From Climate Crisis to Weather Disaster: Tropical Storm Alia Strikes the Sundarbans
29/05/09 07:17
The Sundarbans are a
chain of islands spanning the mouths of the
Ganges-Brahmaputra rivers off the shores of India
and Bangladesh. They’ve been the subject of several
entries here, including some of their human,
species, and ecosystem-based
vulnerabilities to climate
change,
disaster risk reduction, and the founding of a
regional
climate adaptation center. A major tropical storm has hit
the region. The regional WWF director for the
Sundarbans is Anurag Danda, where he focuses on
community-based adaptation and assists with the
Bengal tiger program. He emailed me this morning
with an update, which I have edited here. Please
read his update, see the images he’s sent of the
damage, and consider his request for assistance.
Contact information included.
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Memes in Action: Climate Mitigation vs. Climate Adaptation
28/05/09 10:32
Meme
is one of those odd
words that rarely strays from the rarefied world of
academia, especially in the humanities and social
sciences. A meme is an idea or term (or metaphor)
that, like an organism, takes on a kind of life of
its own from its creator and begins to evolve and
shift through a community of users. For instance,
the right-wing view in the US that President Obama
is a socialist is a recent meme that has been
evolving and shifting for the past few months,
accruing new layers and images on a weekly basis.
But the word occurred to me this week while I was
listening to someone at an informal scientific
meeting. The speaker was distinguishing between
climate mitigation and climate adaptation and he
used a metaphor I had invented about a year ago to
describe the difference between climate mitigation
and climate adaptation. The weird part for me was
that he had never heard me use this metaphor or
been to any of my talks, as far as either of us was
aware. Immediately, I thought: a meme in action! To
spread the meme around a little, I will provide the
image here. The metaphor goes like this:
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NEWS: Crypto-Adaptation Legislation Leaves Committee
22/05/09 11:31
Late last night, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy Committee (the so-called Waxman committee, named after Henry Waxman, the current chair) managed to push an important climate change bill (usually referred to as the Waxman/Markey bill, after the sponsors of the legislation) out of the committee so the rest of the House can vote on it. This particular bill, discussed in an earlier entry here, is exclusively discussed in the media as a carbon cap and trade bill, but I believe it’s most noteworthy as the first climate adaptation bill to be considered in the U.S. Given the almost complete lack of coverage of this aspect of the bill’s language (representing roughly a fifth of the original bill’s word count), I can only imagine that the media doesn’t understand the implications of an adaptation bill. Getting out of committee is a critical step and was full of a lot of political drama. To those of you unfamiliar with U.S. federal legislative procedures (happy people that you are), a piece of legislation (a “bill”) has to get out of its designated committee before it can be considered by the whole of the House. And getting approved by the House is not final either: the US Senate has to move bills through committees before reaching the floor of the Senate too. Then there is a joining process to merge the House and Senate versions. And then the president has to sign the bill. Many a slip remains, but this move shows some progress in pushing the U.S. towards engaging in a serious conversation about climate adaptation. Read More...
Dragons of Change?
19/05/09 21:55
Most of the people I
work with today don’t know that I began my career
as a biologist studying dragonflies. For at least a
year or two, I was probably the world’s expert on a
single species of North American dragonfly. Seem
obscure? My dissertation didn’t start off as a
study of climate change impacts on this species
(the common green darner or Anax
junius),
but four years of fieldwork in rural Ontario
revealed that 40 years of shifting precipitation
patterns correlated closely with an altered the
rate of development of the species’ larvae.
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Stalking the Emerging Climate: Three Paradigms
19/05/09 19:30
When I was kid in
east Texas, my father would take me hunting — deer,
ducks, doves, squirrels, frogs. Whatever was in
season and was legal. I was never an enthusiastic
hunter, but I did enjoy being out in the woods,
fields, and marshes with my father, and being close
to wild things was very moving, which was one of
the reasons I occasionally missed my shots on
purpose. I particularly liked the “hunting” part of
hunting: finding an animal, learning about it, and
seeing it in situ. I know these skills helped me
shift from being a natural historian to a
professional ecologist and conservation biologist.
And now I don’t hunt “for” animals, in the sense of
pursuing them. I hunt for them, in the sense of
someone who is seeking to help them — as their
proxy. As a concerned friend, and no longer as a
predator.
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