May 2009

From Climate Crisis to Weather Disaster: Tropical Storm Alia Strikes the Sundarbans

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

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


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...
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Dragons of Change?

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

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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