Arquivo da tag: Mudanças climáticas

Your weatherman probably denies global warming (Salon)

11/01/2013UncategorizedClima, Enquadramento, Incerteza, jornalismo, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Previsãorenzotaddei

FRIDAY, JAN 11, 2013 08:00 AM -0200

The good news: People can be persuaded climate change is real. The bad news: TV experts can’t

BY DAVID SIROTA

Your weatherman probably denies global warming

There’s a big reason climate change differs from so many public policy challenges: unlike other crises, addressing the planet’s major environmental crisis truly requires mass consensus. Indeed, because fixing the problem involves so many different societal changes — reducing carbon emissions, conserving energy, retrofitting infrastructure, altering a meat-centric diet, to name a few — we all need to at least agree on the basic fact that we are facing an emergency. This is especially the case in a nation where, thanks to the U.S. Senate filibuster, lawmakers representing just 11 percent of the population can kill almost any national legislation.

That’s why, as encouraging as it is to see a new Associated Press-GfK poll showing that 4 in 5 Americans now see climate change as a serious problem, it is also not so encouraging to see that after the hottest year on record, 1 in 5 still somehow do not acknowledge the crisis. Unfortunately, that 1 in 5 may be enough to prevent us from forging the all-hands-on-deck attitude necessary to halt a planetary disaster.

What, if anything, can be done? Short of eliminating the filibuster so that lawmakers representing this 20 percent don’t retain veto power over climate change legislation, America desperately needs a serious public education campaign.

The good news is that with such education, many of those who don’t yet believe climate change is a serious problem can, in fact, be reached — and convinced to accept obvious reality.

This is the conclusion of a new study by researchers at George Mason University and Yale University. It found that those with a “low engagement on the issue of global warming … are more likely to be influenced by their perceived personal experience of global warming than by their prior beliefs.” Summarizing the findings, Grist.org reporter David Roberts writes that “people who have made up their mind have made up their mind,” but for those in the “mushy middle,” personally facing severe weather — and being exposed to facts about what that weather really represents — “can make a real difference.”

The bad news is that this “mushy” group probably cannot be reached by the real experts, as 1 in 3 of those surveyed in the AP poll say they simply do not trust scientists. That leaves local television weather forecasters (many of whom are not actual scientists), national news outlets and Washington political leaders to the task — and up to this point, many of them have played the opposite of a constructive role in climate education.

For instance, when it comes to weather forecasters, a recent Rolling Stone magazine assessment of the local news scene found that “there’s a shockingly high chance that your friendly TV weatherman is a full-blown climate denier.” The report cited a 2010 survey finding that in the vast wasteland of Ron Burgundys, only half of all local weather forecasters believe climate change is even happening, and fewer than a third acknowledge the scientific evidence proving that it is “caused mostly by human activities.” Not surprisingly, their forecasts often omit any discussion of climate change’s effect on the weather systems, thus forfeiting a chance to properly contextualize severe weather events.

Similarly, an analysis in 2012 from the watchdog group Media Matters found that “the amount of climate coverage on both the Sunday shows and the nightly news has declined tremendously.” Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review points out that the “presidential campaign was silent on the issue.”

In a nation that comprises just 5 percent of the world’s population but a whopping 18 percent of its carbon emissions, this situation is unacceptable.

If the first step toward solving a problem is getting past the denial stage, then it is long past time for news organizations and political leaders to end their climate denialism. Only then can we hope to reach the consensus on which our survival depends.

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover,” “The Uprising” and “Back to Our Future.” E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Fluctuating Environment May Have Driven Human Evolution (Science Daily)

27/12/2012UncategorizedAntropologia física, Evolução, Evolucionismo, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

Dec. 24, 2012 — A series of rapid environmental changes in East Africa roughly 2 million years ago may be responsible for driving human evolution, according to researchers at Penn State and Rutgers University.

“The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during a period of 200,000 years,” said Clayton Magill, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. “These changes happened very abruptly, with each transition occurring over hundreds to just a few thousand years.”

According to Katherine Freeman, professor of geosciences, Penn State, the current leading hypothesis suggests that evolutionary changes among humans during the period the team investigated were related to a long, steady environmental change or even one big change in climate.

“There is a view this time in Africa was the ‘Great Drying,’ when the environment slowly dried out over 3 million years,” she said. “But our data show that it was not a grand progression towards dry; the environment was highly variable.”

According to Magill, many anthropologists believe that variability of experience can trigger cognitive development.

“Early humans went from having trees available to having only grasses available in just 10 to 100 generations, and their diets would have had to change in response,” he said. “Changes in food availability, food type, or the way you get food can trigger evolutionary mechanisms to deal with those changes. The result can be increased brain size and cognition, changes in locomotion and even social changes — how you interact with others in a group. Our data are consistent with these hypotheses. We show that the environment changed dramatically over a short time, and this variability coincides with an important period in our human evolution when the genus Homo was first established and when there was first evidence of tool use.”

The researchers — including Gail Ashley, professor of earth and planetary sciences, Rutgers University — examined lake sediments from Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. They removed the organic matter that had either washed or was blown into the lake from the surrounding vegetation, microbes and other organisms 2 million years ago from the sediments. In particular, they looked at biomarkers — fossil molecules from ancient organisms — from the waxy coating on plant leaves.

“We looked at leaf waxes because they’re tough, they survive well in the sediment,” said Freeman.

The team used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to determine the relative abundances of different leaf waxes and the abundance of carbon isotopes for different leaf waxes. The data enabled them to reconstruct the types of vegetation present in the Olduvai Gorge area at very specific time intervals.

The results showed that the environment transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland.

To find out what caused this rapid transitioning, the researchers used statistical and mathematical models to correlate the changes they saw in the environment with other things that may have been happening at the time, including changes in the Earth’s movement and changes in sea-surface temperatures.

“The orbit of the Earth around the sun slowly changes with time,” said Freeman. “These changes were tied to the local climate at Olduvai Gorge through changes in the monsoon system in Africa. Slight changes in the amount of sunshine changed the intensity of atmospheric circulation and the supply of water. The rain patterns that drive the plant patterns follow this monsoon circulation. We found a correlation between changes in the environment and planetary movement.”

The team also found a correlation between changes in the environment and sea-surface temperature in the tropics.

“We find complementary forcing mechanisms: one is the way Earth orbits, and the other is variation in ocean temperatures surrounding Africa,” Freeman said. The researchers recently published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with another paper in the same issue that builds on these findings. The second paper shows that rainfall was greater when there were trees around and less when there was a grassland.

“The research points to the importance of water in an arid landscape like Africa,” said Magill. “The plants are so intimately tied to the water that if you have water shortages, they usually lead to food insecurity.

“Together, these two papers shine light on human evolution because we now have an adaptive perspective. We understand, at least to a first approximation, what kinds of conditions were prevalent in that area and we show that changes in food and water were linked to major evolutionary changes.”

The National Science Foundation funded this research.

* * *

How climate shifts in Africa sparked human evolution (MSNBC)

Scientists say landscape transitions may have forced early humans to think on their feet

Image: Nutcracker Man

Nicolle Rager Fuller / NSF. The first specimen of Paranthropus boisei, also called Nutcracker Man, was reported by Mary and Louis Leakey in 1959 from a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.

By Charles Choi – LiveScience Contributor

updated 12/26/2012 2:16:27 PM ET

At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.

These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added.

Olduvai Gorge is a ravine cut into the eastern margin of the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania that holds fossils of hominins — members of the human lineage. Excavations at Olduvai Gorge by Louis and Mary Leakey in the mid-1950s helped to establish the African origin of humanity.

The Great Drying?

To learn more about the roots of humanity, scientists analyzed samples of leaf waxes preserved in lake sediments at Olduvai Gorge, identifying which plants dominated the local environment around 2 million years ago. This was about when Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of modern humans who used relatively advanced stone tools, appeared.

“We looked at leaf waxes, because they’re tough, they survive well in the sediment,” researcher Katherine Freeman, a biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement.

After four years of work, the researchers focused on carbon isotopes — atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons — in the samples, which can reveal what plants reigned over an area. The grasses that dominate savannas engage in a kind of photosynthesis that involves both normal carbon-12 and heavier carbon-13, while trees and shrubs rely on a kind of photosynthesis that prefers carbon-12. (Atoms of carbon-12 each possess six neutrons, while atoms of carbon-13 have seven.)

Scientists had long thought Africa went through a period of gradually increasing dryness — called the Great Drying — over 3 million years, or perhaps one big change in climate that favored the expansion of grasslands across the continent, influencing human evolution. However, the new research instead revealed “strong evidence for dramatic ecosystem changes across the African savanna, in which open grassland landscapes transitioned to closed forests over just hundreds to several thousands of years,” researcher Clayton Magill, a biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, told LiveScience. [Know Your Roots? Take Our Human Evolution Quiz]

The researchers discovered that Olduvai Gorge abruptly and routinely fluctuated between dry grasslands and damp forests about five or six times during a period of 200,000 years.

“I was surprised by the magnitude of changes and the rapid pace of the changes we found,” Freeman told LiveScience. “There was a complete restructuring of the ecosystem from grassland to forest and back again, at least based on how we interpret the data. I’ve worked on carbon isotopes my whole career, and I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Losing water

The investigators also constructed a highly detailed record of water history in Olduvai Gorge by analyzing hydrogen isotope ratios in plant waxes and other compounds in nearby lake sediments. These findings support the carbon isotope data, suggesting the region experienced fluctuations in aridity, with dry periods dominated by grasslands and wet periods characterized by expanses of woody cover.

“The research points to the importance of water in an arid landscape like Africa,” Magill said in a statement. “The plants are so intimately tied to the water that if you have water shortages, they usually lead to food insecurity.”

The research team’s statistical and mathematical models link the changes they see with other events at the time, such as alterations in the planet’s movement. [50 Amazing Facts About Earth]

“The orbit of the Earth around the sun slowly changes with time,” Freeman said in statement. “These changes were tied to the local climate at Olduvai Gorge through changes in the monsoon system in Africa.”

Earth’s orbit around the sun can vary over time in a number of ways — for instance,Earth’s orbit around the sun can grow more or less circular over time, and Earth’s axis of spin relative to the sun’s equatorial plane can also tilt back and forth. This alters the amount of sunlight Earth receives, energy that drives Earth’s atmosphere.

“Slight changes in the amount of sunshine changed the intensity of atmospheric circulation and the supply of water,” Freeman said. “The rain patterns that drive the plant patterns follow this monsoon circulation. We found a correlation between changes in the environment and planetary movement.”

The team also found links between changes at Olduvai Gorge and sea-surface temperatures in the tropics.

“We find complementary forcing mechanisms — one is the way Earth orbits, and the other is variation in ocean temperatures surrounding Africa,” Freeman said.

These findings now shed light on the environmental shifts the ancestors of modern humans might have had to adapt to in order to survive and thrive.

“Early humans went from having trees available to having only grasses available in just 10 to 100 generations, and their diets would have had to change in response,” Magill said in a statement. “Changes in food availability, food type, or the way you get food can trigger evolutionary mechanisms to deal with those changes. The result can be increased brain size and cognition, changes in locomotion and even social changes — how you interact with others in a group.”

This variability in the environment coincided with a key period in human evolution, “when the genus Homo was first established and when there was first evidence of tool use,” Magill said.

The researchers now hope to examine changes at Olduvai Gorge not just across time but space, which could help shed light on aspects of early human evolution such as foraging patterns.

Magill, Freeman and their colleague Gail Ashley detailed their findings online Dec. 24 in two papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

AL aprova lei que institui Sistema Estadual de REDD+ em MT (ICV)

27/12/2012UncategorizedÍndios, Capitalismo, discurso ambiental, Economia, Educação, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Mudanças climáticas, Previsão, REDD, sociedade civilrenzotaddei

André Alves – Especial para o Institutto Centro de Vida – ICV

21/12/2012

A Assembleia Legislativa de Mato Grosso aprovou nesta quarta-feira (19/12) projeto de lei que cria o Sistema Estadual de REDD+ em Mato Grosso. O projeto, de autoria do poder executivo, segue agora para a sanção do governador Silval Barbosa (PMDB) e não deverá sofrer alterações no texto. O sistema tem como objetivo promover a redução das emissões dos gases de efeito estufa com origem no desmatamento e degradação florestal e também estimular o manejo florestal sustentável, além do aumento de estoques de carbono no estado.

“A aprovação desta lei representa um marco regulatório para o estado, pois vamos compartilhar os benefícios da conservação ambiental”, declarou o secretário estadual de Meio Ambiente Vicente Falcão. “É uma conquista do governo, mas também da sociedade civil que durante dois anos discutiu uma proposta que veio na maturidade certa”, complementou.

O texto aprovado na Assembleia prevê ainda a participação efetiva dos diferentes grupos sociais envolvidos ou afetados pelas ações de REDD. Ou seja, os projetos e programas de desmatamento evitado em áreas de assentamentos ou terras indígenas, por exemplo, terão que atender as demandas dessas comunidades, além de prever um mecanismo de distribuição justa de benefícios.

Para o secretário a implantação de um sistema de REDD+ consolida as políticas ambientais e significa um passo importante para cumprir a meta de reduzir o desmatamento no estado em 89% até o ano de 2020. “Agora há uma nova leitura, pois além do comando e controle vamos ter instrumentos de incentivo para inibir o desmatamento”, concluiu.

Laurent Micol, coordenador executivo do Instituto Centro de Vida – ICV, entidade que coordena o GT REDD no Fórum Mato-grossense de Mudanças Climáticas, explica que com a aprovação da lei, Mato Grosso assume um protagonismo nacional em relação a instrumentos de desmatamento evitado. “Os futuros projetos e programas de redução de desmatamento em andamento poderão se enquadrar na lei assim como os futuros projetos terão que assegurar as questões sociais e ambientais previstas na lei”, explicou. “Há também uma maior segurança para os investidores e doadores para estes projetos e programas”, completou. Micol usou como exemplo a recente doação do banco alemão KFW que repassou 8 milhões de reais ao governo do Acre, o primeiro estado na Amazônia a ter uma legislação com esta finalidade, como pagamento por serviços ambientais.

A discussão da proposta da lei começou com a instituição do Grupo de Trabalho REDD, em março de 2009, no âmbito do Fórum Mato-grossense de Mudanças Climáticas. O grupo trabalhou durante dois anos na elaboração da proposta, que foi debatida em consultas públicas e recebeu propostas de modificações pela internet. Ao todo foram 171 proposições que foram analisadas até a versão final da minuta ser validada pelo Fórum.

Assim que sancionada a lei, o governo deverá instituir o Conselho Gestor do Sistema Estadual de REDD+, que terá função deliberativa. O conselho terá 12 representantes e será paritário entre governo estadual e federal com a sociedade civil. Enquanto isso, o GT REDD está trabalhando na proposta de um programa setorial para o manejo florestal para ser apresentado a Secretaria de Estado de Meio Ambiente (Sema).

Sobre o GT REDD

O GT REDD MT conta com 78 membros, incluindo a Sema e outras secretarias estaduais, a Procuradoria do Estado, a Assembleia Legislativa, representações de organizações dos setores agropecuário, florestal, organizações da sociedade civil e movimentos sociais, a Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil e a Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso. O ICV foi eleito para coordenar e facilitar os trabalhos do grupo.

REDD+

REDD+ é a sigla em inglês para Redução de Emissões por Desmatamento e Degradação Florestal, incluindo a conservação e ao manejo das florestas e o aumento dos estoques de carbono.

Outras informações ICV: 65 3621-3148

Renee Lertzman: the difficulty of knowledge

18/12/2012UncategorizedClima, Cognição, Culpa, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Previsão, Psicologia, Sensacionalismo, Visualidaderenzotaddei

By Renee Lertzman / December 16, 2012

The notion that one can feel deeply, passionately about a particular issue – and not do anything in practically about it – seems to have flummoxed the broader environmental community.

Why else would we continue to design surveys and polls gauging public opinions about climate change (or other serious ecological threats)? Such surveys – even high profile, well funded mass surveys – continue to reproduce pernicious myths regarding both human subjectivity and the so-called gaps between values and actions.

It is no surprise that data surfacing in a survey or poll will stand in stark contrast to the ‘down and dirty’ world of actions. We all know that surveys invoke all sorts of complicated things like wanting to sound smart/good/moral, one’s own self-concept vs. actual feelings or thoughts, and being corralled into highly simplistic renderings of what are hugely complex topics or issues (“do you worry about climate change/support carbon tax/drive to work each day etc?”). So there is the obvious limitation right now. However, more important is this idea that the thoughts or ideas people hold will translate into their daily life. Reflect for a moment on an issue you care very deeply about. Now consider how much in alignment your practices are, in relation with this issue. It takes seconds to see that in fact, we can have multiple and competing desires and commitments, quite easily.

So why is it so hard for us to carry this over into how we research environmental values, perceptions or beliefs?

If we accept from the get-go that we are complicated beings living in hugely complicated contexts, woven into networks extending far beyond our immediate grasp, it makes a lot of sense that I can care deeply for my children’s future quality of life (and climatic conditions), and still carry on business as usual. I may experience deep conflict, guilt, shame and pain, which I can shove to the edges of consciousness. I may manage to not even think about these issues, or create nifty rationalizations for my consumptive behaviors.

However, this does not mean I don’t care, have deep concern, and even profound anxieties.

Until we realize this basic fact – that we are multiple selves in social contexts, and dynamic and fluid – our communications work will be limited. Why? Because we continue to speak with audiences, design messaging, and carry out research with the mythical unitary self in mind. We try to trick, cajole, seduce people into caring about our ecological treasures. This is simply the wrong track. Rather than trick, why not invite? Rather than overcome ‘barriers,’ why not presume dilemmas, and set out to understand them?

There is also the fact that some knowledge is just too difficult to bear.

The concept of “difficult knowledge” relates to the fact that when we learn, we also let go of cherished beliefs or concepts, and this can be often quite painful. How we handle knowledge, in other words, can and should be done with this recognition. How can we best support one another to bear difficult knowledge?

One of the tricks of the trade for gifted psychotherapists is the ability to listen and converse. The therapist listens; not only for the meaning, but where there may be resistance. The places that make us squirm or laugh nervously or change the topic. This is regarded as where the riches lie – where we may find ourselves stuck despite our best intentions. If we were to practice a bit of this in our own work in environmental communications, my guess is we’d see less rah-rah cheerleading engagement styles, and more ‘let’s be real and get down to business’ sort of work.

And this is what we need, desperately.

Eight examples of where the IPCC has missed the mark on its predictions and projections (The Daily Climate)

17/12/2012UncategorizedClima, Desastre, Incerteza, IPCC, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

flooded-768

A “king tide” leaves parts of Sausalito, Calif., flooded in 2010. Disagreement over the impact of ice-sheet melting on sea-level rise has led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to omit their influence – and thus underestimate sea-level rise – in recent reports, a pattern the panel repeats with other key findings. Photo by Yanna B./flickr.

Dec. 6, 2012

Correction appended

By Glenn Scherer
The Daily Climate

Scientists will tell you: There are no perfect computer models. All are incomplete representations of nature, with uncertainty built into them. But one thing is certain: Several fundamental projections found in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports have consistently underestimated real-world observations, potentially leaving world governments at doubt as to how to guide climate policy.

Emissions

At the heart of all IPCC projections are “emission scenarios:” low-, mid-, and high-range estimates for future carbon emissions. From these “what if” estimates flow projections for temperature, sea-rise, and more.

Projection: In 2001, the IPCC offered a range of fossil fuel and industrial emissions trends, from a best-case scenario of 7.7 billion tons of carbon released each year by 2010 to a worst-case scenario of 9.7 billion tons.

Reality: In 2010, global emissions from fossil fuels alone totaled 9.1 billion tons of carbon, according to federal government’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory.

Why the miss? While technically within the range, scientists never expected emissions to rise so high so quickly, said IPCC scientist Christopher Fields. The IPCC, for instance, failed to anticipate China’s economic growth, or resistance by the United States and other nations to curbing greenhouse gases.

“We really haven’t explored a world in which the emissions growth rate is as rapid as we have actually seen happen,” Fields said.

Temperature

IPCC models use the emission scenarios discussed above to estimate average global temperature increases by the year 2100.

warming-300

Projection: The IPCC 2007 assessment projected a worst-case temperature rise of 4.3° to 11.5° Fahrenheit, with a high probability of 7.2°F.

Reality: We are currently on track for a rise of between 6.3° and 13.3°F, with a high probability of an increase of 9.4°F by 2100, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Other modelers are getting similar results, including a study published earlier this month by the Global Carbon Project consortium confirming the likelihood of a 9ºF rise.

Why the miss? IPCC emission scenarios underestimated global CO2 emission rates, which means temperature rates were underestimated too. And it could get worse: IPCC projections haven’t included likely feedbacks such as large-scale melting of Arctic permafrost and subsequent release of large quantities of CO2 and methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent, albeit shorter lived, in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Arctic Meltdown

Five years ago, the summer retreat of Arctic ice wildly outdistanced all 18 IPCC computer models, amazing IPCC scientists. It did so again in 2012.

ice-600

Projection: The IPCC has always confidently projected that the Arctic ice pack was safe at least until 2050 or well beyond 2100.

Reality: Summer ice is thinning faster than every climate projection, and today scientists predict an ice-free Arctic in years, not decades. Last summer, Arctic sea ice extent plummeted to 1.32 million square miles, the lowest level ever recorded – 50 percent below the long-term 1979 to 2000 average.

Why the miss? For scientists, it is increasingly clear that the models are under-predicting the rate of sea ice retreat because they are missing key real-world interactions.

“Sea ice modelers have speculated that the 2007 minimum was an aberration… a matter of random variability, noise in the system, that sea ice would recover.… That no longer looks tenable,” says IPCC scientist Michael Mann. “It is a stunning reminder that uncertainty doesn’t always act in our favor.”

Ice Sheets

Greenland and Antarctica are melting, even though IPCC said in 1995 that they wouldn’t be.

Projection: In 1995, IPCC projected “little change in the extent of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets… over the next 50-100 years.” In 2007 IPCC embraced a drastic revision: “New data… show[s] that losses from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have very likely contributed to sea level rise over 1993 to 2003.”

Today, ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica is trending at least 100 years ahead of projections compared to IPCC’s first three reports.

Reality: Today, ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica is trending at least 100 years ahead of projections compared to IPCC’s first three reports.

Why the miss? “After 2001, we began to realize there were complex dynamics at work – ice cracks, lubrication and sliding of ice sheets,” that were melting ice sheets quicker, said IPCC scientist Kevin Trenberth. New feedbacks unknown to past IPCC authors have also been found. A 2012 study, for example, showed that the reflectivity of Greenland’s ice sheet is decreasing, causing ice to absorb more heat, likely escalating melting.

Sea-Level Rise

The fate of the world’s coastlines has become a classic example of how the IPCC, when confronted with conflicting science, tends to go silent.

Projection: In the 2001 report, the IPCC projected a sea rise of 2 millimeters per year. The worst-case scenario in the 2007 report, which looked mostly at thermal expansion of the oceans as temperatures warmed, called for up to 1.9 feet of sea-level-rise by century’s end.

Today: Observed sea-level-rise has averaged 3.3 millimeters per year since 1990. By 2009, various studies that included ice-melt offered drastically higher projections of between 2.4 and 6.2 feet sea level rise by 2100.

Why the miss? IPCC scientists couldn’t agree on a value for the contribution melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would add to sea-level rise. So they simply left out the data to reach consensus. Science historian Naomi Oreskes calls this – one of IPCC’s biggest underestimates – “consensus by omission.”

Ocean Acidification

To its credit, the IPCC admits to vast climate change unknowns. Ocean acidification is one such impact.

Projection: Unmentioned as a threat in the 1990, 1995 and 2001 IPCC reports. First recognized in 2007, when IPCC projected acidification of between 0.14 and 0.35 pH units by 2100. “While the effects of observed ocean acidification on the marine biosphere are as yet undocumented,” said the report, “the progressive acidification of oceans is expected to have negative impacts on marine shell-forming organisms (e.g. corals) and their dependent species.”

Reality: The world’s oceans absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide humans release annually into the atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units. Since the pH scale is logarithmic, this change represents a stunning 30 percent increase in acidity.

Why the miss? Scientists didn’t have the data. They began studying acidification by the late 1990s, but there weren’t many papers on the topic until mid-2000, missing the submission deadline for IPCC’s 2001 report. Especially alarming are new findings that ocean temperatures and currents are causing parts of the seas to become acidic far faster than expected, threatening oysters and other shellfish.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco has called acidification the “equally evil twin” to global warming.

Thawing Tundra

Some carbon-cycle feedbacks that could vastly amplify climate change – especially a massive release of carbon and methane from thawing permafrost – are extremely hard to model.

Projection: In 2007, IPCC reported with “high confidence” that “methane emissions from tundra… and permafrost have accelerated in the past two decades, and are likely to accelerate further.” However, the IPCC offered no projections regarding permafrost melt.

Reality: Scientists estimate that the world’s permafrost holds 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon. That worries scientists: The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on earth, and researchers are seeing soil temperatures climb rapidly, too. Some permafrost degradation is already occurring.

Large-scale tundra wildfires in 2012 added to the concern.

Why the miss? This is controversial science, with some researchers saying the Arctic tundra is stable, others saying it will defrost only over long periods of time, and still more convinced we are on the verge of a tipping point, where the tundra thaws rapidly and catastrophically. A major 2005 study, for instance, warned that the entire top 11 feet of global permafrost could disappear by century’s end, with potentially cataclysmic climate impacts.

The U.N. Environmental Programme revealed this week that IPCC’s fifth assessment, due for release starting in September, 2013, will again “not include the potential effects of the permafrost carbon feedback on global climate.”

Tipping points

The IPCC has been silent on tipping points – non-linear “light switch” moments when the climate system abruptly shifts from one paradigm to another.

The trouble with tipping points is they’re hard to spot until you’ve passed one.

Projection: IPCC has made no projections regarding tipping-point thresholds.

Reality: The scientific jury is still out as to whether we have reached any climate thresholds – a point of no return for, say, an ice-free Arctic, a Greenland meltdown, the slowing of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, or permanent changes in large-scale weather patterns like the jet stream, El Niño or monsoons. The trouble with tipping points is they’re hard to spot until you’ve passed one.

Why the miss? Blame the computers: These non-linear events are notoriously hard to model. But with scientists recognizing the sizeable threat tipping points represent, they will be including some projections in the 2013-14 assessment.

Correction (Dec. 6, 2012): Earlier editions incorrectly compared global carbon dioxide emissions against carbon emissions scenarios. Carbon dioxide is heavier, incorrectly skewing the comparison. Global use of fossil fuels in 2010 produced about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide but only 9.1 tons of carbon, putting emissions within the extreme end of IPCC scenarios. The story has been changed to reflect that.

Graphic of emissions scenario courtesy U.S. Global Change Research Program. Photo of activist warning of 6ºC warming © Adela Nistora. Graphic showing Arctic summer ice projections vs. observations by the Vancouver Observer.

Glenn Scherer is senior editor of Blue Ridge Press, a news service that has been providing environmental commentary and news to U.S. newspapers since 2007.

DailyClimate.org is a foundation-funded news service covering climate change. Contact editor Douglas Fischer at dfischer [at] dailyclimate.org

Scientists Pioneer Method to Predict Environmental Collapse (Science Daily)

17/12/2012UncategorizedClima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Modelagem, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Researcher Enlou Zhang takes a core sample from the bed of Lake Erhai in China. (Credit: University of Southampton)

Nov. 19, 2012 — Scientists at the University of Southampton are pioneering a technique to predict when an ecosystem is likely to collapse, which may also have potential for foretelling crises in agriculture, fisheries or even social systems.

The researchers have applied a mathematical model to a real world situation, the environmental collapse of a lake in China, to help prove a theory which suggests an ecosystem ‘flickers’, or fluctuates dramatically between healthy and unhealthy states, shortly before its eventual collapse.

Head of Geography at Southampton, Professor John Dearing explains: “We wanted to prove that this ‘flickering’ occurs just ahead of a dramatic change in a system — be it a social, ecological or climatic one — and that this method could potentially be used to predict future critical changes in other impacted systems in the world around us.”

A team led by Dr Rong Wang extracted core samples from sediment at the bottom of Lake Erhai in Yunnan province, China and charted the levels and variation of fossilised algae (diatoms) over a 125-year period. Analysis of the core sample data showed the algae communities remained relatively stable up until about 30 years before the lake’s collapse into a turbid or polluted state. However, the core samples for these last three decades showed much fluctuation, indicating there had been numerous dramatic changes in the types and concentrations of algae present in the water — evidence of the ‘flickering’ before the lake’s final definitive change of state.

Rong Wang comments: “By using the algae as a measure of the lake’s health, we have shown that its eco-system ‘wobbled’ before making a critical transition — in this instance, to a turbid state.

“Dramatic swings can be seen in other data, suggesting large external impacts on the lake over a long time period — for example, pollution from fertilisers, sewage from fields and changes in water levels — caused the system to switch back and forth rapidly between alternate states. Eventually, the lake’s ecosystem could no longer cope or recover — losing resilience and reaching what is called a ‘tipping point’ and collapsing altogether.”

The researchers hope the method they have trialled in China could be applied to other regions and landscapes.

Co-author Dr Pete Langdon comments: “In this case, we used algae as a marker of how the lake’s ecosystem was holding-up against external impacts — but who’s to say we couldn’t use this method in other ways? For example, perhaps we should look for ‘flickering’ signals in climate data to try and foretell impending crises?”

Journal Reference:

Rong Wang, John A. Dearing, Peter G. Langdon, Enlou Zhang, Xiangdong Yang, Vasilis Dakos, Marten Scheffer.Flickering gives early warning signals of a critical transition to a eutrophic lake state. Nature, 2012; DOI:10.1038/nature11655

‘Missing’ Polar Weather Systems Could Impact Climate Predictions (Science Daily)

17/12/2012UncategorizedClima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Modelagem, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Intense but small-scale polar storms could make a big difference to climate predictions according to new research. (Credit: NEODAAS / University of Dundee)

Dec. 16, 2012 — Intense but small-scale polar storms could make a big difference to climate predictions, according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the University of Massachusetts.

Difficult-to-forecast polar mesoscale storms occur frequently over the polar seas; however, they are missing in most climate models.

Research published Dec. 16 inNature Geoscience shows that their inclusion could paint a different picture of climate change in years to come.

Polar mesoscale storms are capable of producing hurricane-strength winds which cool the ocean and lead to changes in its circulation.

Prof Ian Renfrew, from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “These polar lows are typically under 500 km in diameter and over within 24-36 hours. They’re difficult to predict, but we have shown they play an important role in driving large-scale ocean circulation.

“There are hundreds of them a year in the North Atlantic, and dozens of strong ones. They create a lot of stormy weather, strong winds and snowfall — particularly over Norway, Iceland, and Canada, and occasionally over Britain, such as in 2003 when a massive dump of snow brought the M11 to a standstill for 24 hours.

“We have shown that adding polar storms into computer-generated models of the ocean results in significant changes in ocean circulation — including an increase in heat travelling north in the Atlantic Ocean and more overturning in the Sub-polar seas.

“At present, climate models don’t have a high enough resolution to account for these small-scale polar lows.

“As Arctic Sea ice continues to retreat, polar lows are likely to migrate further north, which could have consequences for the ‘thermohaline’ or northward ocean circulation — potentially leading to it weakening.”

Alan Condron from the University of Massachusetts said: “By simulating polar lows, we find that the area of the ocean that becomes denser and sinks each year increases and causes the amount of heat being transported towards Europe to intensify.

“The fact that climate models are not simulating these storms is a real problem because these models will incorrectly predict how much heat is being moved northward towards the poles. This will make it very difficult to reliably predict how the climate of Europe and North America will change in the near-future.”

Prof Renfrew added: “Climate models are always improving, and there is a trade-off between the resolution of the model, the complexity of the model, and the number of simulations you can carry out. Our work suggests we should put some more effort into resolving such storms.”

‘The impact of polar mesoscale storms on Northeast Atlantic ocean circulation’ by Alan Condron from the University of Massachusetts (US) and Ian Renfrew from UEA (UK), is published in Nature Geoscience on December 16, 2012.

Journal Reference:

Alan Condron, Ian A. Renfrew. The impact of polar mesoscale storms on northeast Atlantic Ocean circulation. Nature Geoscience, 2012; DOI:10.1038/ngeo1661

Physicist Happens Upon Rain Data Breakthrough (Science Daily)

17/12/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Matemática, Meteorologia, Modelagem, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

John Lane looks over data recorded from his laser system as he refines his process and formula to calibrate measurements of raindrops. (Credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann)

Dec. 3, 2012 — A physicist and researcher who set out to develop a formula to protect Apollo sites on the moon from rocket exhaust may have happened upon a way to improve weather forecasting on Earth.

Working in his backyard during rain showers and storms, John Lane, a physicist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, found that the laser and reflector he was developing to track lunar dust also could determine accurately the size of raindrops, something weather radar and other meteorological systems estimate, but don’t measure.

The special quantity measured by the laser system is called the “second moment of the size distribution,” which results in the average cross-section area of raindrops passing through the laser beam.

“It’s not often that you’re studying lunar dust and it ends up producing benefits in weather forecasting,” said Phil Metzger, a physicist who leads the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab, part of the Surface Systems Office at Kennedy.

Lane said the additional piece of information would be useful in filling out the complex computer calculations used to determine the current conditions and forecast the weather.

“We may be able to refine (computer weather) models to make them more accurate,” Lane said. “Weather radar data analysis makes assumptions about raindrop size, so I think this could improve the overall drop size distribution estimates.”

The breakthrough came because Metzger and Lane were looking for a way to calibrate a laser sensor to pick up the fine particles of blowing lunar dust and soil. It turns out that rain is a good stand-in for flying lunar soil.

“I was pretty skeptical in the beginning that the numbers would come out anywhere close,” Lane said. “Anytime you do something new, it’s a risk that you’re just wasting your time.”

The genesis of the research was the need to find out how much damage would be done by robotic landers getting too close to the six places on the moon where Apollo astronauts landed, lived and worked.

NASA fears that dust and soil particles thrown up by the rocket exhaust of a lander will scour and perhaps puncture the metal skin of the lunar module descent stages and experiment hardware left behind by the astronauts from 1969 to 1972.

“It’s like sandblasting, if you have something coming down like a rocket engine, and it lifts up this dust, there’s not air, so it just keeps going fast,” Lane said. “Some of the stuff can actually reach escape velocity and go into orbit.”

Such impacts to those materials could ruin their scientific value to researchers on Earth who want to know what happens to human-made materials left on another world for more than 40 years.

“The Apollo sites have value scientifically and from an engineering perspective because they are a record of how these materials on the moon have interacted with the solar system over 40 years,” Metzger said. “They are witness plates to the environment.”

There also are numerous bags of waste from the astronauts laying up there that biologists want to examine simply to see if living organisms can survive on the moon for almost five decades where there is no air and there is a constant bombardment of cosmic radiation.

“If anybody goes back and sprays stuff on the bags or touches the bags, they ruin the experiment,” Metzger said. “It’s not just the scientific and engineering value. They believe the Apollo sites are the most important archaeological sites in the human sphere, more important than the pyramids because it’s the first place humans stepped off the planet. And from a national point of view, these are symbols of our country and we don’t want them to be damaged by wanton ransacking.”

Current thinking anticipates placing a laser sensor on the bottom of one of the landers taking part in the Google X-Prize competition. The sensor should be able to pick up the blowing dust and soil and give researchers a clear set of results so they can formulate restrictions for other landers, such as how far away from the Apollo sites new landers can touch down.

As research continues into the laser sensor, Lane expects the work to continue on the weather forecasting side of the equation, too. Lane already presented some of his findings at a meteorological conference and is working on a research paper to detail the work. “This is one of those topics that span a lot of areas of science,” Lane said.

Water Resources Management and Policy in a Changing World: Where Do We Go from Here? (Science Daily)

17/12/2012Uncategorizedágua, Economia, Gestão de recursos naturais, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Modelagem, Mudanças climáticas, Políticas públicas, Previsão, Secarenzotaddei

Nov. 26, 2012 — Visualize a dusty place where stream beds are sand and lakes are flats of dried mud. Are we on Mars? In fact, we’re on arid parts of Earth, a planet where water covers some 70 percent of the surface.

How long will water be readily available to nourish life here?

Scientists funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) program are finding new answers.

NSF-supported CNH researchers will address water resources management and policy in a changing world at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held in San Francisco from Dec. 3-7, 2012.

In the United States, more than 36 states face water shortages. Other parts of the world are faring no better.

What are the causes? Do the reasons lie in climate change, population growth or still other factors?

Among the topics to be covered at AGU are sociohydrology, patterns in coupled human-water resource systems and the resilience of coupled natural and human systems to global change.

Researchers will report, for example, that human population growth in the Andes outweighs climate change as the culprit in the region’s dwindling water supplies. Does the finding apply in other places, and perhaps around the globe?

Scientists presenting results are affiliated with CHANS-Net, an international network of researchers who study coupled natural and human systems.

NSF’s CNH program supports CHANS-Net, with coordination from the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University.

CHANS-Net facilitates communication and collaboration among scientists, engineers and educators striving to find sustainable solutions that benefit the environment while enabling people to thrive.

“For more than a decade, NSF’s CNH program has supported projects that explore the complex ways people and natural systems interact with each other,” says Tom Baerwald, NSF CNH program director.

“CHANS-Net and its investigators represent a broad range of projects. They’re developing a new, better understanding of how our planet works. CHANS-Net researchers are finding practical answers for how people can prosper while maintaining environmental quality.”

CNH and CHANS-Net are part of NSF’s Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) investment. NSF’s Directorates for Geosciences; Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences; and Biological Sciences support the CNH program.

“CHANS-Net has grown to more than 1,000 members who span generations of natural and social scientists from around the world,” says Jianguo “Jack” Liu, principal investigator of CHANS-Net and Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability at Michigan State University.

“CHANS-Net is very happy to support another 10 CHANS Fellows–outstanding young scientists–to attend AGU, give presentations there, and learn from leaders in CHANS research and build professional networks. We’re looking forward to these exciting annual CHANS-Net events.”

Speakers at AGU sessions organized by CHANS-Net will discuss such subjects as the importance of water conservation in the 21st century; the Gila River and whether its flows might reduce the risk of water shortages in the Colorado River Basin; and historical evolution of the hydrological functioning of the old Lake Xochimilco in the southern Mexico Basin.

Other topics to be addressed include water conflicts in a changing world; system modeling of the Great Salt Lake in Utah to improve the hydro-ecological performance of diked wetlands; and integrating economics into water resources systems analysis.

“Of all our natural resources, water has become the most precious,” wrote Rachel Carson in 1962 in Silent Spring. “By a strange paradox, most of the Earth’s abundant water is not usable for agriculture, industry, or human consumption because of its heavy load of sea salts, and so most of the world’s population is either experiencing or is threatened with critical shortages.”

Fifty years later, more than 100 scientists will present research reflecting Rachel Carson’s conviction that “seldom if ever does nature operate in closed and separate compartments, and she has not done so in distributing Earth’s water supply.”

Moral Injuries and the Environment: Healing the Soul Wounds of the Body Politic (Science & Environmental Health Network)

13/12/2012UncategorizedClima, Cognição, Culpa, Desastre, discurso ambiental, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Psicologiarenzotaddei

By Carolyn Raffensperger – December 6th, 2012

I have a hypothesis about the lack of public support for environmental action. I suspect that many people suffer from a sense of moral failure over environmental matters. They know that we are in deep trouble, that their actions are part of it, but there is so little they or anyone can do individually. Anne Karpf writing about climate change in the Guardian said this: “I now recycle everything possible, drive a hybrid car and turn down the heating. Yet somewhere in my marrow I know that this is just a vain attempt to exculpate myself – it wasn’t me, guv.”

To fully acknowledge our complicity in the problem but to be unable to act at the scale of the problem creates cognitive dissonance. Renee Aron Lertzman describes this as “environmental melancholia”, a form of hopelessness. It is not apathy. It is sorrow. The moral failure and the inability to act leads to what some now identify in other spheres as a moral injury, which is at the root of some post-traumatic stress disorders or ptsd.

The US military has been investigating the causes of soldiers’ ptsd because the early interpretations of it being fear-based didn’t match what psychologists were hearing from the soldiers themselves. What psychologists heard wasn’t fear, but sorrow and loss. Soldiers suffering from ptsd expressed enormous grief over things like killing children and civilians or over not being able to save a fellow soldier. They discovered that at the core of much of ptsd was a moral injury, which author Ed Tick calls a soul wound.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “[e]vents are considered morally injurious if they “transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations”. Thus, the key precondition for moral injury is an act of transgression, which shatters moral and ethical expectations that are rooted in religious or spiritual beliefs, or culture-based, organizational, and group-based rules about fairness, the value of life, and so forth.”

The moral injury stemming from our participation in destruction of the planet has two dimensions: knowledge of our role and an inability to act. We know that we are causing irreparable damage. We are both individually and collectively responsible. But we are individually unable to make systemic changes that actually matter. The moral injury isn’t so much a matter of the individual psyche, but a matter of the body politic. Our culture lacks the mechanisms for taking account of collective moral injuries and then finding the vision and creativity to address them. The difference between a soldier’s moral injury and our environmental moral injuries is that environmental soul wounds aren’t a shattering of moral expectations but a steady, grinding erosion, a slow-motion relentless sorrow.

My environmental lawyer friend Bob Gough says that he suffers from pre-traumatic stress disorder. Pre-traumatic stress disorder is short hand for the fact that he is fully aware of the future trauma, the moral injury that we individually and collectively suffer, the effects on the Earth of that injury and our inability to act in time. Essentially pre-traumatic stress disorder, the environmentalist’s malady, is a result of our inability to prevent harm.

James Hillman once wrote a book with Michael Ventura called “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s getting Worse.” In it Hillman said that for years people would go into a therapist and say “the traffic in L.A. is making me crazy” and the therapist would say “let’s deal with your mother issues.” Hillman said “deal with the traffic in L.A.”

So much of environmental or health messaging speaks to us as individuals. “Stop smoking, get more exercise, change your light bulbs.” We take on the individual responsibility for the moral failure. Sure, we need to do all that we can as individuals–that is part of preventing any further damage to the planet or our own souls. But that isn’t enough. We all know it. We have to overcome our assumption that the problem is our mother issues (or the equivalent) and deal with the traffic in L.A., climate change, the loss of the pollinators. These are not things we can address individually. We have to do them together.

Healing the moral injury we suffer individually and collectively from our participation in destruction of the planet will require strong intervention in all spheres of life. Actions like creating a cabinet level office of the guardian of future generations or 350.org’s campaign for colleges to divest of oil stocks, or revamping public transportation are beginning steps. Can we think of a hundred more bold moves to make reparations and give future generations a sporting chance? Our moral health, our sanity—and our survival—depend on it.

Monbiot: The Gift of Death (The Guardian)

12/12/2012UncategorizedCapitalismo, Consumismo, Desastre, discurso ambiental, Economia, Educação, Enquadramento, Lixo, Mudanças climáticas, Natal, Obsolescência programada, Previsãorenzotaddei

December 10, 2012

Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012

There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3). Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4). No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It’s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption.

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5). An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.

The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population(7). The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished.

So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week’s Moral Maze programme, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8). When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.

Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t.

http://www.monbiot.com

1. http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-stuff/

2. It’s 57%. See http://www.monbiot.com/2010/05/05/carbon-graveyard/

3. See the film Blood in the Mobile. http://bloodinthemobile.org/

4.http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_dirty_war_against_africas_remaining_rhinos/2595/

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7VE2wlDkr8&list=UU25QbTq58EYBGf2_PDTqzFQ&index=9

6. http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/07/commercial-for-googles-nexus-7-tablet-revealed/

7. Emmanuel Saez, 2nd March 2012. Striking it Richer: the Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2009 and 2010 estimates).http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf

8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p424r

Natural Step: the Science of Sustainability (Yes Magazine)

10/12/2012Uncategorizedambientalismo, Capitalismo, ciência, Ecologia, Economia, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Políticas públicas, Sustentabilidade, Violênciarenzotaddei

Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert had an epiphany about the conditions required to sustain life – this epiphany catalyzed a consensus among Sweden’s top sceintists about the scientific foundations for sustainablity

by Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert

http://www.yesmagazine.org

posted Aug 30, 1998

What do cells need to sustain life? How can human systems of production be a sustainable part of consensus among Sweden’s top scientists about the scientific foundations for sustainability

Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, a Swedish cancer doctor and medical researcher, founded The Natural Step to inject some science into the environmental debate – and provide a solid foundation for action. He spoke to YES! executive editor Sarah van Gelder during his recent trip to the US.

SARAH: How did you go from being a doctor to taking on this large question of sustainability?

KARL: My career centered on my work as a medical doctor heading a cancer ward in a university hospital, the largest one outside of Stockholm. I was concerned with the environment as a private human being, but I didn’t know what I could do except to pay my dues to Greenpeace and other NGOs.

My epiphany came one day when I was studying cells from cancer patients. It hit me that cells are the unifying unit of all living things. The difference between our cells and the cells of plants are so minor that it’s almost embarrassing; the makeup is almost identical all the way down to the molecular level.

You can’t argue with them or negotiate with them. You can’t ask them to do anything they can’t do. And their complexity is just mind blowing!

Since politicians and business people also are constituted of cells, I had a feeling that a broad understanding of these cells might help us reach a consensus on the basic requirements for the continuation of life.

Most people are not aware that it took living cells about 3.5 billion years to transform the virgin soup of the atmosphere – which was a toxic, chaotic mixture of sulfurous compounds, methane, carbon dioxide, and other substances – into the conditions that could support complex life.

In just the last decades humans have reversed this trend. First we found concentrated energy like fossil fuels and nuclear power. As a result, we can create such a high throughput of resources that natural processes no longer have the time to process the waste and build new resources.

Dispersed junk is increasing in the system as we lose soils, forests, and species. So we have reversed evolution. The Earth is running back towards the chaotic state it came from at a tremendous speed.

On an intuitive level, everyone knows that the natural environment is also the habitat for our economy, and if it goes down the drain, so does the economy.

Despite that, the green movement attacks business, and business reacts defensively. So much of the debate focuses on the details – so much is like monkeys chattering among the leaves of the tree while the trunk and roots die.

I thought we could go beyond that stalemate if we could begin to build a consensus based on much more solid, comprehensive thinking.

SARAH: What did you do with this insight? What was your plan for getting beyond the stalemate in the environmental debate?

KARL: I had a daydream that I could write a consensus statement with other scientists about the conditions that are essential to life. Instead of asking them what environmental issues they disagreed on, I could ask them where there was agreement and use that as a basis for a consensus that would serve as a platform for sounder decision-making in society.

In August 1988, when I wrote the first effort to frame a consensus, I believed that my colleagues would agree wholeheartedly with what I had written, it was so well thought through. Actually, it took 21 iterations to reach a consensus among this group of 50 ecologists, chemists, physicists, and medical doctors.

I was able to raise funds to mail this consensus statement as a booklet with an audio cassette to all 4.3 million households in Sweden. This statement describes how badly we are performing with respect to the natural systems around us and how dangerous the situation is. It makes the point that debating about policy is not bad in itself – but it is bad when the debate is based on misunderstandings and poor knowledge. It doesn’t matter if you are on the left or the right – the consensus platform takes us beyond arguments about what is and is not true. That was the start of The Natural Step.

SARAH: Karl, could you explain briefly the Natural Step system conditions?

KARL: The four system conditions describe the principles that make a society sustainable. The first two system conditions have to do with avoiding concentrations of pollutants from synthetic substances and from substances mined or pumped from the Earth’s crust to ensure that they aren’t systematically increasing in nature.

The third condition says we must avoid overharvesting and displacing natural systems.

Finally, system condition number four says we must be efficient when it comes to satisfying human needs by maximizing the benefit from the resources used.

Today, society is well outside the framework set by these conditions, and as a result, we are running towards increasing economic problems as we run out of fresh and non-polluted resources.

SARAH: So if we follow these conditions we can avoid the reverse evolution you mentioned earlier – we can quit dispersing persistent substances into the biosphere and make it possible for nature to continue to provide us with the basic resources we need to live – soil, air, a stable climate, water, and so on. In other words, these conditions will help us judge whether our actions are sustainable. Is this an approach that businesses and government officials find compelling?

KARL: I think most people in business understand that we are running into a funnel of declining resources globally.

We will soon be 10 billion people on Earth – at the same time as we are running out of forests, crop land, and fisheries. We need more and more resource input for the same crop or timber yield. At the same time, pollution is increasing systematically and we have induced climate change. All that together creates a resource funnel.

By decreasing your dependence on activities that violate the system conditions, you move towards the opening of the resource funnel. You can do this through step by step reducing your dependence on:

• heavy metals and fossil fuels that dissipate into the environment (condition #1)

• persistent unnatural compounds like bromine-organic antiflammables or persistent pesticides (condition #2)

• wood and food from ecologically maltreated land and materials that require long-distance transportation (condition #3)

• wasting resources (system #4).

Any organization that directs its investments towards the opening of the funnel through complying with these system conditions will do better in business than their ignorant competitors. This is due to inevitable changes at the wall of the funnel in the form of increased costs for resources, waste management, insurance, loans, international business agreements, taxes, and public fear. In addition, there is the question of competition from those who direct their investments more skillfully towards the opening of the funnel – thus avoiding those costs – and sooner or later getting rewarded by their customers.

Once we have understood the funnel, the rest is a matter of timing. And time is now running out. Many corporations have already run into the wall of the funnel as a result of violating the system conditions. And today many companies are getting relatively stronger in comparison with others as a result of previous investments in line with the system conditions. Of course there are a large number of companies who still benefit in the short term from violating the principles of the common good, but in the long run, they have no future.

So if you ask business people, “Do you think that this could possibly influence tomorrow’s market?” they get embarrassed, because they all understand it will. The issue is to foresee the nature of that influence, because if you do, you will prosper from it

SARAH: I want to ask you about the fourth condition because it seems as though that’s the one that has been most controversial. Perhaps that is because it is based on human systems more than natural systems.

KARL: The fourth principle is about the internal resource flows in a society, but it is still a logical first-order principle that follows as a conclusion from the first three. The reason people regard the fourth principle as a separate value is the word “fairness,” which is part of the fourth principle.

Most people understand that the first three principles set a frame for societal behavior. If matter from the Earth’s crust is no longer going to systematically increase in concentration, nor man-made compounds, and if we are going to live from the interest of what nature gives us – not use up nature’s capital – the first-order conclusion is that we must be much more efficient about how we meet our needs.

Fairness is an efficiency parameter if we look at the whole global civilization. It is not an efficient way of meeting human needs if one billion people starve while another billion have excess. It would be more efficient to distribute resources so that at least vital needs were met everywhere. Otherwise, for example, if kids are starving somewhere, dad goes out to slash and burn the rain forest to feed them – and so would I if my kids were dying. And this kind of destruction is everyone’s problem, because we live in the same
ecosphere.

SARAH: I realize you reached consensus among the scientists and the foundations for sustainability, but has your approach been controversial in the larger society?

KARL: No. The business community found it refreshing to be involved in a dialogue that did not involve someone pointing fingers at them and telling them what they should do.

This dialogue was the opposite of that; it involved a group of scientists describing the situation with regards to the environment and then asking for advice about how to remove the obstacles to sustainability. The business community, municipalities, and farmers actually enjoyed being part of it.

SARAH: Why do companies choose to adopt The Natural Step? Is it that they understand the science and want to contribute to a more sustainable world? Or do they see TNS primarily as a winning business strategy?

KARL: It is a mixture of both, and it is hard to evaluate which is most important. My feeling is that top people in business have a tough image that they display in board rooms. Privately, after the board meeting, they would much rather do well by doing good, than doing well by contributing to the destruction of our habitat. Because of the rational economic and strategic thinking of the system conditions, they can endorse TNS principles without losing face in front of their tough peers. But as time goes on, the “soft” values become more and more important.

SARAH: In the research I’ve done on Green Plans in the Netherlands, I found that Dutch businesses were concerned that they would be less competitive if they were holding to higher environmental standards than businesses from other countries. How have you dealt with the issue of competitiveness in The Natural Step?

KARL: If you look at the countries where business is very successful, it is not the countries where the standards are low – it is the countries where they have set high goals for what they want to achieve. In the long run, you get competitiveness from increasing standards.

SARAH: Can you give me some examples of some things in Sweden that have been done differently out of this understanding?

KARL: The Natural Step introduces a shared mental model that is intellectually strict, but still simple to understand. These are the rules of sustainability; you can plug them into decision-making about any product.

The first thing that happens is that this stimulates creativity, because people enter a much smarter dialogue if they have a shared framework for their goals. We have written books of case studies about how people together found smart and flexible solutions to problems that seemed impossible to solve, including new products, logistics, suppliers, energy sources, and fuels.

A strict shared mental model can really get people working together.

SARAH: You mentioned that this approach requires thinking beyond the short term, and yet especially in the United States, so many CEOs are rewarded based on this quarter’s profits, not on how well they are positioning the company for the next five or ten years. How can companies in that kind of an environment take on this kind of a challenge?

KARL: If you are audited at quarterly intervals and you can be sued for failing to earn the last buck possible, it is more difficult. But you can still develop a future scenario for your company in which it meets principles that make it ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable – because it is not economically sustainable to rely on behaviors that have no future.

Once you’ve developed that scenario, you look back from this imagined future and ask yourself how those sustainability principles might have been met and what you might do today to get there.

The strategy for business is to select as the first steps toward sustainability those that fulfill two criteria: they must be flexible to build on in the future, and they must provide a return on investments relatively soon; like, for instance, an attractive car that can run on renewable energy as well as gasoline.

SARAH: What do you see as the trends for the coming years, in terms of a switch to more sustainable practices?

KARL: A deepening intellectual understanding is a good starting point for change of values. Today, it is considered “rational” to think about economic growth only, whereas a focus on the true underlying reason for people living together in societies is considered non-rational. The TNS approach demonstrates that their present paradigm is, in fact, irrational and that we need new economic tools.

My belief is that free will of individuals and firms will not be sufficient to make sustainable practices widespread – legislation is a crucial part of the walls of the funnel, particularly if we want to make the transition in time.

But this is a dynamic process. The more examples we get of businesses entering the transition out of free will, the easier it will be for proactive politicians. In a democracy, there must be a “market” for proactive decisions in politics, and that market can be created by proactive businesses in dialogue with proactive customers. For example, in Sweden, some of these proactive business leaders are lobbying for green taxes. In that triangle of dialogue: business-market-politicians, a new culture may evolve, with an endorsement of the values we share but have forgotten how to pay attention to.

So, the flow goes: intellectual understanding, some practice and experience, deeper understanding with some change in attitude, preparedness for even more radical change, some more experience, even deeper understanding, and, eventually, an endorsement of the value systems that are inherent in the human constitution.

SARAH: What worries you the most about the future? You mentioned when you were in Seattle that you anticipate some very difficult times for the world in the years ahead – perhaps even a collapse. Could you
explain what you meant and what you think might cause such a collapse?

KARL: What worries me the most is the systematic social battering of people all around the world, leading to more and more desperate people who don’t feel any partnership with society because of alienation, poverty, dissolving cultural structures, more and more “molecular” violence (unorganized and self-destructive violence that pops up everywhere without any meaning at all).

The response of the establishment is too superficial, with more and more imprisonment and money spent on defense against those feared, leading to a vicious cycle.

If this goes on long enough, a constructive and new sustainable paradigm in the heads of governments and business leaders will not necessarily help us in time. We will have more and more people who are so hungry to meet their vital human needs that it will be hard to reach them.

SARAH: What keeps you energized in the face of these enormous challenges? What are your sources of hope?

KARL: My vision is that we develop a mainstream understanding that nobody wins from destroying our habitat, and that people will see that you do better in business if you work as though society will become sustainable and as though different cultures will survive, because cultural diversity is also essential.

To maintain hope, we cannot only focus on the dark things that are going on. Once in a while if you get a “bird’s eye” perspective, you see all sorts of good examples, and they comfort you. You see more and more people who understand and who are making concrete contributions to the transition to this new understanding.

Doubling Down on Climate Change Denial (Slate)

04/12/2012UncategorizedCapitalismo, Clima, Desastre, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

By Phil Plait

Posted Monday, Dec. 3, 2012, at 8:00 AM ET

Graphic of Earth on fire Oh, those wacky professional climate change deniers! Once again, they’ve banded together a passel of people, 90 percent of whom aren’t even climatologists, and had them sign a nearly fact-free opinion piece in the Financial Post, claiming global warming isn’t real. It’s an astonishing example of nonsense so ridiculous I would run out of synonyms for “bilge” before adequately describing it.

The Op-Ed is directed to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who has recently, and thankfully, been vocal about the looming environmental catastrophe of global warming. The deniers’ letter takes him to task for this, but doesn’t come within a glancing blow of reality.

The letter itself is based on a single claim. So let’s be clear: If that claim is wrong, so is the rest of the letter.

Guess what? That claim is wrong. So blatantly wrong, in fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone could write it with a straight face. It says:

“The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years.”

This is simply, completely, and utterly false. The Met Office is the national weather service for the United Kingdom. In October 2012, they updated their database of global surface temperature measurements, a compendium of temperatures taken over time by weather stations around the planet. David Rose, a climate change denier who can charitably be said to have trouble with facts, cherry-picked this dataset and published a horrendously misleading graph in that bastion of scientific thought, the Daily Mail, saying the measurements show there’s been no global warming for the past 16 years.

But he did this by choosing a starting point on his graph that gave the result he wanted, a graph that looks like there’s been no warming since 1997. But if you show the data properly, you see there has been warming:

Graph showing how the Earth is warming up.

Global surface temperatures from the Met Office data. Top: Fiction. Bottom: Fact.

Image credit: David Rose/Daily Mail (top), Tamino (bottom).

The top graph is from Rose’s article, but the bottom graph shows what happens when you display the data going back a few more years. See the difference? What he did is like measuring how tall you are when you’re 25, doing it again when you’re 30, then claiming human beings never grow. That’s a big no-no in science. You have to choose starting and ending points that fairly represent the data, as in the bottom graph. When you do, you very clearly see the trend that the Earth is getting warmer. In fact, hammering home how patently ridiculous this claims is, nine of the 10 hottest years on record have been since 2000. On top of that, Rose was using global surface temperatures, which don’t really represent global overall heat content well; most of the heating is going into ocean waters. So the data he’s displaying so awfully isn’t even the right data to make his claim anyway!

So the very first basis of this denial letter is total garbage, and was such an egregious manipulation of the U.K. Met Office data that the Met Office itself issued a debunking of it! Yet here were are, months later, with the deniers still ignoring facts.

The letter is chock full of more such falsehoods. If you want the rundown, please go readthe great article on Skeptical Science destroying this nonsense. Full disclosure: I had already written quite a bit more for this post before seeing the one at Skeptical Science, and decided it would be better to send readers there for more rather than debunk all the wrongness here. I’m pleased to note they found the same examples of misleading or outright false statements in the deniers’ article and debunked them the same way I had.

I do want to add something, though. I’ll note that it seems superficially impressive that they got 125 scientists, “qualified in climate-related matters” as they claim, to sign this letter.

Yeah, about that…

First, not everyone signing that letter is a scientist. Lord Monckton, for example, apparently has no formal scientific training, has some trouble with the truth, and oh, by the way, claims Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery. He’s the last guy I’d want signing a letter I was on. Yet he seems to pop up on every denialist list as a go-to guy.

Here’s another: The very first signatory, Hhabibullo Abdusamatov, claims that global warming is caused by the Sun, which is patently and provably false (see that Skeptical Science link for more). Many of the claims Abdusamatov makes (as listed on his Wikipedia page) are, um, not accepted by mainstream science, to be very charitable.

Going down the list of signatories I was struck by how many are not, in fact, climate scientists (again, for examples with references, see Skeptical Science); I counted a dozen who actually have climatology in their listed credentials. It’s kinda weird to write such a big letter and then only have fewer than 10 percent of the signers actually be credentialed in the field.

Of course, I’m not a climatologist either, though I am an astronomer classically trained in science, and that means I know enough to rely on the combined research of actual climate scientists from around the world. And when thousands upon thousands of such scientists— in fact, 98 percent of actual, bona fide climate scientists—say global warming is real, well then, that strikes me as being somewhat more credible than a hundred or so politically and ideologically driven non-climate-scientists.

I’ll note this isn’t the first time a laughably-wrong article has been printed by right-leaning venues and signed by multiple, similarly-inappropriate authors. The Wall Street Journalposted one in January 2012 (while turning down an article supporting the reality of global warming signed by 255 actual scientists), and in April 2012, another made the roundsthat was signed by 49 people, including some ex-NASA astronauts, but again, none who actually were climate scientists.

So we can expect to see more of this. Clearly, when you don’t have facts to support your claims, the best thing to do is make as much noise as possible to distract from reality. And that reality is that the world is getting hotter, and unless we do something, now, we’re facing a world of trouble.

Climate Change DO THE MATH! (Scientia Productions)

01/12/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125-plus scientists (Financial Post) + EANTH list reactions

01/12/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Desastre, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

OPEN CLIMATE LETTER TO UN SECRETARY-GENERAL: Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125-plus scientists.

Special to Financial Post | Nov 29, 2012 8:36 PM ET | Last Updated:Nov 30, 2012 12:11 PM ET

Getty – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon

Policy actions that aim to reduce CO2 emissions are unlikely to influence future climate. Policies need to focus on preparation for, and adaptation to, all dangerous climatic events, however caused

Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

H.E. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General, United Nations. First Avenue and East 44^th Street, New York, New York, U.S.A.

November 29, 2012

Mr. Secretary-General:

On November 9 this year you told the General Assembly: “Extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal … Our challenge remains, clear and urgent: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthen adaptation to … even larger climate shocks … and to reach a legally binding climate agreement by 2015 … This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy.”

On November 13 you said at Yale: “The science is clear; we should waste no more time on that debate.”

The following day, in Al Gore’s “Dirty Weather” Webcast, you spoke of “more severe storms, harsher droughts, greater floods”, concluding: “Two weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States. A nation saw the reality of climate change. The recovery will cost tens of billions of dollars. The cost of inaction will be even higher. We must reduce our dependence on carbon emissions.”

We the undersigned, qualified in climate-related matters, wish to state that current scientific knowledge does not substantiate your assertions.

The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years. During this period, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations rose by nearly 9% to now constitute 0.039% of the atmosphere. Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years. Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.

The “even larger climate shocks” you have mentioned would be worse if the world cooled than if it warmed. Climate changes naturally all the time, sometimes dramatically. The hypothesis that our emissions of CO₂ have caused, or will cause, dangerous warming is not supported by the evidence.

The incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased. There is little evidence that dangerous weather-related events will occur more often in the future. The U.N.’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its Special Report on Extreme Weather (2012) that there is “an absence of an attributable climate change signal” in trends in extreme weather losses to date. The funds currently dedicated to trying to stop extreme weather should therefore be diverted to strengthening our infrastructure so as to be able to withstand these inevitable, natural events, and to helping communities rebuild after natural catastrophes such as tropical storm Sandy.

There is no sound reason for the costly, restrictive public policy decisions proposed at the U.N. climate conference in Qatar. Rigorous analysis of unbiased observational data does not support the projections of future global warming predicted by computer models now proven to exaggerate warming and its effects.

The NOAA “State of the Climate in 2008” report asserted that 15 years or more without any statistically-significant warming would indicate a discrepancy between observation and prediction. Sixteen years without warming have therefore now proven that the models are wrong by their creators’ own criterion.

Based upon these considerations, we ask that you desist from exploiting the misery of the families of those who lost their lives or properties in tropical storm Sandy by making unsupportable claims that human influences caused that storm. They did not. We also ask that you acknowledge that policy actions by the U.N., or by the signatory nations to the UNFCCC, that aim to reduce CO₂ emissions are unlikely to exercise any significant influence on future climate. Climate policies therefore need to focus on preparation for, and adaptation to, all dangerous climatic events however caused.

Signed by:

Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Dr. Sci., mathematician and astrophysicist, Head of the Selenometria project on the Russian segment of the ISS, Head of Space Research of the Sun Sector at the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, PhD, Professor of Physics, Emeritus and Founding Director, International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, U.S.A.
Bjarne Andresen, Dr. Scient., physicist, published and presents on the impossibility of a “global temperature”, Professor, Niels Bohr Institute (physics (thermodynamics) and chemistry), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
J. Scott Armstrong, PhD, Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, focus on analyzing climate forecasts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Timothy F. Ball, PhD, environmental consultant and former climatology professor, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
James R. Barrante, Ph.D. (chemistry, Harvard University), Emeritus Professor of Physical Chemistry, Southern Connecticut State University, focus on studying the greenhouse gas behavior of CO2, Cheshire, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Colin Barton, B.Sc., PhD (Earth Science, Birmingham, U.K.), FInstEng Aus Principal research scientist (ret.), Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Joe Bastardi, BSc, (Meteorology, Pennsylvania State), meteorologist, State College, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Franco Battaglia, PhD (Chemical Physics), Professor of Physics and Environmental Chemistry, University of Modena, Italy
Richard Becherer, BS (Physics, Boston College), MS (Physics, University of Illinois), PhD (Optics, University of Rochester), former Member of the Technical Staff – MIT Lincoln Laboratory, former Adjunct Professor – University of Connecticut, Areas of Specialization: optical radiation physics, coauthor – standard reference book Optical Radiation Measurements: Radiometry, Millis, MA, U.S.A.
Edwin X. Berry, PhD (Atmospheric Physics, Nevada), MA (Physics, Dartmouth), BS (Engineering, Caltech), Certified Consulting Meteorologist, President, Climate Physics LLC, Bigfork, MT, U.S.A.
Ian Bock, BSc, PhD, DSc, Biological sciences (retired), Ringkobing, Denmark
Ahmed Boucenna, PhD, Professor of Physics (strong climate focus), Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Ferhat Abbas University, Setif, Algéria
Antonio Brambati, PhD, Emeritus Professor (sedimentology), Department of Geological, Environmental and Marine Sciences (DiSGAM), University of Trieste (specialization: climate change as determined by Antarctic marine sediments), Trieste, Italy
Stephen C. Brown, PhD (Environmental Science, State University of New York), District Agriculture Agent, Assistant Professor, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ground Penetrating Radar Glacier research, Palmer, Alaska, U.S.A.
Mark Lawrence Campbell, PhD (chemical physics; gas-phase kinetic research involving greenhouse gases (nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide)), Professor, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, U.S.A.
Rudy Candler, PhD (Soil Chemistry, University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF)), former agricultural laboratory manager, School of Agriculture and Land Resources Management, UAF, co-authored papers regarding humic substances and potential CO2 production in the Arctic due to decomposition, Union, Oregon, U.S.A.
Alan Carlin, B.S. (California Institute of Technology), PhD (economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), retired senior analyst and manager, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, former Chairman of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club (recipient of the Chapter’s Weldon Heald award for conservation work), U.S.A.
Dan Carruthers, M.Sc., Arctic Animal Behavioural Ecologist, wildlife biology consultant specializing in animal ecology in Arctic and Subarctic regions, Turner Valley, Alberta, Canada
Robert M. Carter, PhD, Professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
Uberto Crescenti, PhD, Full Professor of Applied Geology, Università G. d’Annunzio, Past President Società Geologica taliana, Chieti, Italy
Arthur Chadwick, PhD (Molecular Biology), Research Professor of Geology, Department of Biology and Geology, Southwestern Adventist University, Climate Specialties: dendrochronology (determination of past climate states by tree ring analysis), palynology (same but using pollen as a climate proxy), paleobotany and botany; Keene, Texas, U.S.A.
George V. Chilingar, PhD, Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Engineering (CO2/temp. focused research), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
Ian D. Clark, PhD, Professor (isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology), Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Cornelia Codreanova, Diploma in Geography, Researcher (Areas of Specialization: formation of glacial lakes) at Liberec University, Czech Republic, Zwenkau, Germany
Michael Coffman, PhD (Ecosystems Analysis and Climate Influences, University of Idaho), CEO of Sovereignty International, President of Environmental Perspectives, Inc., Bangor, Maine, U.S.A.
Piers Corbyn, ARCS, MSc (Physics, Imperial College London)), FRAS, FRMetS, astrophysicist (Queen Mary College, London), consultant, founder WeatherAction long range weather and climate forecasters, American Thinker Climate Forecaster of The Year 2010, London, United Kingdom
Richard S. Courtney, PhD, energy and environmental consultant, IPCC expert reviewer, Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom
Roger W. Cohen, B.S., M.S., PhD Physics, MIT and Rutgers University, Fellow, American Physical Society, initiated and managed for more than twenty years the only industrial basic research program in climate, Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Susan Crockford, PhD (Zoology/Evolutionary Biology/Archaeozoology), Adjunct Professor (Anthropology/Faculty of Graduate Studies), University of Victoria, Victoria, British Colombia, Canada
Walter Cunningham, B.S., M.S. (Physics – Institute of Geophysics And Planetary Sciences, UCLA), AMP – Harvard Graduate School of Business, Colonel (retired) U.S. Marine Corps, Apollo 7 Astronaut., Fellow – AAS, AIAA; Member AGU, Houston, Texas, U.S.A.
Joseph D’Aleo, BS, MS (Meteorology, University of Wisconsin), Doctoral Studies (NYU), CMM, AMS Fellow, Executive Director – ICECAP (International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project), College Professor Climatology/Meteorology, First Director of Meteorology The Weather Channel, Hudson, New Hampshire, U.S.A.
David Deming, PhD (Geophysics), Professor of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, U.S.A.
James E. Dent; B.Sc., FCIWEM, C.Met, FRMetS, C.Env., Independent Consultant (hydrology & meteorology), Member of WMO OPACHE Group on Flood Warning, Hadleigh, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom
Willem de Lange, MSc (Hons), DPhil (Computer and Earth Sciences), Senior Lecturer in Earth and Ocean Sciences, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Silvia Duhau, Ph.D. (physics), Solar Terrestrial Physics, Buenos Aires University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Geoff Duffy, DEng (Dr of Engineering), PhD (Chemical Engineering), BSc, ASTCDip. (first chemical engineer to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in NZ), FIChemE, wide experience in radiant heat transfer and drying, chemical equilibria, etc. Has reviewed, analysed, and written brief reports and papers on climate change, Auckland, New Zealand
Don J. Easterbrook, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Geology, Western Washington, University, Bellingham, Washington, U.S.A.
Ole Henrik Ellestad, former Research Director, applied chemistry SINTEF, Professor in physical chemistry, University of Oslo, Managing director Norsk Regnesentral and Director for Science and Technology, Norwegian Research Council, widely published in infrared spectroscopy, Oslo, Norway
Per Engene, MSc, Biologist, Co-author – The Climate, Science and Politics (2009), Bø i Telemark, Norway
Gordon Fulks, B.S., M.S., PhD (Physics, University of Chicago), cosmic radiation, solar wind, electromagnetic and geophysical phenomena, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Katya Georgieva, MSc (meteorology), PhD (solar-terrestrial climate physics), Professor, Space Research and Technologies Institute, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
Lee C. Gerhard, PhD, Senior Scientist Emeritus, University of Kansas, past director and state geologist, Kansas Geological Survey, U.S.A.
Ivar Giaever PhD, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1973, professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, Applied BioPhysics, Troy, New York, U.S.A.
Albrecht Glatzle, PhD, ScAgr, Agro-Biologist and Gerente ejecutivo, Tropical pasture research and land use management, Director científico de INTTAS, Loma Plata, Paraguay
Fred Goldberg, PhD, Adj Professor, Royal Institute of Technology (Mech, Eng.), Secretary General KTH International Climate Seminar 2006 and Climate analyst (NIPCC), Lidingö, Sweden
Laurence I. Gould, PhD, Professor of Physics, University of Hartford, Past Chair (2004), New England Section of the American Physical Society, West Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Vincent Gray, PhD, New Zealand Climate Coalition, expert reviewer for the IPCC, author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of Climate Change 2001, Wellington, New Zealand
William M. Gray, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Head of the Tropical Meteorology Project, Fort Collins, Colorado, U.S.A.
Charles B. Hammons, PhD (Applied Mathematics), climate-related specialties: applied mathematics, modeling & simulation, software & systems engineering, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Management, University of Dallas; Assistant Professor, North Texas State University (Dr. Hammons found many serious flaws during a detailed study of the software, associated control files plus related email traffic of the Climate Research Unit temperature and other records and “adjustments” carried out in support of IPCC conclusions), Coyle, OK, U.S.A.
William Happer, PhD, Professor, Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, U.S.A.
Hermann Harde, PhD, Professur f. Lasertechnik & Werkstoffkunde (specialized in molecular spectroscopy, development of gas sensors and CO₂-climate sensitivity), Helmut-Schmidt-Universität, Universität der Bundeswehr Fakultät für Elektrotechnik, Hamburg, Germany
Howard Hayden, PhD, Emeritus Professor (Physics), University of Connecticut, The Energy Advocate, Pueblo West, Colorado, U.S.A.
Ross Hays, Meteorologist, atmospheric scientist, NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (currently working at McMurdo Station, Antarctica), Palestine, Texas, U.S.A.
Martin Hovland, M.Sc. (meteorology, University of Bergen), PhD (Dr Philos, University of Tromsø), FGS, Emeritus Professor, Geophysics, Centre for Geobiology, University of Bergen, member of the expert panel: Environmental Protection and Safety Panel (EPSP) for the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) and the Integrated ODP, Stavanger, Norway
Ole Humlum, PhD, Professor of Physical Geography, Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Craig D. Idso, PhD, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.
Sherwood B. Idso, PhD, President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.
Larry Irons, BS (Geology), MS (Geology), Sr. Geophysicist at Fairfield Nodal (specialization: paleoclimate), Lakewood, Colorado, U.S.A.
Terri Jackson, MSc (plasma physics), MPhil (energy economics), Director, Independent Climate Research Group, Northern Ireland and London (Founder of the energy/climate group at the Institute of Physics, London), United Kingdom
Albert F. Jacobs, Geol.Drs., P. Geol., Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Hans Jelbring, PhD Climatology, Stockholm University, MSc Electronic engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, BSc Meteorology, Stockholm University, Sweden
Bill Kappel, B.S. (Physical Science-Geology), B.S. (Meteorology), Storm Analysis, Climatology, Operation Forecasting, Vice President/Senior Meteorologist, Applied Weather Associates, LLC, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, U.S.A.
Olavi Kärner, Ph.D., Extraordinary Research Associate; Dept. of Atmospheric Physics, Tartu Observatory, Toravere, Estonia
Leonid F. Khilyuk, PhD, Science Secretary, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Professor of Engineering (CO2/temp. focused research), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
William Kininmonth MSc, MAdmin, former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological organization’s Commission for Climatology, Kew, Victoria, Australia
Gerhard Kramm, Dr. rer. nat. (Theoretical Meteorology), Research Associate Professor, Geophysical Institute, Associate Faculty, College of Natural Science and Mathematics, University of Alaska Fairbanks, (climate specialties: Atmospheric energetics, physics of the atmospheric boundary layer, physical climatology – seeinteresting paper by Kramm et al), Fairbanks, Alaska, U.S.A.
Leif Kullman, PhD (Physical geography, plant ecology, landscape ecology), Professor, Physical geography, Department of Ecology and Environmental science, Umeå University, Areas of Specialization: Paleoclimate (Holocene to the present), glaciology, vegetation history, impact of modern climate on the living landscape, Umeå, Sweden
Hans H.J. Labohm, PhD, Independent economist, author specialised in climate issues, IPCC expert reviewer, author of Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma and climate science-related Blog, The Netherlands
Rune Berg-Edland Larsen, PhD (Geology, Geochemistry), Professor, Dep. Geology and Geoengineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
C. (Kees) le Pair, PhD (Physics Leiden, Low Temperature Physics), former director of the Netherlands Research Organization FOM (fundamental physics) and subsequently founder and director of The Netherlands Technology Foundation STW. Served the Dutch Government many years as member of its General Energy Council and of the National Defense Research Council. Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences Honorary Medal and honorary doctorate in all technical sciences of the Delft University of technology, Nieuwegein, The Netherlands
Douglas Leahey, PhD, meteorologist and air-quality consultant, past President – Friends of Science, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Jay Lehr, B.Eng. (Princeton), PhD (environmental science and ground water hydrology), Science Director, The Heartland Institute, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
Bryan Leyland, M.Sc., FIEE, FIMechE, FIPENZ, MRSNZ, consulting engineer (power), Energy Issues Advisor – International Climate Science Coalition, Auckland, New Zealand
Edward Liebsch, B.A. (Earth Science, St. Cloud State University); M.S. (Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University), former Associate Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; former Adjunct Professor of Meteorology, St. Cloud State University, Environmental Consultant/Air Quality Scientist (Areas of Specialization: micrometeorology, greenhouse gas emissions), Maple Grove, Minnesota, U.S.A.
William Lindqvist, PhD (Applied Geology), Independent Geologic Consultant, Areas of Specialization: Climate Variation in the recent geologic past, Tiburon, California, U.S.A.
Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Prof. Dr. , PhD (Physics), retired from university of appl. sciences HTW, Saarbrücken (Germany), atmospheric temperature research, speaker of the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), Heidelberg, Germany
Anthony R. Lupo, Ph.D., Professor of Atmospheric Science, Department of Soil, Environmental, and Atmospheric Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, U.S.A.
Oliver Manuel, BS, MS, PhD, Post-Doc (Space Physics), Associate – Climate & Solar Science Institute, Emeritus Professor, College of Arts & Sciences University of Missouri-Rolla, previously Research Scientist (US Geological Survey) and NASA Principal Investigator for Apollo, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, U.S.A.
Francis Massen, professeur-docteur en physique (PhD equivalent, Universities of Nancy (France) and Liège (Belgium), Manager of the Meteorological Station of the Lycée Classique de Diekirch, specialising in the measurement of solar radiation and atmospheric gases. Collaborator to the WOUDC (World Ozone and UV Radiation Data Center), Diekirch, Luxembourg
Henri Masson, Prof. dr. ir., Emeritus Professor University of Antwerp (Energy & Environment Technology Management), Visiting professor Maastricht School of Management, specialist in dynamical (chaotic) complex system analysis, Antwerp, Belgium.
Ferenc Mark Miskolczi, PhD, atmospheric physicist, formerly of NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia, U.S.A.
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Expert reviewer, IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Quantification of Climate Sensitivity, Carie, Rannoch, Scotland
Nils-Axel Mörner, PhD (Sea Level Changes and Climate), Emeritus Professor of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
John Nicol, PhD (Physics, James Cook University), Chairman – Australian climate Science Coalition, Brisbane, Australia
Ingemar Nordin, PhD, professor in philosophy of science (including a focus on “Climate research, philosophical and sociological aspects of a politicised research area”), Linköpings University, Sweden.
David Nowell, M.Sc., Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, former chairman of the NATO Meteorological Group, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Cliff Ollier, D.Sc., Professor Emeritus (School of Earth and Environment – see hisCopenhagen Climate Challenge sea level article here), Research Fellow, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, W.A., Australia
Oleg M. Pokrovsky, BS, MS, PhD (mathematics and atmospheric physics – St. Petersburg State University, 1970), Dr. in Phys. and Math Sciences (1985), Professor in Geophysics (1995), principal scientist, Main Geophysical Observatory (RosHydroMet), Note: Dr. Pokrovsky analyzed long climates and concludes that anthropogenic CO2 impact is not the main contributor in climate change,St. Petersburg, Russia.
Daniel Joseph Pounder, BS (Meteorology, University of Oklahoma), MS (Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign); Meteorological/Oceanographic Data Analyst for the National Data Buoy Center, formerly Meteorologist, WILL AM/FM/TV, Urbana, U.S.A.
Brian Pratt, PhD, Professor of Geology (Sedimentology), University of Saskatchewan (see Professor Pratt’s article for a summary of his views), Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Harry N.A. Priem, PhD, Professore-emeritus isotope-geophysics and planetary geology, Utrecht University, past director ZWO/NOW Institute of Isotope Geophysical Research, Past-President Royal Netherlands Society of Geology and Mining, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Oleg Raspopov, Doctor of Science and Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation, Professor – Geophysics, Senior Scientist, St. Petersburg Filial (Branch) of N.V.Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowaves Propagation of RAS (climate specialty: climate in the past, particularly the influence of solar variability), Editor-in-Chief of journal “Geomagnetism and Aeronomy” (published by Russian Academy of Sciences), St. Petersburg, Russia
Curt G. Rose, BA, MA (University of Western Ontario), MA, PhD (Clark University), Professor Emeritus, Department of Environmental Studies and Geography, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
S. Jeevananda Reddy, M.Sc. (Geophysics), Post Graduate Diploma (Applied Statistics, Andhra University), PhD (Agricultural Meteorology, Australian University, Canberra), Formerly Chief Technical Advisor—United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) & Expert-Food and Agriculture Organization (UN), Convener – Forum for a Sustainable Environment, author of 500 scientific articles and several books – here is one: “Climate Change – Myths & Realities“, Hyderabad, India
Arthur Rorsch, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Molecular Genetics, Leiden University, former member of the board of management of the Netherlands Organization Applied Research TNO, Leiden, The Netherlands
Rob Scagel, MSc (forest microclimate specialist), Principal Consultant – Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Chris Schoneveld, MSc (Structural Geology), PhD (Geology), retired exploration geologist and geophysicist, Australia and France
Tom V. Segalstad, PhD (Geology/Geochemistry), Associate Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, University of Oslo, former IPCC expert reviewer, former Head of the Geological Museum, and former head of the Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden (UO), Oslo, Norway
John Shade, BS (Physics), MS (Atmospheric Physics), MS (Applied Statistics), Industrial Statistics Consultant, GDP, Dunfermline, Scotland, United Kingdom
Thomas P. Sheahen, B.S., PhD (Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), specialist in renewable energy, research and publication (applied optics) in modeling and measurement of absorption of infrared radiation by atmospheric CO2, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (2005-2009); Argonne National Laboratory (1988-1992); Bell Telephone labs (1966-73), National Bureau of Standards (1975-83), Oakland, Maryland, U.S.A.
S. Fred Singer, PhD, Professor Emeritus (Environmental Sciences), University of Virginia, former director, U.S. Weather Satellite Service, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A.
Frans W. Sluijter, Prof. dr ir, Emeritus Professor of theoretical physics, Technical University Eindhoven, Chairman—Skepsis Foundation, former vice-president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, former President of the Division on Plasma Physics of the European Physical Society and former bureau member of the Scientific Committee on Sun-Terrestrial Physics, Euvelwegen, the Netherlands
Jan-Erik Solheim, MSc (Astrophysics), Professor, Institute of Physics, University of Tromsø, Norway (1971-2002), Professor (emeritus), Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Norway (1965-1970, 2002- present), climate specialties: sun and periodic climate variations, scientific paper by Professor Solheim “Solen varsler et kaldere tiår“, Baerum, Norway
H. Leighton Steward, Master of Science (Geology), Areas of Specialization: paleoclimates and empirical evidence that indicates CO2 is not a significant driver of climate change, Chairman, PlantsNeedCO2.org and CO2IsGreen.org, Chairman of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man (geology, archeology & anthropology) at SMU in Dallas, Texas, Boerne, TX, U.S.A.
Arlin B. Super, PhD (Meteorology – University of Wisconsin at Madison), former Professor of Meteorology at Montana State University, retired Research Meteorologist, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Saint Cloud, Minnesota, U.S.A.
Edward (Ted) R. Swart, D.Sc. (physical chemistry, University of Pretoria), M.Sc. and Ph.D. (math/computer science, University of Witwatersrand). Formerly Director of the Gulbenkian Centre, Dean of the Faculty of Science, Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science, University of Rhodesia and past President of the Rhodesia Scientific Association. Set up the first radiocarbon dating laboratory in Africa. Most recently, Professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo and Chair of Computing and Information Science and Acting Dean at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, now retired in Kelowna British Columbia, Canada
George H. Taylor, B.A. (Mathematics, U.C. Santa Barbara), M.S. (Meteorology, University of Utah), Certified Consulting Meteorologist, Applied Climate Services, LLC, Former State Climatologist (Oregon), President, American Association of State Climatologists (1998-2000), Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A.
J. E. Tilsley, P.Eng., BA Geol, Acadia University, 53 years of climate and paleoclimate studies related to development of economic mineral deposits, Aurora, Ontario, Canada
Göran Tullberg, Civilingenjör i Kemi (equivalent to Masters of Chemical Engineering), Co-author – The Climate, Science and Politics (2009) (see here for a review), formerly instructor of Organic Chemistry (specialization in “Climate chemistry”), Environmental Control and Environmental Protection Engineering at University in Växjö; Falsterbo, Sweden
Brian Gregory Valentine, PhD, Adjunct professor of engineering (aero and fluid dynamics specialization) at the University of Maryland, Technical manager at US Department of Energy, for large-scale modeling of atmospheric pollution, Technical referee for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science programs in climate and atmospheric modeling conducted at American Universities and National Labs, Washington, DC, U.S.A.
Bas van Geel, PhD, paleo-climatologist, Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, Research Group Paleoecology and Landscape Ecology, Faculty of Science, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gerrit J. van der Lingen, PhD (Utrecht University), geologist and paleoclimatologist, climate change consultant, Geoscience Research and Investigations, Nelson, New Zealand
A.J. (Tom) van Loon, PhD, Professor of Geology (Quaternary Geologyspecialism: Glacial Geology), Adam Mickiewicz University, former President of the European Association of Science Editors Poznan, Poland
Fritz Vahrenholt, B.S. (chemistry), PhD (chemistry), Prof. Dr., Professor of Chemistry, University of Hamburg, Former Senator for environmental affairs of the State of Hamburg, former CEO of REpower Systems AG (wind turbines), Author of the book Die kalte Sonne: warum die Klimakatastrophe nicht stattfindet (The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Crisis Isn’t Happening”, Hamburg, Germany
Michael G. Vershovsky, Ph.D. in meteorology (macrometeorology, long-term forecasts, climatology), Senior Researcher, Russian State Hydrometeorological University, works with, as he writes, “Atmospheric Centers of Action (cyclones and anticyclones, such as Icelandic depression, the South Pacific subtropical anticyclone, etc.). Changes in key parameters of these centers strongly indicate that the global temperature is influenced by these natural factors (not exclusively but nevertheless)”, St. Petersburg, Russia
Gösta Walin, PhD and Docent (theoretical Physics, University of Stockholm), Professor Emeritus in oceanografi, Earth Science Center, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden
Anthony Watts, ItWorks/IntelliWeather, Founder, surfacestations.org, Watts Up With That, Chico, California, U.S.A.
Carl Otto Weiss, Direktor und Professor at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Visiting Professor at University of Copenhagen, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Coauthor of ”Multiperiodic Climate Dynamics: Spectral Analysis of…“, Braunschweig, Germany
Forese-Carlo Wezel, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Stratigraphy (global and Mediterranean geology, mass biotic extinctions and paleoclimatology), University of Urbino, Urbino, Italy
Boris Winterhalter, PhD, senior marine researcher (retired), Geological Survey of Finland, former professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
David E. Wojick, PhD, PE, energy and environmental consultant, Technical Advisory Board member – Climate Science Coalition of America, Star Tannery, Virginia, U.S.A.
George T. Wolff, Ph.D., Principal Atmospheric Scientist, Air Improvement Resource, Inc., Novi, Michigan, U.S.A.
Thomas (Tom) Wysmuller –NASA (Ret) ARC, GSFC, Hdq. – Meteorologist, Ogunquit, ME, U.S.A.
Bob Zybach, PhD (Environmental Sciences, Oregon State University), climate-related carbon sequestration research, MAIS, B.S., Director, Environmental Sciences Institute Peer review Institute, Cottage Grove, Oregon, U.S.A.
Milap Chand Sharma, PhD, Associate Professor of Glacial Geomorphology, Centre fort the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Valentin A. Dergachev, PhD, Professor and Head of the Cosmic Ray Laboratory at Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
Vijay Kumar Raina, Ex-Deputy Director General, Geological Survey of India, Ex-Chairman Project Advisory and Monitoring Committee on Himalayan glacier, DST, Govt. of India and currently Member Expert Committee on Climate Change Programme, Dept. of Science & Technology, Govt. of India, author of 2010 MoEF Discussion Paper, “Himalayan Glaciers – State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change”, the first comprehensive study on the region. Winner of the Indian Antarctica Award, Chandigarh, India
Scott Chesner, B.S. (Meteorology, Penn State University), KETK Chief Meteorologist, KETK TV, previously Meteorologist with Accu Weather, Tyler, Texas, U.S.A

* * *

Reactions (I will not mention names here; all are from emails in the EANTH list)

1) “Hmm, I clicked on a few links, googled a few names. Found that when one is listed as “author of x book”, said book doesn’t appear on Amazon, etc.

Many non-PhDs.

Many “consultants”. Losts of “adjuncts”, lots of professor emeriti. someone listed as an “Extraordinary Research Associate”.

Little actual data. Few peer-reviewed research reports.

Didn’t recognize most of the names. Did recognize some “suspicious” ones (e.g., Tim Ball, a lovely [sic] Canadian).

Misrepresentation of the SREX report (quotation is a minor comment on a single point of many – page 280 of 594).

Link is to a letter published in the Financial Post, the business section of the National Post, the more rightward leaning of Canada’s 2 national papers. To give an indication, on the day in 2007 when the Nobel was awarded to IPCC and Gore, the headline on front page was “A Coup for Junk Science: Gaffe riddled work undeserving”.

Conclusion: don’t bother to click the link.”

2) “A few of the names on the list are also contained in table 3 of the 2012 Heartland Institute Proposed Budget (pages 7-8). Namely:

Craig D. Idso

Anthony Lupo

Susan Crockford

Joseph D’Aleo

Fred Singer

Robert Carter

Link:

http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/(1-15-2012)%202012%20Heartland%20Budget.pdf”

3) “Is it that bad guys without phd and associations with the wrong institutions nullify the legitimacy of the good guys with proper credentials? Suppose you could not look them up. Would you be unable to judge the contents (with links to data) of the letter? You seem to require a certain kind of authority (defined by political means especially) to allow you to decide whether ideas are valuable. How sad. If every scientist were that intellectually timid there would be no learning. Thank goodness for the Feynmans of the world.”

4) “Short of being able to read, review and test all the science, a person has to make judgements based on additional criteria. My criteria include, but are not limited to, some things such as peer-review, credentials, reputation, availability of cited sources/affiliation/expertise, guilt-by-association, and so on. They are only part of the judgement of credibility. I looked up a book listed in the credentials of one “expert” and could not find it; I followed links, and so on.

The endpoint was when I looked for the quotation in the cited source (SREX ) and evaluated it as misrepresentation. Since the IPCC was called on as an expert source by the so-called experts, yet it claimed other than what they claimed it claimed, the credibility of the letters and listed experts is to be disparaged.

That’s the character of science, and process of knowledge. Yup, that is how one really, really does judge which ideas are valuable.”

5) “Thank you for drawing attention to this open letter. I suspect quite a number of the people named in this letter are members of naysayer groups. From an Australian perspective Prof Bob Carter is a member of the secretive Lavoissier group. I have inside knowledge of this group as I was approached with my husband to write a film script about climate change many years ago and we pulled out eventually after being told what they wanted to say about the science of climate change, which required a distortion of the facts. We had the impression that the money for the film was coming from America and I wouldn’t mind betting that it was oil and mining interest finance ($6 million). The person who set out to recruit us was a glaciologist who was also a member of the Lavoissier group. For more information see the following:

Pearse, Guy , “High and Dry”, Viking/Penguin,Camberwell, Victoria, 2007.

Hamilton, Clive, “Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change, Black Inc. Agenda, Melbourne, Victoria, 2007.”

6) “I read a short and entertaining book that laid out a good process for deciding what to believe about climate change (or any other complex issue with lots of scientific research swirling around). It’s by Greg Craven and it’s called What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Besides providing a way to cut through all the chatter, the book offers sound fundamentals for people interested in how scientific information comes to be accepted. I think it’s a great book for students, especially because the author (a physics teacher) tackles tough subjects with humor.

Here’s a link to it: http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Worst-That-Could-Happen/dp/0399535012/”

The State of Climate Science (scienceprogress.org)

27/11/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

CLIMATE SCIENCE

A Thorough Review of the Scientific Literature on Global Warming

By Dr. James Powell | Thursday, November 15th, 2012

Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming. The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature.

I searched the Web of Science, an online science publication tool, for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between January first 1991 and November 9th 2012 that have the keyword phrases “global warming” or “global climate change.” The search produced 13,950 articles. See methodology.

I read whatever combination of titles, abstracts, and entire articles was necessary to identify articles that “reject” human-caused global warming. To be classified as rejecting, an article had to clearly and explicitly state that the theory of global warming is false or, as happened in a few cases, that some other process better explains the observed warming. Articles that merely claimed to have found some discrepancy, some minor flaw, some reason for doubt, I did not classify as rejecting global warming.

Articles about methods, paleoclimatology, mitigation, adaptation, and effects at least implicitly accept human-caused global warming and were usually obvious from the title alone. John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli also reviewed and assigned some of these articles; John provided invaluable technical expertise.

This work follows that of Oreskes (Science, 2005) who searched for articles published between 1993 and 2003 with the keyword phrase “global climate change.” She found 928, read the abstracts of each and classified them. None rejected human-caused global warming. Using her criteria and time-span, I get the same result. Deniers attacked Oreskes and her findings, but they have held up.

Some articles on global warming may use other keywords, for example, “climate change” without the “global” prefix. But there is no reason to think that the proportion rejecting global warming would be any higher.

By my definition, 24 of the 13,950 articles, 0.17 percent or 1 in 581, clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming. The list of articles that reject global warming is here.

The 24 articles have been cited a total of 113 times over the nearly 21-year period, for an average of close to 5 citations each. That compares to an average of about 19 citations for articles answering to “global warming,” for example. Four of the rejecting articles have never been cited; four have citations in the double-digits. The most-cited has 17.

Of one thing we can be certain: had any of these articles presented the magic bullet that falsifies human-caused global warming, that article would be on its way to becoming one of the most-cited in the history of science.

The articles have a total of 33,690 individual authors. The top ten countries represented, in order, are USA, England, China, Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia, France, Spain, and Netherlands. (The chart shows results through November 9th, 2012.)

Global warming deniers often claim that bias prevents them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But 24 articles in 18 different journals, collectively making several different arguments against global warming, expose that claim as false. Articles rejecting global warming can be published, but those that have been have earned little support or notice, even from other deniers.

A few deniers have become well known from newspaper interviews, Congressional hearings, conferences of climate change critics, books, lectures, websites and the like. Their names are conspicuously rare among the authors of the rejecting articles. Like those authors, the prominent deniers must have no evidence that falsifies global warming.

Anyone can repeat this search and post their findings. Another reviewer would likely have slightly different standards than mine and get a different number of rejecting articles. But no one will be able to reach a different conclusion, for only one conclusion is possible: Within science, global warming denial has virtually no influence. Its influence is instead on a misguided media, politicians all-too-willing to deny science for their own gain, and a gullible public.

Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. These are known facts about which virtually all publishing scientists agree.

James Lawrence Powell is the author of The Inquisition of Climate Science. Powell is also the executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, a partnership among government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education dedicated to increasing the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in the physical sciences and related engineering fields. This article is cross-posted with permission with the Columbia University Press blog.

This article is a cross-post with our partners at DeSmogBlog.

Naomi Klein on Capitalism and Climate Change (Bill Moyers)

27/11/2012UncategorizedClima, Desastre, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Previsão, Violênciarenzotaddei

November 15, 2012 – The Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein joins Bill to discuss hurricanes, climate change and democracy.

Saúde mental, outra vítima da mudança climática (IPS)

27/11/2012UncategorizedClima, Desastre, discurso ambiental, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsão, Saúde mental, Violênciarenzotaddei

23/11/2012 – 10h05

por Patricia Grogg, da IPS

As tensões e angústias acompanham toda pessoa que sofre um desastre. Foto: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 23/11/2012 – “A cidade parecia bombardeada. Caminho para meu escritório, cruzo com pessoas que levavam em seus rostos o mesmo – diria dramático – espanto que eu. Nos olhávamos e, sem nos conhecermos, nos perguntávamos: como foi com você? Aconteceu alguma coisa com sua casa? Foi uma solidariedade afetiva muito importante para mim”. Este testemunho dado à IPS, por uma jornalista de Santiago de Cuba, coloca na balança um dos lados bons da reação coletiva após um desastre como o sofrido por esta cidade na madrugada do dia 25 de outubro, quando o furacão Sandy, apesar do alerta meteorológico e das advertências oficiais, surpreendeu boa parte de seus habitantes.

O valor econômico dos prejuízos ainda são desconhecidos hoje, quando a parte mais oriental do país cura suas feridas, graves de todos os ângulos. Mas existe também o impacto psicológico, do qual se fala menos e se vê nos olhos das pessoas quando contam: “perdemos nossa casa com móveis, eletrodomésticos, até as lembranças”. “Tive muito medo, me enfiei no armário quando o vento levou o telhado do meu quarto. Meus vizinhos me tiraram de casa e me ajudaram a atravessar a rua até onde haviam se refugiado outras famílias cujas casas estavam em muito mau estado”, contou à IPS Isabel da Cruz, de 70 anos, moradora de Guantânamo, outra área afetada.

Depressão, tristeza, angústia, desespero, incerteza e agressividade, todas estas são manifestações que acompanham as pessoas depois de um desastre em qualquer parte do mundo. “Imagine, nos deitamos com a bela e acordamos com a fera”, comparou um trabalhador do setor turístico cujo hotel onde é empregado foi totalmente destruído. “As pessoas estão deprimidas e desorientadas. Em muitas nota-se o desequilíbrio psíquico pelas perdas sofridas”, disse à IPS o sacerdote católico Eugenio Castellanos, reitor do Santuário da Caridad del Cobre, virgem padroeira de Cuba. O padre estima que 90% das casas do Cobre, localidade vizinha a esta cidade, sofreram o impacto do Sandy.

Juan González Pérez, por sua vez, disse à IPS que dias antes do furacão houve focos de violência em alguns lugares, especialmente na hora de comprar artigos em falta. “Ficamos muitos dias sem energia elétrica e começaram a vender ‘luz brilhante’ (querosene) para cozinhar. Embora houvesse o suficiente para todos, aconteceram discussões e brigas na fila. Quando as pessoas se desesperam, costumam ficar agressivas”, observou Pérez, mais conhecido por Madelaine, líder do espiritismo cruzado “muertero”, uma expressão de religiosidade popular nesse lugar. Segundo contou, aconselha aos seus seguidores “unirem-se, se lavar bem, dar a quem não tem e não se desesperar”.

Em Mar Verde, a praia por onde o Sandy tocou o território cubano a 15 quilômetros de Santiago, a médica Elizabeth Martínez atende mais de cem pessoas, abrigadas em cabanas de veraneio que, por estarem mais afastadas do mar, se salvaram do desastre. “O impacto psicológico é grande, mas não houve mortes e nem temos pessoas doentes”, contou. Pouco mais de uma semana depois da passagem do furacão, os esforços em matéria de saúde se concentravam fundamentalmente em conter focos epidêmicos. “Estamos dando informações sanitárias aos moradores, ensinando como cuidar de doenças transmissíveis, sobre a importância de descontaminar a água antes de beber”, informou a médica.

Segundo meios especializados, estima-se que entre um terço e metade de uma população exposta a desastres sofre algum tipo de problema psicológico, embora na maioria dos casos se deva entender como reações normais diante de eventos extremos, que sob o impacto da mudança climática ameaçam aumentar em intensidade.

“Quando encontrei meus vizinhos no abrigo, estávamos em choque. Mas alguém disse: vamos limpar a entrada que está bloqueada por essas árvores caídas. Então, começamos a trabalhar, embora no começo ninguém falasse”, contou uma mulher do setor turístico. Nos primeiros dias era possível ver muitas pessoas recolhendo escombros e varrendo as ruas de suas vizinhanças.

Diante da frequência e da maior intensidade dos ciclones tropicais, as autoridades de saúde, desde a década de 1990, começaram a se preocupar com o impacto psicológico dos desastres causados por esses e outros fenômenos naturais. Em 2008, quando o país sofreu três furacões, uma indicação ministerial fortaleceu a inclusão do tema nos planos sanitários. Em um artigo sobre o assunto, o médico cubano Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz explica que os aspectos psicossociais dos desastres são considerados tanto na capacitação do pessoal como na organização dos programas que chegam a todo o país e enfatizam a atenção a setores mais vulneráveis, como menores de idade, adolescentes e idosos.

Do ponto de vista da saúde mental, nos desastres toda a população “sofre tensões e angústias em maior ou menor medida, direta ou indiretamente”, afirmaram Katia Villamil e Orlando Fleitas, que recomendaram não se esquecer que o impacto nessas circunstâncias é mais acentuado em populações de escassos recursos. Estes profissionais afirmam que as reações mais frequentes vão desde as consideradas normais, como ansiedade controlável, depressão leve ou quadros “histeriformes”, até estresse “peritraumático”, embotamento, redução do nível de atenção, descompensação de transtornos psiquiátricos pré-existentes, bem como “reação coletiva de agitação”.

O furacão Sandy causou estragos não apenas em Santiago de Cuba, mas também nas províncias de Guantânamo e Holguín, com saldo de 11 mortos. O governo de Raúl Castro ainda não divulgou as perdas econômicas, embora dados preliminares e incompletos dos primeiros dias indicassem uma estimativa de US$ 88 milhões.

Call to Modernize Antiquated Climate Negotiations (Science Daily)

19/11/2012UncategorizedClima, Desastre, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2012) — The structure and processes of United Nations climate negotiations are “antiquated,” unfair and obstruct attempts to reach agreements, according to research published November 18.

The findings come ahead of the 18^thUN Climate Change Summit, which starts in Doha on November 26.

The study, led by Dr Heike Schroeder from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, argues that the consensus-based decision making used by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stifles progress and contributes to negotiating deadlocks, which ultimately hurts poor countries more than rich countries.

It shows that delegations from some countries taking part have increased in size over the years, while others have decreased, limiting poor countries’ negotiating power and making their participation less effective.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Dr Schroeder, Dr Maxwell Boykoff of the University of Colorado and Laura Spiers of Pricewaterhouse Coopers, argue that changes are long overdue if demands for climate mitigation and adaptation agreements are to be met.

They recommend that countries consider capping delegation numbers at a level that allows broad representation across government departments and sectors of society, while maintaining a manageable overall size.

Dr Schroeder, of UEA’s School of International Development, will be attending COP18. She said: “The UN must recognize that these antiquated structures serve to constrain rather than compel co-operation on international climate policy. The time is long overdue for changes to institutions and structures that do not support decision-making and agreements.

“Poor countries cannot afford to send large delegations and their level of expertise usually remains significantly below that of wealthier countries. This limits poor countries’ negotiating power and makes their participation in each session less effective.”

The researchers found that attendance has changed in terms of the number and diversity of representatives. The number of delegates went from 757 representing 170 countries at the first COP in 1995 to 10,591 individuals from 194 countries attending COP15 in 2009 — a 1400 per cent increase. At COP15 there were also 13,500 delegates from 937 non-government Observer organisations.

Small developing countries have down-sized their delegations while G-7 and +5 countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa) have increased theirs. The exception is the United States, which after withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol started to send fewer delegates to COPs.

The study also looked at the make-up of the delegations and found an increase in participation by environmental, campaigning, academic and other non-Governmental organisations.

“Our work shows an increasing trend in the size of delegations on one side and a change in the intensity, profile and politicization of the negotiations on the other,” explained Dr Schroeder. “These variations suggest the climate change issue and its associated interests are framed quite differently across countries. NSAs are well represented on national delegations but clearly the government decides who is included and who is not, and what the official negotiating position of the country and its level of negotiating flexibility are.”

Some countries send large representations from business associations (Brazil), local government (Canada) orscience and academia (Russia). For small developing countries such as Bhutan and Gabon the majority of government representatives come from environment, forestry and agriculture. The UK has moved from mainly environment, forestry and agriculture to energy and natural resources. The US has shifted from these more conventional areas to an overwhelming representation from the US Congress at COP15.

Journal Reference:

Heike Schroeder, Maxwell T. Boykoff, Laura Spiers. Equity and state representations in climate negotiations.Nature Climate Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1742

Government, Industry Can Better Manage Risks of Very Rare Catastrophic Events, Experts Say (Science Daily)

19/11/2012UncategorizedAversão a risco, Cognição, Desastre, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Memória, Mudanças climáticas, Políticas públicas, Previsão, Psicologia, Risco, Visualidaderenzotaddei

ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2012) — Several potentially preventable disasters have occurred during the past decade, including the recent outbreak of rare fungal meningitis linked to steroid shots given to 13,000 patients to relieve back pain. Before that, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion in 2003, the financial crisis that started in 2008, the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011, and the Fukushima tsunami and ensuing nuclear accident also in 2011 were among rare and unexpected disasters that were considered extremely unlikely or even unthinkable.

A Stanford University engineer and risk management expert has analyzed the phenomenon of government and industry waiting for rare catastrophes to happen before taking risk management steps. She concluded that a different approach to these events would go far towards anticipating them, preventing them or limiting the losses.

To examine the risk management failures discernible in several major catastrophes, the research draws upon the combination of systems analysis and probability as used, for example, in engineering risk analysis. When relevant statistics are not available, it discusses the powerful alternative of systemic risk analysis to try to anticipate and manage the risks of highly uncertain, rare events. The paper by Stanford University researcher Professor Elisabeth Paté-Cornell recommends “a systematic risk analysis anchored in history and fundamental knowledge” as opposed to both industry and regulators sometimes waiting until after a disaster occurs to take safety measures as was the case, for example, of the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2011. Her paper, “On ‘Black Swans’ and ‘Perfect Storms’: Risk Analysis and Management When Statistics Are Not Enough,” appears in the November 2012 issue of Risk Analysis, published by the Society for Risk Analysis.

Paté-Cornell’s paper draws upon two commonly cited images representing different types of uncertainty — “black swans” and “perfect storms” — that are used both to describe extremely unlikely but high-consequence events and often to justify inaction until after the fact. The uncertainty in “perfect storms” derives mainly from the randomness of rare but known events occurring together. The uncertainty in “black swans” stems from the limits of fundamental understanding of a phenomenon, including in extreme cases, a complete lack of knowledge about its very existence.

Given these two extreme types of uncertainties, Paté-Cornell asks what has been learned about rare events in engineering risk analysis that can be incorporated in other fields such as finance or medicine. She notes that risk management often requires “an in-depth analysis of the system, its functions, and the probabilities of its failure modes.” The discipline confronts uncertainties by systematic identification of failure “scenarios,” including rare ones, using “reasoned imagination,” signals (new intelligence information, medical alerts, near-misses and accident precursors) and a set of analytical tools to assess the chances of events that have not happened yet. A main emphasis of systemic risk analysis is on dependencies (of failures, human errors, etc.) and on the role of external factors, such as earthquakes and tsunamis that become common causes of failure.

The “risk of no risk analysis” is illustrated by the case of the 14 meter Fukushima tsunami resulting from a magnitude 9 earthquake. Historical records showed that large tsunamis had occurred at least twice before in the same area. The first time was the Sanriku earthquake in the year 869, which was estimated at magnitude 8.6 with a tsunami that penetrated 4 kilometers inland. The second was the Sanriku earthquake of 1611, estimated at magnitude 8.1 that caused a tsunami with an estimated maximum wave height of about 20 meters. Yet, those previous events were not factored into the design of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor, which was built for a maximum wave height of 5.7 meters, simply based on the tidal wave caused in that area by the 1960 earthquake in Chile. Similar failures to capture historical data and various “signals” occurred in the cases of the 9/11 attacks, the Columbia Space Shuttle explosion and other examples analyzed in the paper.

The risks of truly unimaginable events that have never been seen before (such as the AIDS epidemics) cannot be assessed a priori, but careful and systematic monitoring, signals observation and a concerted response are keys to limiting the losses. Other rare events that place heavy pressure on human or technical systems are the result of convergences of known events (“perfect storms”) that can and should be anticipated. Their probabilities can be assessed using a set of analytical tools that capture dependencies and dynamics in scenario analysis. Given the results of such models, there should be no excuse for failing to take measures against rare but predictable events that have damaging consequences, and to react to signals, even imperfect ones, that something new may be unfolding.

Journal Reference:

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell. On “Black Swans” and “Perfect Storms”: Risk Analysis and Management When Statistics Are Not Enough. Risk Analysis, 2012; DOI:10.1111/j.1539-6924.2011.01787.x

Estudo aumenta precisão ao simular clima (Folha de São Paulo)

14/11/2012UncategorizedClima, Desastre, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4621, de 09 de Novembro de 2012.

Americanos conseguiram método indireto para levar em conta o papel das nuvens no aquecimento do planeta. Metodologia criada por eles indica que o mais provável neste século é que temperatura média aumente perto de 4º C.

Pesquisadores americanos acabam de achar um meio de determinar quais modelos da mudança climática parecem ser os mais precisos. E a má notícia: os melhores são os que predizem modificações mais drásticas no clima para as próximas décadas.

O segredo do trabalho, conduzido por John Fasullo e Kevin Trenberth, do Centro Nacional Para Pesquisa Atmosférica em Boulder, Colorado, foi se concentrar naquilo que se podia ver -no caso, a umidade relativa em regiões subtropicais- para compreender o que é muito mais difícil de medir: a dinâmica das nuvens.

As nuvens são um dos elementos-chave na interpretação do fenômeno do aquecimento global. Isso porque elas têm um efeito duplo. Por um lado, por serem claras, elas refletem a luz solar para o espaço, resultando em resfriamento. Por outro, o vapor d’água nelas é um poderoso gás do efeito estufa, podendo gerar aquecimento.

Os modelos de computador têm dificuldade em lidar com as nuvens e seu papel na evolução do clima.

Incerteza, em termos – Já é possível simular, ao menos em parte, o efeito delas, e existe um consenso mais ou menos claro de que a soma de tudo que elas fazem resulta em suave resfriamento. Entretanto, ainda há muita incerteza sobre o que isso significa para o futuro.

Tal incerteza é o grande mal a afetar a ciência do aquecimento global. Os detratores costumam apontá-la como a prova de que o medo da mudança climática é muito mais um movimento ideológico do que uma conclusão científica inescapável.

Ao que tudo indica, porém, a incerteza diz respeito ao nível de aquecimento para as próximas décadas, mas não ao fenômeno em si. Alguns modelos sugerem que, nos próximos cem anos, veremos um aumento da temperatura média da ordem de 4,5 graus Celsius. Já os mais modestos preveem que tudo não passará de uma variação de 1,5 grau Celsius.

Foi aí que entrou em cena o lampejo de Fasullo e Trenberth. Como é difícil observar diretamente as propriedades das nuvens e compará-las com o que os modelos oferecem, eles decidiram estudar a umidade relativa do ar, sobretudo nas regiões subtropicais, em geral mais secas.

A vantagem é que dados de umidade relativa são obtidos com confiança a partir de satélites, de forma que é possível contrastar as previsões dos modelos para o presente com observações reais. Também há forte correlação entre a umidade relativa e o processo de formação de nuvens, de forma que, a partir de um, é possível inferir o efeito de outro. O chato é que os modelos que parecem estar mais corretos são justamente aqueles que preveem mudanças mais fortes, da ordem de 4,5º C.

A questão das nuvens, porém, não é a única fonte de incertezas. “Esse trabalho é só uma das peças do quebra-cabeças da sensibilidade climática”, afirma Karen Shell, da Universidade Estadual do Oregon (EUA), que comentou a pesquisa na mesma edição da revista “Science” na qual os resultados saíram.

Cultural Dimensions of Climate Change Are Underestimated, Overlooked and Misunderstood (Science Daily)

13/11/2012UncategorizedClima, Cultura, Desastre, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsão, Psicologia, Visualidaderenzotaddei

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2012) — The impact of climate change on many aspects of cultural life for people all over the world is not being sufficiently accounted for by scientists and policy-makers. University of Exeter-led research by an international team, published on 11th November in Nature Climate Change, shows that cultural factors are key to making climate change real to people and to motivating their responses.

From enjoying beaches or winter sports and visiting iconic natural spaces to using traditional methods of agriculture and construction in our daily lives, the research highlights the cultural experiences that bind our communities and are under threat as a result of climate change. The paper argues that governments’ programmes for dealing with the consequences of climate change do not give enough consideration to what really matters to individuals and communities.

Culture binds people together and helps them overcome threats to their environments and livelihoods. Some are already experiencing such threats and profound changes to their lives. For example, the Polynesian Island of Niue, which experiences cyclones, has a population of 1,500 with four times as many Niueans now living in New Zealand. The research shows that most people remaining on the island resist migrating because of a strong attachment to the island. There is strong evidence to suggest that it is important for people’s emotional well-being to have control over whether and where they move. The researchers argue that these psychological factors have not been addressed.

Lead researcher Professor Neil Adger of the University of Exeter said: “Governments have not yet addressed the cultural losses we are all facing as a result of global climate change and this could have catastrophic consequences. If the cultural dimensions of climate change continue to be ignored, it is likely that responses will fail to be effective because they simply do not connect with what matters to individuals and communities. It is vital that the cultural impact of climate change is considered, alongside plans to adapt our physical spaces to the changing environment.”

Professor Katrina Brown from the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute adds: “The evidence is clear; when people experience the impacts of climate change in places that matter to them, the problems become real and they are motivated to make their futures more sustainable. This is as true in coastal Cornwall as in Pacific Islands.”

Journal Reference:

W. Neil Adger, Jon Barnett, Katrina Brown, Nadine Marshall, Karen O’Brien. Cultural dimensions of climate change impacts and adaptation. Nature Climate Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1666

Anthropocene Continues to Spark Scientific Debate (The Geological Society of America)

04/11/2012UncategorizedAntropoceno, Clima, Enquadramento, Geologia, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

GSA Annual Meeting Technical Session: “Geomorphology of the Anthropocene”

Boulder, Colorado, USA – How have humans influenced Earth? Can geoscientists measure when human impacts began overtaking those of Earth’s other inhabitants and that of the natural Earth system? Responding to increasing scientific recognition that humans have become the foremost agent of change at Earth’s surface, organizers of this GSA technical session have brought together speakers and poster presentations from a variety of sources in order to answer these questions and define the “Geomorphology of the Anthropocene.”

“Anthropocene” is a fairly new term (first used ca. 2002 by Paul Crutzen) now being applied to the current global environment and its domination by human activity (see J. Zalasiewicz et al.’s 2008 GSA Today article “Are we now living in the Anthropocene” [v. 18, no. 2, p. 4]). This “era” or “epoch” spans a yet-undetermined but so far brief (in geologic terms) time scale potentially marking the end of the Holocene epoch.

Session organizers Anne Jefferson of Kent State University, Karl Wegmann of North Carolina State University, and Anne Chin of the University of Colorado Denver have gathered presentations addressing human interactions with Earth’s systems. Research studies span a range of temporal and spatial scales and investigate a variety of influences, including the effects of indigenous culture as well as dams and cities.

Chin says that part of the research is spurred by “the difficulty of finding any place (no matter how ‘pristine’) where the landscape hasn’t been affected by human activities.” She cites the U.S. National Research Council’s “Grand Challenge” in Landscapes on the Edge: New Horizons for Research on Earth’s Surface (2010) to determine how Earth’s surface may evolve in the Anthropocene.

Chin also points to the intensification of debate over “Anthropocene” and the time frame it encompasses as scientists, policymakers, the media, and the public become increasingly aware of the term. A goal of this session is to address the debate and add a greater base of scientific understanding to round out the popularity of the idea.

Three Geological Society of American (GSA) specialty divisions cosponsor this session: the GSA Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division, the GSA Geology and Society Division, and the GSA Archaeological Geology Division, thus bringing to bear a multidisciplinary perspective to the problem. Talks include “An early Anthropocene analog: Ancient Maya impacts on the Earth’s surface”; “Removing streams from the landscape: Counting the buried streams beneath urban landscapes”; and Anthropogenic influences on rates of coastal change.”

Papers from this session will be compiled into a special issue of Anthropocene, a new journal launching in 2013 by Elsevier, devoted to addressing one of the grand challenges of our time.

Session 8: T24. Geomorphology of the Anthropocene: The Surficial Legacy of Past and Present Human Activities
Talks: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/webprogram/Session30644.html
When: Sunday, 4 Nov., 8 a.m. to noon
Where: Charlotte Convention Center, Room 207A
Poster Session: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/webprogram/Session31925.html
When: Sunday, 4 Nov., 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Where: Charlotte Convention Center Hall B

Contacts:
Anne J. Jefferson: ajeffer9@kent.edu, +1-980-213-5933
Karl W. Wegmann: kwwegman@ncsu.edu
Anne Chin: anne.chin@ucdenver.edu, +1-979-492-0074

Find out what else is new and newsworthy by browsing the complete technical program schedule at https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/finalprogram/.

To identify presentations in specific areas of interest, search topical sessions by discipline categories or sponsors using the drop-down menus atwww.geosociety.org/meetings/2012/sessions/topical.asp, or use your browser’s “find” feature to search for keywords or convener names.

Risk (Fractal Ontology)

04/11/2012UncategorizedCaos, Clima, Desastre, Enquadramento, Fractais, Furacão Sandy, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Previsão, Riscorenzotaddei

http://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/risk/

Joseph Weissman | Thursday, November 1, 2012

Paul Klee, “Insula Dulcamara” (1938); Oil on newsprint, mounted on burlap

I began writing this before disaster struck very close to home; and so I finish it without finishing it. A disaster never really ends; it strikes and strikes continuously — and so even silence is insufficient. But yet there is also no expression of concern, no response which could address comprehensively the immense and widespread suffering of bodies and minds and spirits. I would want to emphasize my plea below upon the responsibility of thinkers and artists and writers to create new ways of thinking the disaster; if only to mitigate the possibility of their recurrence. (Is it not the case that the disaster increasingly has the characteristics of the accident; that the Earth and global techno-science are increasingly co-extensive Powers?) And yet despite these necessary new ways of thinking and feeling, I fear it will remain the case that nothing can be said about a disaster, if only because nothing can ultimately be thought about the disaster. But it cannot be simply passed over in silence; if nothing can be said, then perhaps everything may be said.

Inherent to the notion of risk is the multiple, or multiplicity. The distance between the many and the multiple is nearly infinite; every problem of the one and the many resolves to the perspective of the one, while multiplicity always singularizes, takes a line of pure variation or difference to its highest power. A multiplicity is already a life, the sea, time: a cosmos or style in terms of powers and forces; a melody or refrain in its fractured infinity.

The multiple is clear in its “being” only transitorily — as the survey of a fleet or swarm or network; the thought which grasps it climbs mountains, ascends vertiginously towards that infinite height which would finally reveal the substrate of the plane, the “truth” of its shadowy depths, the mysterious origins of its nomadic populations.

No telescopic lens could be large enough to approach this distance; and yet it is traversed instantaneously when the tragic arc of a becoming terminates in disaster; when a line of flight turns into a line of death, when one-or-several lines of organization and development reach a point beyond which avoiding self-destruction is impossible.

Chaos, boundless furnace of becoming! Fulminating entropy which compels even the cosmos itself upon a tragic arc of time; are birth and death not one in chaos or superfusion?

Schizophrenia is perhaps this harrowing recognition that there are only machines machining machines, without limit, bottomless.

In chaos, there is no longer disaster; but there are no longer subjects or situations or signifiers. Every subject, signifier and situation approaches its inevitable as the Disaster which would rend their very being from them; hence the nihilism of the sign, the emptiness of the subject, the void of the situation. Existence is farce — if loss is (permitted to become) tragedy, omnipresent, cosmic, deified.

There is an infinite tragedy at the heart of the disaster; a trauma which makes the truth of our fate impossible-to-utter; on the one hand because imbued with infinite meaning, because singular — and on the other, in turn, meaningless, because essentially nullified, without-reason. That the disaster is never simply pure incidental chaos, a purely an-historical interruption, is perhaps the key point: we start and end with a disaster that prevents us from establishing either end or beginning — a disaster which swiftly looms to cosmic and even ontological proportions…

Perhaps there is only a life after the crisis, after a breakthrough or breakdown; after an encounter with the outside. A life as strategy or risk, which is perhaps to say a multiplicity: a life, or the breakthrough of — and, perhaps inevitably, breakdown before — white walls, mediation, determinacy.

A life in any case is always-already a voice, a cosmos, a thought: it is light or free movement whose origin and destination cannot be identified as stable sites or moments, whose comings and goings are curiously intertwined and undetermined.

We cannot know the limits of a life’s power; but we know disaster. We know that multiplicities, surging flocks of actions and passions, are continually at risk.

The world presents itself unto a life as an inescapable gravity, monstrous fate, the contagion of space, time, organization. A life expresses itself as an openness which is lacerated by the Open.

A life is a cosmos within a cosmos — and so a life opens up closed systems; it struggles and learns not in spite of entropy but on account of it, through a kind of critical strategy, even a perversely recursive or fractal strategy; through the micro-cosmogenetic sieve of organic life, entropy perversely becomes a hyper-organizational principle.

A life enters into a perpetual and weightless ballet — in a defiance-which-is-not-a-defiance of stasis; a stasis which yet presents a grave and continuous danger to a life.

What is a life, apart from infinite movement or disaster? Time, a dream, the sea: but a life moves beyond rivers of time, or seas of dreaming, or the outer spaces of radical forgetting (and alien memories…)

A life is a silence which may become wise. A life — or that perverse machine which works only by breaking down — or through…

A life is intimacy through parasitism, already a desiring-machine-factory or a tensor-calculus of the unconscious.

A life lives in taut suspension from one or several lines of becoming, of flight or death — lines whose ultimate trajectories may not be known through any safe or even sure method.

A life is the torsion between dying and rebirth.

Superfusion between all potentialities, a life is infinite-becoming of the subjectless-subject. Superject.

Journeying and returning, without moving, from the infinity and chaos of the outside/inside. A stationary voyage in a non-dimensional cosmos, where everything flows, heats, grinds.

Phenomenology is a geology of the unconscious, a problem of the crystalline apparatus of time. Could there be at long last a technology of time which would abandon strip-mining the subsconscious?

A chrono-technics which ethico-aesthetically creates and transforms virtual and actual worlds, traces possibilities of living, thinking, thinking; diagnoses psychic, social and physical ecosystems simultaneously.

A communications-strategy, but one that could point beyond the vicious binary of coercion and conflation — but so therefore would not-communicate.

There is a a recursive problem surrounding the silence and darkness at the heart of a life; it is perhaps impossible to exhaust (at least clinically) the infinitely-deferred origin of those crystalline temporal dynamisms which in turn structure any-moment-whatsoever.

Is there a silence which would constitute that very singular machinic ‘sheaf’, the venerated crystalline paradise of the moved-unmoving?

Silence, wisdom.

The impossibility of this origin is also the interminability of the analysis; also the infinite movement attending any moment whatsoever. It is the history of disaster, of the devil.

There is only thinking when a thought becomes critically or clinically engaged with a world, a cosmos. This engagement discovers its bottomlessness in a disaster for thought itself. A disaster for life, thought, the world; but also perhaps their infinitely-deferred origins…

What happens in the physical, economic, social and psychic collapse of a world, a thought, a life? Is it only in this collapse, commensurate with the collision, interference of one cosmos with another…?

Collapse is never a final state. There is no closed system of causes but a kind of original fracture. The schizophrenic coexistence of many separate worlds in a kind of meta-stable superfusion.

A thought, a cosmos, a world, a life can have no other origin than the radical corruption and novel genesis of a pure substance of thinking, living, “worlding,” “cosmosing.” A becoming refracts within its own infinite history the history of a life, a world, a thought.

Although things doubtless seem discouraging, at any moment whatsoever a philosophy can be made possible. At any time and place, this cyclonic involution of the library of Babel can be reactivated, this golden ball propelled by comet-fire and dancing towards the future can be captured in a moment’s reflection…

The breakdown of the world, of thought, of life — the experience of absolute collapse, of the horror of the vacuum, is already close the infinite zero-point reached immediately and effortlessly by schizophrenia. Even in a joyous mode when it recognizes the properly affirmative component of the revelation of cosmos as production, production as multiplicity, multiplicity as it opens onto the infinite or the future. (Only the infinity of the future can become-equal to a life.)

That spirit which fixes a beginning in space and time, fixes it without fixing itself; it exemplifies the possibility of atemporality and the heresy of the asignifying, even while founding the possibility of piety and dogma.

The disaster presents thought and language with their cosmic doubles; thought encounters a disaster in the way a subject encounters a radical outside, a death.

Only selection answers to chaos, to the infinite horizon of a life — virtually mapping infinite potential planes of organization onto a singular line of development. Only selection, only the possibility of philosophy, points beyond the inevitability of disaster.

The disaster and its aversion is the basic orientation of critical thought; thinking the disaster: this impossible task is the critical cultural aim of art and writing. Speaking the truth of the disaster is perhaps impossible. A life encounters disaster as the annihilating of the code itself; not merely a decoding but the alienation from the essence of matter or speech or language. The means to thinking the disaster lie in poetic imagination, the possibility of the temporal retrojection of narrative elements; the disaster can be thought only through “unthinking” it: in the capacity of critical or poetic imagination to explore the means by which a disaster was retroactively averted. The counterfactual acquires a new and radical dimension: not the theological dimension of salvation, but a clinical dimension — the power to of think the transformation of the conditions of the disaster.

Uma (in)certa antropologia

An (un)certain anthropology

Arquivo da tag: Mudanças climáticas

Your weatherman probably denies global warming (Salon)

The good news: People can be persuaded climate change is real. The bad news: TV experts can’t

Fluctuating Environment May Have Driven Human Evolution (Science Daily)

How climate shifts in Africa sparked human evolution (MSNBC)

Scientists say landscape transitions may have forced early humans to think on their feet

AL aprova lei que institui Sistema Estadual de REDD+ em MT (ICV)

Renee Lertzman: the difficulty of knowledge

Eight examples of where the IPCC has missed the mark on its predictions and projections (The Daily Climate)

Emissions

Temperature

Arctic Meltdown

Ice Sheets

Sea-Level Rise

Ocean Acidification

Thawing Tundra

Tipping points

Scientists Pioneer Method to Predict Environmental Collapse (Science Daily)

‘Missing’ Polar Weather Systems Could Impact Climate Predictions (Science Daily)

Physicist Happens Upon Rain Data Breakthrough (Science Daily)

Water Resources Management and Policy in a Changing World: Where Do We Go from Here? (Science Daily)

Moral Injuries and the Environment: Healing the Soul Wounds of the Body Politic (Science & Environmental Health Network)

Monbiot: The Gift of Death (The Guardian)

Natural Step: the Science of Sustainability (Yes Magazine)

Doubling Down on Climate Change Denial (Slate)

Climate Change DO THE MATH! (Scientia Productions)

Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125-plus scientists (Financial Post) + EANTH list reactions

OPEN CLIMATE LETTER TO UN SECRETARY-GENERAL: Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125-plus scientists.

The State of Climate Science (scienceprogress.org)

A Thorough Review of the Scientific Literature on Global Warming

Naomi Klein on Capitalism and Climate Change (Bill Moyers)

Saúde mental, outra vítima da mudança climática (IPS)

Call to Modernize Antiquated Climate Negotiations (Science Daily)

Government, Industry Can Better Manage Risks of Very Rare Catastrophic Events, Experts Say (Science Daily)

Estudo aumenta precisão ao simular clima (Folha de São Paulo)

Cultural Dimensions of Climate Change Are Underestimated, Overlooked and Misunderstood (Science Daily)

Anthropocene Continues to Spark Scientific Debate (The Geological Society of America)

Risk (Fractal Ontology)