Arquivo da tag: Opinião pública

Analysis: ‘Lulismo’ Appeals in Latin America but Hard to Copy (N.Y. Times)

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By REUTERS
Published: June 22, 2011 at 12:12 PM ET

RIO DE JANEIRO/LIMA (Reuters) – It was a political pilgrimage that surprised no one.

Within days of winning Peru’s presidential election, Ollanta Humala flew to Brazil to learn more about its success over the past decade and meet former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who inspired Humala’s journey from the radical left toward the political center.

Humala’s election victory was the latest sign that Lula’s mix of market-friendly policies and social programs for the poor, credited with turning Brazil into an economic powerhouse, is going international. Call it the Brasilia Consensus, or “Lulismo.”

The former union boss established an enviable electoral formula by making deep inroads into poverty in his eight years in power while pleasing Wall St. bankers and elevating Brazil into the league of emerging market powers like China and India.

Leftist Mauricio Funes won El Salvador’s presidency in 2009 at the head of a party of former Marxist guerrillas after convincing enough middle-class voters that he was inspired by Lula rather than Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez.

One of Lula’s leading election marketers even helped him craft his campaign, and other former advisers to Lula’s party helped Humala craft his campaign message in Peru.

In South America, several leaders have opted to take the Lula path — most notably Jose “Pepe” Mujica, a former guerrilla who was elected president of Uruguay in 2009.

Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo has also steered clear of copying the more radical leftist policies of the region since his election in 2008.

And pointing to the Lula model is now smart politics for any left-wing candidate in Latin America looking to ease voters’ concerns that he or she might be too radical.

“Brazil is the lodestar, the reference for a lot of governments as an example of success,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.

“There are vast differences between Brazil and other Latin American countries but there does seem to be a formula, a consensus that has produced real results.”

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

Still, copying the Lula formula is easier said than done, as Humala may discover in the coming months.

Lula’s two-term presidency — which ended on January 1 when his hand-picked successor Dilma Rousseff was sworn in as president — was built on a long journey to the political center by his Workers’ Party, a sustained boom in global commodities prices and his own magnetic charisma.

In contrast, Humala’s embrace of center-left policies came much later and his party lacks the institutional strength of the Workers’ Party in Brazil. Peru, whose previous government had center-right policies in line with countries such as Chile, Colombia and Mexico, has a tiny budget that limits its ability to help poor, rural areas.

“Any emulation is going to face serious limitations,” said Matias Spektor, an international relations professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a think tank in Rio de Janeiro.

“That said, what Humala seems to be doing is realizing that there is a message for progressive parties in the region that you do need financial stability with some degree of redistribution. It’s not about people on the street fighting the old elite, it’s about minimal-level redistribution.”

Lula himself has hailed Humala’s win as a step forward in Latin America for the progressive left, in which he included Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and his closest disciples, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa.

“While in the European continent, politics is moving to the right and conservatives are occupying space, in Latin America it is the progressive sectors that are advancing,” Lula was reported as saying in Sao Paulo with Humala on June 10.

LULA OR CHAVEZ?

But there has long been a clear divide between Chavez’s more radical brand of socialism opposed to U.S. influence and Lula’s more moderate version. Lately, it is Lulismo that is gaining ground while the socialist, anti-U.S. alliance spearheaded by Chavez has run into trouble.

The economies of the Chavez-led leftist bloc have mostly struggled. Venezuela has been unable to tame double-digit inflation and economic growth has been patchy. The private sector has shrunk, nationalized companies have performed poorly and there are frequent shortages of basic goods.

Chavez has also lost support among ordinary Latin Americans in recent years with strong-arm policies such as threatening media freedoms, said Yehude Simon, a former leftist who served as prime minister under Peruvian President Alan Garcia.

“The Chavez of 2006 is nothing compared with the Chavez of 2011. He made a series of errors,” he said. “Chavez can be very friendly and charming but sometimes he’s very authoritarian.”

In Peru, Humala repeatedly borrowed tactics from Lula, going as far as to hire two experienced aides from Brazil’s Workers’ Party to help run his campaign.

They had Humala — who narrowly lost the 2006 election running on an ultranationalist platform that spooked investors — codify his promises to fight inflation and run a balanced budget in a letter to the Peruvian people.

The tactic was borrowed directly from the playbook of Lula, who won the presidency in 2002 on his fourth try by casting himself as a moderate who had outgrown his hard-left roots.

Humala also wants to emulate another pillar of Lulismo — wealth distribution policies that in Brazil have helped lift millions of poor people into a thriving lower middle class.

Humala has proposed taxing the windfall profits of wealthy mining companies for a fund to help the one-third of Peruvians who are poor, but critics say that model will only work if commodity prices stay high.

“Humala is going to need a lot of skill to keep foreign and Peruvian businesses investing here while managing demands from the provinces for better social programs,” said Simon.

Peru and other countries in the region have much smaller federal budgets, limiting the ability of governments to copy Lula’s heavy spending on social programs.

Their economies are also far less diversified than Brazil, so they are more vulnerable to economic shocks caused by a slump in commodities, for example. A sharp downturn in prices could quickly undermine their ability to keep financial markets and their poorer citizens happy at the same time.

In the end, it may be communist China — now Brazil’s No. 1 trade partner and Peru’s second-biggest — that could be the most important factor determining the success of Lulismo inside and outside Brazil.

“If China’s economy suffers a slowdown, it will be a problem for Humala,” said Simon. “Much of Latin America is dependent on China.”

(Additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne in Caracas; Editing by Todd Benson and Kieran Murray)

A Amazônia da grande mídia (Mercado Ético)

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16/06/2011 19:04:42 – http://mercadoetico.terra.com.br/arquivo/a-amazonia-da-grande-midia/

André Alves*

O programa Observatório da Imprensa da última terça-feira (14/06) transmitido pela TV Brasil e conduzido pelo jornalista Alberto Dines fez uma discussão sobre o estranhamento da grande mídia sobre a Amazônia. Participaram como convidados o cientista político Sérgio Abranches, o antropólogo Alfredo Wagner Almeida e a repórter de meio ambiente Afra Balazina, do Estado de S.Paulo. A tese do programa era a de mostrar as limitações da grande mídia (leia-se os veículos do sudeste) em cobrir o país em sua totalidade, sobretudo a Amazônia.

Os convidados deram uma grande contribuição à discussão mostrando que os problemas da região são muito mais complexos do que a mídia pressupõe. Wagner, coordenador do importantíssimo Projeto Nova Cartografia Social da Amazônia fez um paralelo sobre o aumento da violência no campo e a revisão no Congresso Nacional do Código Florestal. Abranches falou do enfraquecimento do interesse da mídia pelo tema e a jornalista do Estadão mostrou a dificuldade de se cobrir à distância assuntos delicados e urgentes.

No entanto, algumas abordagens sobre a Amazônia não foram consideradas como se deveria. Apesar do esforço do antropólogo em mostrar esses debates, Alberto Dines sempre voltava a questão da necessidade de mais profissionais dos maiores jornais distribuídos pelo país e em vários momentos criticou a cobertura dos veículos locais. Ainda que grande parte dos veículos pequenos mereça críticas e que o jornalista é um grande pensador brasileiro, seu enviesamento no programa deixou muitas abordagens interessantes sem serem discutidas.

Uma questão muito importante se refere ao fato de que a imprensa brasileira não conhece a Amazônia. Trata a região que abriga nove estados e mais de 60% do território brasileiro como se fosse uma coisa só, desconsiderando suas diferenças geográficas, econômicas, de biodiversidade, cultural, potencialidades e problemas. Essa limitação é ancorada num outro fator muito preponderante: o mito sobre a Amazônia. É do senso comum conceber a Amazônia como sendo uma grande floresta em que mesmo em capitais como Manaus, Belém ou Cuiabá é possível ver índios andando semi-nus nas ruas e não raro se deparar com uma onça pintada na esquina ou um jacaré saindo da beira do rio.

Mais do que isso, cria-se um imaginário quase onírico ou saído das páginas de José de Alencar sobre os povos que habitam a região. Já faz alguns anos que parei de contar as vezes que algum amigo, familiar ou jornalista fez considerações etnocêntricas sobre comunidades indígenas quando constatam, por exemplo, que em muitas (talvez a maioria das aldeias em Mato Grosso) existem escolas, telefone, televisão e seus moradores andem vestidos. “Nossa, eles deixaram de serem índios”, é o que mais escuto. Não necessariamente por maldade e sim por ignorância, mesmo. No sentido literal do termo.

É claro que a Amazônia tem que sair na mídia por conta do desmatamento que voltou a aumentar e a violência no campo que explodiu na mídia, embora aconteça sistematicamente desde antes da morte de Chico Mendes e Irmã Dorothy, em várias regiões. Mas também tem uma riqueza social, cultural, econômica e ambiental que tem que ser valorizada e discutida na mídia com intensidade parecida.

É muito fácil os jornalistas do sudeste criticarem as mídias do norte por não repercutirem tanto os descasos de sua região, embora sofram muito mais de carência de pessoal e infra-estrutura. E sim, e é claro que quase a totalidade das mídias locais pertence ou sofre severas influências de políticos locais que impedem a divulgação de determinados temas. Mas essa censura (às vezes velada, às vezes às claras) não é privilégio dos pequenos grupos.

As grandes corporações de comunicação também evitam assuntos ao máximo ou deturpam de tal maneira temas como Terras Indígenas, comunidades tradicionais e grandes obras de infra-estrutura que reforçam estereótipos e preconceitos de tal maneira que dificulta ainda mais que as vozes dos que precisam gritar sejam ouvidas. A grande mídia precisa descer do pedestal e de suas torres de marfins e ir mais a campo, contar com jornalistas locais e ouvir fontes mais diversas. Existe um mundo de organizações não-governamentais, associações de assentados, comunidades tradicionais e indígenas que sistematicamente divulgam suas lutas por sites, blogs e emails, que ajudam a diminuir a distância entre os fatos da Amazônia e os jornalistas do sudeste.

A mídia quando quer faz boa cobertura sobre qualquer assunto. E talvez seja esse o verbo que falte às redações!

* André Alves é jornalista em Mato Grosso e especialista em Antropologia

IPCC aprimora rigor científico e estratégias de comunicação (FAPESP)

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POLÍTICA DE C & T
Em clima de diálogo

Carlos Fioravanti
Edição Impressa 184 – Junho 2011

Dos Andes para a Amazônia: bactérias da bartonelose se espalham. © EDUARDO CESAR

O Painel Intergovernamental de Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC) está em fase de reformulação. Deve ampliar o rigor científico com que sua equipe de cientistas tem trabalhado e se tornar mais sensível às inquietações de negociadores internacionais como Sir John Beddington, conselheiro científico chefe do governo do Reino Unido (ver entrevista). No dia 11 de maio, o primeiro de um workshop do Programa FAPESP de Pesquisa sobre Mudanças Climáticas Globais (PFPMCG), Beddington alertou para as consequências provavelmente dramáticas das mudanças do clima, da urbanização, da escassez de alimentos e de água no mundo. Dois dias depois, 13 de maio, em Abu Dabi, capital dos Emirados Árabes Unidos, os líderes do IPCC anunciaram que adotarão as recomendações sobre mudanças de métodos de trabalho e estratégias de comunicação propostas pelo InterAcademy Council (IAC), que embasam as mudanças em curso.

Em abril de 2010 as Nações Unidas, que mantêm o IPCC, tinham pedido ao IAC para formar um comitê independente de revisão dos procedimentos do IPCC, que havia perdido credibilidade após a divulgação de uma série de mensagens eletrônicas indicando que algumas previsões sobre os efeitos das alterações climáticas tinham sido precipitadas. Uma delas era que as geleiras do Himalaia desapareceriam até 2035. “Os erros, embora pequenos, tiveram um efeito imenso”, observou para Pesquisa FAPESP Robbert Dijkgraaf, membro do IAC, presidente da Academia Real Holandesa de Ciências e Artes e professor da Universidade de Amsterdã, Holanda. “Eles deveriam ter sido corrigidos imediatamente, mas o IPCC não achava que havia necessidade de comunicação ou de explicações, já que as medidas que apresentavam eram consensuais.”

Dijkgraaf acompanhou o trabalho do comitê do IAC, que reuniu 12 especialistas de academias de ciências e conselhos de pesquisa de diversos países, entre os quais o Brasil, representado por Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, diretor científico da FAPESP. “Os dirigentes do IPCC aceitaram a maioria de nossas recomendações e sugestões”, comentou o economista Harold Shapiro, professor e ex-reitor da Universidade Princeton, nos Estados Unidos, e coordenador do comitê.

As recomendações do comitê do IAC sugerem mudanças na governança e no gerenciamento, nos métodos de revisão do trabalho científico, na caracterização e na comunicação das incertezas científicas e nas estratégias de comunicação. “Qualquer organização precisa se rever, de tempos em tempos, porque os tempos mudam”, disse Shapiro para Pesquisa FAPESP. O comitê do IAC sugeriu que o presidente do IPCC tenha apenas um mandato e que todo o enfoque de trabalho seja revisto a cada quatro ou seis anos.

O IAC sugeriu que o IPCC explicitasse mais claramente os modos pelos quais os documentos técnicos serão revisados, apresentasse uma variedade maior de visões científicas, incluindo aquelas sujeitas a controvérsias. Outro ponto relevante: explicitar as incertezas científicas. “O IPCC e os cientistas do clima devem reconhecer mais claramente o que sabem e também o que não sabem”, disse Dijkgraaf. Outra recomendação seguida à risca: implementar uma estratégia de comunicação que enfatize a transparência e respostas rápidas e satisfatórias a qualquer interessado. “O IPCC deve se tornar mais interativo e os cientistas do clima, mais críticos do que fazem.”

Colaborações – Na abertura do workshop do Programa FAPESP de Pesquisa em Mudanças Climáticas Globais (PFPMCG), Shaun Quegan, pesquisador da Universidade de Sheffield, Reino Unido, comentou: “As estimativas anuais de áreas desmatadas em florestas tropicais são precisas e altamente confiáveis, pelo menos no Brasil”. No entanto, acrescentou, “a utilização desses dados para avaliar as emissões de carbono provenientes de mudanças de uso do solo traz grandes incertezas, principalmente porque o mapeamento da biomassa das florestas é precário”. O objetivo do encontro era estimular a integração entre as equipes dos vários projetos de pesquisa que compõem o PFPMCG, agora coordenado por Reynaldo Luiz Victoria, pesquisador da Universidade de São Paulo, que substituiu o climatologista Carlos Nobre.

Em uma das apresentações do segundo dia, o médico Manuel Cesario, pesquisador da Universidade de Franca (Unifran), relatou seu estudo sobre disseminação de doenças infecciosas na Amazônia – ampliadas pelas mudanças no uso da terra promovidas pelo asfaltamento de estradas, pelo desmatamento e pela urbanização – e as alterações do clima na América do Sul. Pesquisadores da Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina e Fundação Oswaldo Cruz participam desse trabalho.

Cesario acredita que a bartonelose, doença de origem bacteriana com sintomas semelhantes aos da malária, antes restrita a regiões dos Andes de 500 a 3.200 metros de altitude, pode ter se expandido geograficamente e se adaptado a regiões mais baixas na esteira da crescente migração e das alterações climáticas. A seu ver, essa doença, detectada pela primeira vez em 2004 na região de Madre de Dios, sudeste do Peru, pode passar facilmente pela fronteira com o Acre, no Brasil, e com Pando, na Bolívia. As cidades dessa região estão cada vez mais interligadas pelo prolongamento da rodovia BR-317: a Rodovia Interoceânica, também chamada de Estrada do Pacífico, já em operação e quase toda asfaltada.

A leishmaniose também avança. “As duas formas de leishmaniose, a visceral e a cutânea, no Brasil, eram doenças associadas ao desmatamento, transmitidas por vetores tipicamente de florestas, mas hoje estão ligadas à urbanização e ao desmatamento”, disse. A bartonelose e a leishmaniose são transmitidas por insetos do gênero Lutzomyia, abundantes na região. Em 2008 Cesario e sua equipe percorreram o município de Assis Brasil e, para capturar insetos, instalavam armadilhas das seis da noite às seis da manhã. Em uma semana coletaram mais de 3 mil insetos de 56 espécies de Lutzomyia. “As casas com frestas, próximas à floresta e com animais de criação por perto”, disse ele, “formam o ambiente ideal para os insetos que saem de seus espaços naturais e usam restos de material orgânico para se reproduzir e animais para sugar o sangue, aproximando-se das pessoas e transmitindo as doenças”.

Academic Adaptation and “The New Communications Climate” (Open the Echo Chamber blog)

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Posted by Edward R. Carr (31 May 2011)

[Original post here].

Andrew Revkin has a post up on Dot Earth that suggests some ways of rethinking scientific engagement with the press and the public.  The post is something of a distillation of a more detailed piece in the WMO Bulletin.  Revkin was kind enough to solicit my comments on the piece, as I have appeared in Dot Earth before in an effort to deal with this issue as it applies to the IPCC, and this post is something of a distillation of my initial rapid response.

First, I liked the message of these two pieces a lot, especially the push for a more holistic engagement with the public through different forms of media, including the press.  As Revkin rightly states, we need to “recognize that the old model of drafting a press release and waiting for the phone to ring is not the path to efficacy and impact.” Someone please tell my university communications office.

A lot of the problem stems from our lack of engagement with professionals in the messaging and marketing world.  As I said to the very gracious Rajendra Pachauri in an email exchange back when we had the whole “don’t talk to the media” controversy:

I am in no way denigrating your [PR] efforts. I am merely suggesting that there are people out there who spend their lives thinking about how to get messages out there, and control that message once it is out there. Just as we employ experts in our research and in these assessment reports precisely because they bring skills and training to the table that we lack, so too we must consider bringing in those with expertise in marketing and outreach.

I assume that a decent PR team would be thinking about multiple platforms of engagement, much as Revkin is suggesting.  However, despite the release of a new IPCC communications strategy, I’m not convinced that the IPCC (or much of the global change community more broadly) yet understands how desperately we need to engage with professionals on this front.  In some ways, there are probably good reasons for the lack of engagement with pros, or with the “new media.” For example, I’m not sure Twitter will help with managing climate change rumors/misinformation as it is released, if only because we are now too far behind the curve – things are so politicized that it is too late for “rapid response” to misinformation. I wish we’d been on this twenty years ago, though . . .

But this “behind the curve” mentality does not explain our lack of engagement.  Instead, I think there are a few other things lurking here.  For example, there is the issue of institutional politics. I love the idea of using new media/information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) to gather and communicate information, but perhaps not in the ways Revkin suggests.  I have a section later inDelivering Development that outlines how, using existing mobile tech in the developing world, we could both get better information about what is happening to the global poor (the point of my book is that, as I think I demonstrate in great detail, we actually have a very weak handle on what is going on in most parts of the developing world) and could empower the poor to take charge of efforts to address the various challenges, environmental, economic, political and social, that they face every day.  It seems to me, though, that the latter outcome is a terrifying prospect for some in development organizations, as this would create a much more even playing field of information that might force these organizations to negotiate with and take seriously the demands of the people with whom they are working.  Thus, I think we get a sort of ambiguity about ICT4D in development practice, where we seem thrilled by its potential, yet continue to ignore it in our actual programming.  This is not a technical problem – after all, we have the tech, and if we want to do this, we can – it is a problem of institutional politics.  I did not wade into a detailed description of the network I envision in the book because I meant to present it as a political challenge to a continued reticence on the part of many development organizations and practitioners to really engage the global poor (as opposed to tell them what they need and dump it on them).  But my colleagues and I have a detailed proposal for just such a network . . . and I think we will make it real one day.

Another, perhaps more significant barrier to major institutional shifts with regard to outreach is the a chicken-and-egg situation of limited budgets and a dominant academic culture that does not understand media/public engagement or politics very well and sees no incentive for engagement.  Revkin nicely hits on the funding problem as he moves past simply beating up on old-school models of public engagement:

As the IPCC prepares its Fifth Assessment Report, it does so with what, to my eye, appears to be an utterly inadequate budget for communicating its findings and responding in an agile way to nonstop public scrutiny facilitated by the Internet.

However, as much as I agree with this point (and I really, really agree), the problem here is not funding unto itself – it is the way in which a lack of funding erases an opportunity for cultural change that could have a positive feedback effect on the IPCC, global assessments, and academia more generally that radically alters all three. The bulk of climate science, as well as social impact studies, come from academia – which has a very particular culture of rewards.  Virtually nobody in academia is trained to understand that they can get rewarded for being a public intellectual, for making one’s work accessible to a wide community – and if I am really honest, there are many places that actively discourage this engagement.  But there is a culture change afoot in academia, at least among some of us, that could be leveraged right now – and this is where funding could trigger a positive feedback loop.

Funding matters because once you get a real outreach program going, productive public engagement would result in significant personal, intellectual and financial benefits for the participants that I believe could result in very rapid culture change.  My twitter account has done more for the readership of my blog, and for my awareness of the concerns and conversations of the non-academic development world, than anything I have ever done before – this has been a remarkable personal and intellectual benefit of public engagement for me.  As universities continue to retrench, faculty find themselves ever-more vulnerable to downsizing, temporary appointments, and a staggering increase in administrative workload (lots of tasks distributed among fewer and fewer full-time faculty).  I fully expect that without some sort of serious reversal soon, I will retire thirty-odd years hence as an interesting and very rare historical artifact – a professor with tenure.  Given these pressures, I have been arguing to my colleagues that we must engage with the public and with the media to build constituencies for what we do beyond our academic communities.  My book and my blog are efforts to do just this – to become known beyond the academy such that I, as a public intellectual, have leverage over my university, and not the other way around.  And I say this as someone who has been very successful in the traditional academic model.  I recognize that my life will need to be lived on two tracks now – public and academic – if I really want to help create some of the changes in the world that I see as necessary.

But this is a path I started down on my own, for my own idiosyncratic reasons – to trigger a wider change, we cannot assume that my academic colleagues will easily shed the value systems in which they were intellectually raised, and to which they have been held for many, many years.  Without funding to get outreach going, and demonstrate to this community that changing our model is not only worthwhile, but enormously valuable, I fear that such change will come far more slowly than the financial bulldozers knocking on the doors of universities and colleges across the country.  If the IPCC could get such an effort going, demonstrate how public outreach improved the reach of its results, enhanced the visibility and engagement of its participants, and created a path toward the progressive politics necessary to address the challenge of climate change, it would be a powerful example for other assessments.  Further, the participants in these assessments would return to their campuses with evidence for the efficacy and importance of such engagement . . . and many of these participants are senior members of their faculties, in a position to midwife major cultural changes in their institutions.

All this said, this culture change will not be birthed without significant pains.  Some faculty and members of these assessments will want nothing to do with the murky world of politics, and prefer to continue operating under the illusion that they just produce data and have no responsibility for how it is used.  And certainly the assessments will fear “politicization” . . . to which I respond “too late.”  The question is not if the findings of an assessment will be politicized, but whether or not those who best understand those findings will engage in these very consequential debates and argue for what they feel is the most rigorous interpretation of the data at hand.  Failure to do so strikes me as dereliction of duty.  On the other hand, just as faculty might come to see why public engagement is important for their careers and the work they do, universities will be gripped with contradictory impulses – a publicly-engaged faculty will serve as a great justification for faculty salaries, increased state appropriations, new facilities, etc.  Then again, nobody likes to empower the labor, as it were . . .

In short, in thinking about public engagement and the IPCC, Revkin is dredging up a major issue related to all global assessments, and indeed the practices of academia.  I think there is opportunity here – and I feel like we must seize this opportunity.  We can either guide a process of change to a productive end, or ride change driven by others wherever it might take us.  I prefer the former.

Código Florestal como foi aprovado na Câmara poderá agravar mudanças climáticas, alertam cientistas do IPCC (Agência Brasil, JC)

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JC e-mail 4268, de 30 de Maio de 2011.

De acordo com os pesquisadores, a versão do Código Florestal aprovada pela Câmara compromete as metas internacionais assumidas pelo País para diminuir emissão de gases de efeito estufa.

Quatro dos cientistas brasileiros que fazem parte do Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC, na sigla em inglês), da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU), alertaram para o possível agravamento sobre o clima com a entrada em vigência da atual versão do Código Florestal aprovada pela Câmara. Segundo eles, o aumento da pressão sobre as áreas de florestas comprometerá os compromissos internacionais firmados em 2009 pelo Brasil na Conferência de Copenhague, de diminuir em até 38,9% a emissão de gases de efeito estufa (GEE) e reduzir em 80% o desmatamento na Amazônia até 2020.

Os cientistas, que são ligados à Coordenação de Programas de Pós-Gradução de Engenharia da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Coppe-UFRJ), falaram sobre o assunto durante um seminário que abordou as conclusões de um relatório do IPCC sobre energias renováveis, realizado na última quinta-feira (26).

Para a cientista Suzana Kanh, as posições internacionais assumidas pelo País serão prejudicadas, se o Senado não mudar o texto do código aprovado pela Câmara ou se a presidenta da República, Dilma Rousseff, não apresentar vetos. “O impacto do código é muito grande, na medida em que o Brasil tem a maior parte do compromisso de redução de emissão ligada à diminuição do desmatamento. Qualquer ação que fragilize esse combate vai dificultar bastante o cumprimento das metas brasileiras”, afirmou.

A cientista alertou que haverá mudanças climáticas imediatas no Brasil e na América do Sul com o aumento da derrubada de florestas para abrir espaço à agricultura e à pecuária, como vem ocorrendo no Cerrado e na Amazônia. “Com o desmatamento, há o aumento da liberação de carbono para a atmosfera, afetando o microclima, influindo sobre o regime de chuvas e provocando a erosão do solo, prejudicando diretamente a população”.

O cientista Roberto Schaeffer, professor de planejamento energético da Coppe, disse que a entrada em vigor do Código Florestal, como aprovado pelos deputados, poderá prejudicar o investimento que o País faz em torno dos biocombustíveis, principalmente a cana, como fontes de energia limpa. “Hoje os biocombustíveis são entendidos como uma das alternativas para lidar como mudanças climáticas. No momento em que o Brasil flexibiliza as regras e perdoa desmatadores, isso gera desconfiança sobre a maneira como o biocombustível é produzido no País e se ele pode reduzir as emissões [de GEE] como a gente sempre falou”, disse.

O geógrafo Marcos Freitas, que também faz parte do IPCC, considerou que o debate em torno do código deveria ser mais focado no melhor aproveitamento do solo, principalmente na revitalização das áreas degradadas. “O Brasil tem 700 mil quilômetros quadrados de terra que já foi desmatada na Amazônia, e pelo menos dois terços é degradada. Se o código se concentrasse nessa terra já seria um ganho, pois evitaria que se desmatasse o restante. A área de floresta em pé é a que preocupa mais. Pois a tendência, na Amazônia, é a expansão da pecuária com baixa rentabilidade”, afirmou.

Para ele, haverá impactos no clima da região e do País, se houver aumento na devastação da floresta decorrente do novo código. “Isso é preocupante, porque a maior emissão [de GEE] histórica do Brasil, em nível global, tem sido o uso do solo da Amazônia, que responde por cerca de 80% de nossas emissões. Nas últimas conferências [climáticas], nós saímos bem na foto, apresentando cenários favoráveis à redução no desmatamento na região. Agora há uma preocupação de que a gente volte a níveis superiores a 10 mil quilômetros quadrados por ano”.

A possibilidade de um retrocesso ambiental, se mantida a decisão da Câmara sobre o código, também foi apontada pelo engenheiro Segen Estefen, especialista em impactos sobre os oceanos. “Foi decepcionante o comportamento do Congresso, uma anistia para quem desmatou. E isso é impunidade. Uma péssima sinalização dos deputados sobre a seriedade na preservação ambiental. Preponderou a visão daqueles que têm interesse no desmatamento. Isso sempre é muito ruim para a imagem do Brasil”, disse.

O diretor da Coppe, Luiz Pinguelli, enviou uma carta à presidenta Dilma, sugerindo que ela vete parte do código, se não houver mudanças positivas no Senado. Secretário executivo do Fórum Brasileiro de Mudanças Climáticas, Pinguelli alertou para a dificuldade do país de cumprir as metas internacionais, se não houver um freio à devastação ambiental.

“O problema é o aumento do desmatamento em alguns estados, isso é um mau sinal. Com a aprovação do código, poderemos estar favorecendo essa situação. Seria possível negociar, beneficiando os pequenos agricultores. Mas o que passou é muito ruim”, afirmou Pinguelli, que mantém a esperança de que o Senado discuta com mais profundidade a matéria, podendo melhorar o que foi aprovado na Câmara.

(Agência Brasil – 28/5)

Kari Norgaard on climate change denial

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Understanding the climate ostrich

BBC News, 15 November 07
By Kari Marie Norgaard
Whitman College, US

Why do people find it hard to accept the increasingly firm messages that climate change is a real and significant threat to livelihoods? Here, a sociologist unravels some of the issues that may lie behind climate scepticism.

“I spent a year doing interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Norwegian community recently.

In winter, the signs of climate change were everywhere – glaringly apparent in an unfrozen lake, the first ever use of artificial snow at the ski area, and thousands of dollars in lost tourist revenues.

Yet as a political issue, global warming was invisible.

The people I spoke with expressed feelings of deep concern and caring, and a significant degree of ambivalence about the issue of global warming.

This was a paradox. How could the possibility of climate change be both deeply disturbing and almost completely invisible – simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge?

Self-protection
People told me many reasons why it was difficult to think about this issue. In the words of one man, who held his hands in front of his eyes as he spoke, “people want to protect themselves a bit.”

Community members described fears about the severity of the situation, of not knowing what to do, fears that their way of life was in question, and concern that the government would not adequately handle the problem.

They described feelings of guilt for their own actions, and the difficulty of discussing the issue of climate change with their children.

In some sense, not wanting to know was connected to not knowing how to know. Talking about global warming went against conversation norms.

It wasn’t a topic that people were able to speak about with ease – rather, overall it was an area of confusion and uncertainty. Yet feeling this confusion and uncertainty went against emotional norms of toughness and maintaining control.

Other community members described this sense of knowing and not knowing, of having information but not thinking about it in their everyday lives.

As one young woman told me: “In the everyday I don’t think so much about it, but I know that environmental protection is very important.”

Security risk
The majority of us are now familiar with the basics of climate change.

Worst case scenarios threaten the very basics of our social, political and economic infrastructure.

Yet there has been less response to this environmental problem than any other. Here in the US it seems that only now are we beginning to take it seriously.

How can this be? Why have so few of us engaged in any of the range of possible actions from reducing our airline travel, pressurising our governments and industries to cut emissions, or even talking about it with our family and friends in more than a passing manner?

Indeed, why would we want to know this information?

Why would we want to believe that scenarios of melting Arctic ice and spreading diseases that appear to spell ecological and social demise are in store for us; or even worse, that we see such effects already?

Information about climate change is deeply disturbing. It threatens our sense of individual identity and our trust in our government’s ability to respond.

At the deepest level, large scale environmental problems such as global warming threaten people’s sense of the continuity of life – what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ontological security.

Thinking about global warming is also difficult for those of us in the developed world because it raises feelings of guilt. We are now aware of how driving automobiles and flying to exotic warm vacations contributes to the problem, and we feel guilty about it.

Tactful denial
If being aware of climate change is an uncomfortable condition which people are motivated to avoid, what happens next?

After all, ignoring the obvious can take a lot of work.

In the Norwegian community where I worked, collectively holding information about global warming at arm’s length took place by participating in cultural norms of attention, emotion, and conversation, and by using a series of cultural narratives to deflect disturbing information and normalise a particular version of reality in which “everything is fine.”

When what a person feels is different from what they want to feel, or are supposed to feel, they usually engage in what sociologists call emotional management.

We have a whole repertoire of techniques or “tools” for ignoring this and other disturbing problems.

As sociologist Evitiar Zerubavel makes clear in his work on the social organisation of denial and secrecy, the means by which we manage to ignore the disturbing realities in front of us are also collectively shaped.

How we cope, how we respond, or how we fail to respond are social as well.

Social rules of focusing our attention include rules of etiquette that involve tact-related ethical obligations to “look the other way” and ignore things we most likely would have noticed about others around us.

Indeed, in many cases, merely following our cultural norms of acceptable conversation and emotional expression serves to keep our attention safely away from that pesky topic of climate change.

Emotions of fear and helplessness can be managed through the use of selective attention; controlling one’s exposure to information, not thinking too far into the future and focusing on something that could be done.

Selective attention can be used to decide what to think about or not to think about, for example screening out painful information about problems for which one does not have solutions: “I don’t really know what to do, so I just don’t think about that”.

The most effective way of managing unpleasant emotions such as fear about your children seems to be by turning our attention to something else, or by focusing attention onto something positive.

Hoodwinking ourselves?
Until recently, the dominant explanation within my field of environmental sociology for why people failed to confront climate change was that they were too poorly informed.

Others pose that Americans are simply too greedy or too individualistic, or suffer from incorrect mental models.

Psychologists have described “faulty” decision-making powers such as “confirmation bias”, and argue that with more appropriate analogies we will be able to manage the information and respond.

Political economists, on the other hand, tell us that we’ve been hoodwinked by increased corporate control of media that limits and moulds available information about global warming.

These are clearly important answers.

Yet the fact that nobody wants information about climate change to be true is a critical piece of the puzzle that also happens to fit perfectly with the agenda of those who have tried to generate climate scepticism.”

Dr Kari Marie Norgaard is a sociologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington state, US.

See also A Dialog Between Renee Lertzman and Kari Norgaard.

Remember Climate Change? (Huffington Post)

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Posted: 05/09/11
By Peter Neill – The Huffington Post

Remember climate change? Remember Copenhagen, the climate summit, and half a million people in the streets? Remember the scientific reports? Remember the predictions? Remember the headlines? The campaign promises? The strategies to offset and mitigate the impact of CO2 emissions on human health, the atmosphere, and the ocean? How long ago was it? Six months? A year? More? It might never have been.

How can we meet challenges if we can’t remember what they are? As far as the news media is concerned, the story is archived behind any new urgency no matter what the data. The subject of climate is no more. The deniers have prevailed through shrill contradictions, corporate funded public relations, personal attacks on scientists, and indifference to reports and continuing data that still and again raise critical questions to fall on deaf ears.

In the US Congress, any bill or suggested appropriation that contains the keyword climate is eliminated, most probably without being read. There is no global warming; therefore there is no need for the pitiful American financial support of $2.3 million for the International Panel on Climate Change. There is no problem with greenhouse gases, so there is no need for legislation that enables the Environmental Protection Agency to measure further such impact on animal habitat or human health. There is no need for support for the research and development of alternative renewable energy technologies. There is no need to protect the marine environment from oil spill disaster. There is no need to protect watersheds and drinking water from industrial and mining pollution. There is no need to fund tsunami-warning systems off the American coast. There is no need to support any part of a World Bank program to prevent deforestation in the developing world. There is no need to maintain NOAA’s study of climate change implication for extreme weather. There is no need to fund further climate research sponsored by the National Science Foundation. There is no need to maintain EPA regulation of clean water; oh, and by the way, there is no need for the Environmental Protection Agency. Put it to vote today in the US House of Representatives, and they would blandly and blindly legislate that there is no need for the environment at all.

What do we need? Jobs, jobs, jobs, it is said. To that end, we can start by eliminating jobs that don’t advance our political agenda, by ignoring scientific demonstrations and measurable conditions that foreshadow future job destruction, by promoting and further subsidizing old technologies that make us sick and unable to work successfully in our present jobs, by building the unemployment roles so that the ranks of the jobless will reach levels unheard of since the Great Depression, and by compromising the educational system that is the only hope for those seeking training or re-training for whatever few new jobs may actually exist.

What does this have to do with the ocean?

The health of the ocean is a direct reflection of the health of the land. A nuclear accident in Japan allows radioactive material to seep into the sea. A collapse of shoreside fishery regulation enables the final depletion of species for everyone everywhere. Indifference to watershed protection, industrial pollution, waste control, and agricultural run-off poisons the streams and rivers and coasts and deep ocean and corrupts the food chain all along the way. Lack of understanding of changing weather compromises our response to storms and droughts that inundate our coastal communities and destroy our sustenance.

There is a reason for knowledge. It informs constructive behavior; it promotes employment and economic development; it makes for wise governance; it improves our lives. Are we drowning in debt? Or are we drowning in ignorance? I can’t remember.

Scientist says listen to pope on climate change (U.S. Catholic)

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Thursday, May 12, 2011
By Online Editor
Guest blog post by Dan DiLeo

Religion and science comes together in urging action on climate change.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences sees climate change as an urgent matter, member Veerabhadran (Ram) Ramanathan, Ph.D., told Dan Misleh, Executive Director of the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change, in an interview on the academy’s report coming out of its meeting at the Vatican April 2-4, 2011.

While written, public reports are not the norm following such meetings, the working group was motivated by a sense of the urgency of the issue and the adverse social, political, economic and ecological impacts of climate change, said Ramanathan, who is the co-chair of the working group that produced the report and has been a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 2004. He is also Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences and Director of the National Science Foundation funded Center for Clouds, Chemistry, and Climate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The Vatican’s recent report focuses on the impacts to humans due to global glacier retreat—one of the most obvious indicators of anthropogenic climate change. Ramanathan noted that climate change is already being experienced by many, especially in developing countries, and is likely to continue unless significant global actions to curtail human produced greenhouse gases are not begun soon.

Ramanathan said the working group focused glaciers and not other climate change impacts for three reasons: These impacts have not been sufficiently studied and discussed; shrinking glaciers offer the most visible example of how climate change is adversely affecting the planet; and the disappearance of mountain glaciers—which act as huge freshwater reservoirs for billions of people especially in Central Asia—could have catastrophic impacts.

Throughout his remarks, Ramanathan echoed the church’s call to exercise prudence in confronting climate change, confirming that the grave—and potentially irreversible—nature of climate change impacts obligate action based on what we already know now. He also emphasized the crucial role which the church must continue to play in the face of climate change: while the science community can present the facts, it is the church which has the moral authority necessary to inspire individuals and institutions to change environmentally—and socially—destructive patterns of behaviors.

Ramanathan also shared his personal inspiration for working on the issue of climate change, and in particular the contribution of black carbon. Growing up in a village in India, he saw how the burning of biomass not only created tremendous air pollution but also severely impacted the health of his family. The experience helped him see the interconnectedness of health, poverty, and environment, and reaffirmed that individual choices can have widespread affects—both positive and negative.

Ramanathan closed by noting that if the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics chose to heed the Holy Father and address climate change as a matter of faith, their individual actions and choices would go a long way in caring for God’s good gift of Creation and the poor who are most impacted by environmental degradation.

Dan DiLeo is Project Manager for the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change.

Major reform for climate body (Nature)

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Intergovernmental panel aims to become more responsive.

By Quirin Schiermeier
Published online 16 May 2011 | Nature 473, 261 (2011)

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri faced calls to quit after errors were
found in a key report.

After months of soul-searching, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) has agreed on reforms intended to restore confidence in
its integrity and its assessments of climate science.

Created as a United Nations body in 1988 to analyse the latest
knowledge about Earth’s changing climate, it has worked with thousands
of scientists and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. But its
reputation crumbled when its leadership failed to respond effectively
to mistakes — including a notorious error about the rate of Himalayan
glacier melting — that had slipped into its most recent assessment
report (see Nature 463, 276–277; 2010).

That discovery coincided with the furore over leaked e-mails from the
University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Norwich, UK (see
Nature 462, 397; 2009). Some e-mails seemed to show that leading
climate scientists, who had contributed key findings to previous IPCC
reports, had tried to stifle critics. This put the panel — especially
its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri — under intense pressure. The
InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national science academies, was
commissioned to review the structure and procedures of the IPCC and to
suggest improvements to its operations (see Nature 467, 14; 2010).

The council identified the lack of an executive body as a key factor
in the IPCC’s failure to respond to the crisis. It also urged the
panel to improve the transparency of its assessments and to make its
communication and outreach activities more professional. The IPCC
adopted several minor changes at a meeting last October (see Nature
467, 891–892; 2010).

More substantial reforms were signed off last week in Abu Dhabi at a
meeting of delegates from IPCC member states. An executive committee
will be created to oversee the body’s daily operations and to act on
issues that cannot wait for full plenary meetings. The 13-strong
committee will be led by the chairman, and includes the vice-chairs
and co-chairs of its working groups and technical support units.

A new conflict-of-interest policy will require all IPCC officials and
authors to disclose financial and other interests relevant to their
work (Pachauri had been harshly criticized in 2009 for alleged
conflicts of interest.) The meeting also adopted a detailed protocol
for addressing errors in existing and future IPCC reports, along with
guidelines to ensure that descriptions of scientific uncertainties
remain consistent across reports. “This is a heartening and
encouraging outcome of the review we started one year ago,” Pachauri
told Nature. “It will strengthen the IPCC and help restore public
trust in the climate sciences.”

The first major test of these changes will be towards the end of this
year, with the release of a report assessing whether climate change is
increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events. Despite much
speculation, there is scant scientific evidence for such a link —
particularly between climate warming, storm frequency and economic
losses — and the report is expected to spark renewed controversy.
“It’ll be interesting to see how the IPCC will handle this hot potato
where stakes are high but solid peer-reviewed results are few,” says
Silke Beck, a policy expert at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental
Research in Leipzig, Germany.

The IPCC overhaul is not yet complete. Delegates postponed a decision
about the exact terms of office of the group’s chairman and head of
the secretariat. Critics say that these terms should be strictly
limited to the time it takes to produce a single assessment report,
about six or seven years. With no clear decision on that issue,
Pachauri could theoretically remain in office beyond 2014, when the
next full report is due for release.

But the Indian economist says he has not considered staying on that
long. “My job is to successfully complete the next assessment,” he
says. “That’s what I’m solely focused on.”

Read more on climate controversy at: nature.com/climategate

Anthropology and Climate Science Controversies

clima, Incerteza, mídia, meteorologia, mudança climática, poder, previsão, , , , , , , ,

Brad Walters (Mount Allison U.)
Anthropology News (American Association of Anthropology), vol. 51(5):36-37 (May 2010)

Enormous research effort has been invested in the study of climate change. Many scientists reveled in the acclaim that followed last-year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This year, some of these same scientists have faced an onslaught of criticism as a result of a few mistakes found in published reports of the IPCC and leaked emails from an eminent, UK-based science group that revealed an all-too-human side of the scientific endeavor (so-called “climate-gate”).

The editors of the pre-eminent science journal Nature commented that these supposedly explosive revelations would be laughable were it not for their policy consequences. Like many, they recognize that the real scandal has little to do with climate change science, but everything to do with its political ramifications.

The scientific consensus on climate change is rock solid on the most critical issues: greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are now warming the earth’s climate at a rate that is extremely rapid by historical and recent geological standards and this poses increasingly serious risks our well being (Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2010, “U.S. scientists and economists’ call for swift and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions,” http://www.ucsusa.org). The evidence for this general conclusion is so broad, diverse and compelling that virtually no reputable scientist doubts it.

Yet, large swaths of the American public and many opinion leaders continue to doubt the reality of climate change. A major reason for this is that the controversies over the credibility of climate science are to a large degree intentionally contrived by people and organizations with vested interests in the economic status-quo and fear of government regulation, particularly members of the oil, gas and coal industries. What we are witnessing today, according to authors James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore (Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming) and George Monbiot (Heat), is a similar but much more ambitious replay of the tobacco industries’ campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to sew doubt about the scientific consensus on the health risks of smoking. These climate deniers understand what many social scientists do: where there is uncertainty in the minds of the electorate, the political cost of inaction falls while the cost of decisive action rises.

These climate controversies raise intriguing questions for anthropologists who may have interests in issues of public knowledge formation, risk perception, and the application of expert and non-expert knowledge in policy making. But, what motivated me to write this column is a different question: do many anthropologists also not trust the credibility of the scientific “experts” on the matter of climate change?

I came to this question as a result of recent exchanges on the Environmental Anthropology (E-Anth) List-serve that revealed a far less solid consensus on the matter than is found within the mainstream climate science community, which is dominated by natural scientists. Specifically, postings by some list members revealed a surprising lack of trust in the credibility of scientific bodies like the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences. Even more troubling was their referencing of scientifically un-credible sources—climate skeptics’ blogs, for example—as the basis for their opinions on the status of climate science.

Anthropologists are not alone in having within their ranks credentialed scientists who espouse views on climate change that are totally unsupportable in any reasonable scientific sense. But is it possible that anthropologists are particularly vulnerable to this kind of anti-scientific way of thinking about the issue? Has the disciplines’ deep emersion in subjects like the social construction of knowledge produced social scientists with so little trust and respect for the work of natural scientists that they won’t (or can’t!) distinguish between peer-reviewed research and politically-motivated blog postings?

There is a point reached—and we are now well passed it in climate science—where theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are so overwhelmingly compelling that positions contrary to the scientific consensus are simply untenable. Perhaps it is time for the AAA to step-up as a body and officially state their position on this most critical of issues.