicing genes from ancient mammoths into Asian elephant DNA. The ultimate dream is to generate a sustainable population of mammoths that can once again roam the tundra.

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How Americans Think About Climate Change in Six Maps 

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How Americans Think About Climate Change in Six Maps 

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It is found that 69% of Americans believe there should be stricter regulations on CO2 emissions from existing coal fired power plants. Even though most Americans can agree on this, congress and President Trump is moving to kill regulations that Obama put in place.
Most Americans also believe that global warming will harm people, but will not personally harm them. This issue of risk perception is why people have a difficult time realizing just how large the long term consequences of global warming will be.
There are states who are split on the issue, such as Texas and Florida. This is due to the fact that the the southern part of these states are affected by the immediate consequences of  global warming, whereas the north is not.
Global warming is a much more relevant issue to those who are affected by it in the west. There are constant droughts and wildfires, which cause people in the west to be more aware of the issues of climate change and global warming.

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Americans want to restrict carbon emissions from coal power plants. The White House and Congress may do the opposite.

In every congressional district, a majority of adults supports limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. But many Republicans in Congress (and some Democrats) agree with President Trump, who this week may move to kill an Obama administration plan that would have scaled back the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.

Nationally, about seven in 10 Americans support regulating carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants - and 75 percent support regulating CO2 as a pollutant more generally. But lawmakers are unlikely to change direction soon.

Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, warned that committed activists - like the Tea Party - can shape politicians' approaches to issues like climate change. "Those are the ones who can take you out at the next primary," he said. Mr. Inglis lost his primary in 2010 to Trey Gowdy, a Tea Party candidate who attacked his climate views.

Most people think that climate change will harm Americans, but they don't think it will happen to them.

Most people know climate change is happening, and a majority agrees it is harming people in the United States. But most don't believe it will harm them.

Part of this is the problem of risk perception.

Global warming is precisely the kind of threat humans are awful at dealing with: a problem with enormous consequences over the long term, but little that is sharply visible on a personal level in the short term. Humans are hard-wired for quick fight-or-flight reactions in the face of an imminent threat, but not highly motivated to act against slow-moving and somewhat abstract problems, even if the challenges that they pose are ultimately dire.

Texas and Florida are vulnerable to climate change, but residents are split on how much to worry about it.

The effects of climate change, including sunny-day flooding, are being felt across Florida. But the state shows a distinct north-south split in the level of concern over global warming, and it is not a simple Democrat-versus-Republican distinction, said State Representative Kristin D. Jacobs, a Democrat. Four southeast Florida counties - Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe and Palm Beach - stand out because of their concerted effort to work on climate issues together and to discuss it in nonpartisan terms.

South and West Texas, as well as the state's Gulf Coast, are more worried about climate change than the rest of the state - and politics alone cannot explain it. South Texas favors Democrats, West Texas is decidedly more mixed, and the Gulf Coast in November 2016 was solid Trump territory.

One thing is shared by those disparate parts of the state: They have felt the brunt of shifting weather patterns, including rising temperatures, coastal hurricanes and western droughts so long and severe that some West Texas towns now recycle wastewater for drinking.

The state's highest concentrations of Latinos can be found in the south and west, which may also partly explain the difference in climate views. Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy and journalism at the University of Southern California, suggested age as a possible factor. Latinos are " a young population with the median age significantly younger than the white population, and younger still than the African-American population," he said, noting that young people have embraced climate science to a greater extent than their elders.

Everybody talks about the weather. But the climate? Only in some places.

Thirty three percent of Americans surveyed said they discuss global warming at least occasionally with friends and family - and 31 percent said they never do. But there are distinct regional patterns.

In the West, much of which has been affected by drought and wildfires, residents are more likely to talk about climate change. New England states, and not just the liberals of Massachusetts and Vermont, talk more about the climate, as well, along with coastal South Carolina, which lies in a path many hurricanes have taken.

But aside from Southeast Florida, which has put so much effort into making discussion of climate change a priority, much of the rest of the Atlantic Coast is less likely to engage in climate discussions, despite recent increases in tidal flooding.

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How Americans Think About Climate Change, in Six Maps

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Americans want to restrict carbon emissions from coal power plants. The White House and Congress may do the opposite. In every congressional district, a majority of adults supports limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants.