Rapid Shifts are the Hallmark of Climate Change, Epileptic Seizures, Financial Crises, and Fishery Collapses. Deep Mathematical Principles Tie These Events Together.

Published on February 22, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From George Sugihara, Seed Magazine

At a closed meeting held in Boston in October 2009, the room was packed with high-flyers in foreign policy and finance: Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, Andy Haldane, and Joseph Stiglitz, among others, as well as representatives of sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and endowments worth more than a trillion dollars—a significant slice of the world’s wealth. The session opened with the following telling question: “Have the last couple of years shown that our traditional finance/risk models are irretrievably broken and that models and approaches from other fields (for example, ecology) may offer a better understanding of the interconnectedness and fragility of complex financial systems?”

Science is a creative human enterprise. Discoveries are made in the context of our creations: our models and hypotheses about how the world works. Big failures, however, can be a wake-up call about entrenched views, and nothing
produces humility or gains attention faster than an event that blindsides so many so immediately.

Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a variety of fields, typically in specialized contexts with little cross-connection. Only recently have we begun to look for generic patterns in the web of linked causes and effects that puts disparate events into a common framework—a framework that operates on a sufficiently high level to include geologic climate shifts, epileptic seizures, market and fishery crashes, and rapid shifts from healthy ecosystems to biological deserts.

To Read More…

Can we build it? Yes we can!

Published on February 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From James Hrynyshyn, Class:M

As a father of a four-year-old, I’m a big fan of Bob the Builder. The basic plot of each episode of the charming stop-motion children’s series revolves around one or more pieces of heavy machinery learning self-discipline, which, as a new PNAS study shows, is a key skill associated with success and happiness later in life. I also like the optimism embedded in the catch-phrase that Bob’s machine team invariably declares: “Can we build it? Yes we can!”

If only that can-do spirit were as evident in the public debate over how to respond to the threat of climate change. Recently a spate of reports and papers are beginning to point in that direction. Are they too optimistic? Hard to say. But they are worth a look at least.

Some would have us believe that new-fangled, clean, renewable sources of electricity aren’t ready for prime-time and the only way we’ll replace greenhouse-gas-generating fossil fuels is with an aggressive research effort to turn prototypical schemes into commercial reality. Nobel laureate Burton Richter, author of Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, is one such scientist. He derides hydrogen fuel cells as lunacy, loves nuclear reactors, and generally insists that everything else already on the shelf is insufficient to make a serious dent in our power mix. Here he is at a 2010 conference organized by the like-minded Breakthrough Institute and the AGW-denying American Enterprise Institute, both of which don’t care much for the idea that we already have the tools we need to forestall catastrophic climate change.

To Read More…

Why Dire Climate Warnings Boost Scepticism

Published on February 9, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Matt Kaplan, naturenews

The use of dire predictions to encourage action on climate change may be backfiring and increasing doubt that greenhouse gases from human activities are causing global warming.

Although scientific evidence that anthropogenic activities are behind global warming continues to mount, belief in the phenomenon has stagnated in recent years. “When I was a pollster, I was detecting that many dire messages seemed to be counterproductive, we really needed someone to determine why,” says Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute, a Californian think-tank for energy and climate issues.

Matthew Feinberg at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether presenting children as the main victims of climate change, a common feature of warning messages, might be viewed as unfair because children have not caused global warming. He speculated that this, along with the apocalyptic descriptions of global warming’s possible consequences, might threaten people’s natural tendency to believe that the world is a fundamentally fair and stable place1. Undermining that belief has been shown to increase the likelihood that people will ignore reality and allow events to unfold around them without intervening.

To Read More…

Latest Climate Change Journal Papers

Published on February 8, 2011 in Journal. 1 Comment

climate_frontThe latest issue of  The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses includes:

Lords of the Rings: Understanding Tree Ring Science

Published on January 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Tim De Chant, ars technica

Ask any second grader what you can do with the rings on a tree, and they’ll respond, “Learn the age of the tree!” They’re not wrong, but dendrochronology—the dating of trees based on patterns in their rings—is more than just counting rings. The hundred year-old discipline has given scientists access to extraordinarily detailed records of climate and environmental conditions hundreds, even thousands of years ago.

The ancient Greeks were the first people known to realize the link between a tree’s rings and its age but, for most of history, that was the limit of our knowledge. It wasn’t until 1901 that an astronomer at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory was hit with a very terrestrial idea—that climatic variations affected the size of a tree’s rings. The idea would change the way scientists study the climate, providing them with over 10,000 years of continuous data that is an important part of modern climate models.

A. E. Douglass, the astronomer in question, is revered as the father of dendrochronology even though one of the field’s basic concepts—crossdating, or the matching of ring patterns between trees—was independently discovered on four earlier occasions. (Pioneering computer scientist Charles Babbage was among that group.) Douglass was the first to apply truly scientific rigor to the study of tree rings, using a quantitative approach to tie variations in ring width to available climate records.

To Read More…

Climate Changes Tied to Fall of Roman Empire

Published on January 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Emily Sohn, msnbc.com

A prolonged period of wet weather spurred the spread of the bubonic plague in medieval times, according to a new study. And a 300-year spell of unpredictable weather coincided with the decline of the Roman Empire.

Climate change wasn’t necessarily the cause of these and other major historical events, researchers say. But the study, which pieced together a year-by-year history of temperature and precipitation in Western Europe, dating back 2,500 years, offers the most detailed picture yet of how climate and society have been intertwined for millennia.

With a look to the past, the work may help society better prepare for climate change in the future by informing public policy decisions about water management and other resources.

“We need to have a better understanding about the ancient climate system and its variability to understand the modern situation,” said Ulf Büntgen, a paleoclimatologist at the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Zurich. “It does not provide any predictions. But it helps us take it as something to be considered.”

Büntgen and colleagues collaborated with archaeologists to amass a database of more than 9,000 pieces of wood dating back 2,500 years. Samples came from both live trees and remains of buildings and other wooden artifacts, all from France and Germany. By measuring the width of annual growth rings in the wood, the researchers were able to determine temperature and precipitation levels on a year-by-year basis.

To get annual temperatures, they measured rings in high-altitude conifer trees, which grow faster in warmer summers and slower in colder years. To gauge precipitation, they looked at tree ring widths in lower-elevation oaks, which grow faster in years with higher levels of rainfall. Other techniques allowed them to figure out exactly which year each ring represented.

To Read More…

Climate Change Journal, Volume 2, Number 3

Published on January 18, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 1 Comment

climate_frontThe third issue of  Volume 2 The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses has now been published.

Volume 2, Number 3 contains:

Continue reading ‘Climate Change Journal, Volume 2, Number 3′

Does the Cancún agreement show climate leadership?

Published on December 13, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

From John Vidal in The Guardian:

In the last hours before the final session of the Cancún climate changesummit, the world’s poorest countries tried to remind the rich what was at stake. Bruno Sekoli, chair of the 54 nations in the least developed block, spoke for them all:

“The objective of these talks [has been] to mitigate climate change and help developing countries adapt [to climate impacts]. The situation is extremely disappointing. Concentrations of greenhouse gases have risen at alarming rates and it’s worrying to think of the situation in just 10 years’ time. Most of us are already fighting for survival I appeal to developed countries to do what is right. They have shown economic, even military leadership. They must now show climate leadership.”

Well, they didn’t. They kept the wheels on the bus by reaching an agreement on Saturday, but it is still careering towards the precipice.

The promise of vast new flows of aid money is still a chimera; the ambition to keep temperatures to 2C is nowhere near enough to prevent disaster across Africa, Latin America and Asia. In the overriding desire to get a deal – any deal – gaping loopholes and ambiguities were left in, dates were left out and major issues about the final legal form and the emission cuts all countries will need to make were pushed back another year. In effect, the world is in limbo.

For more…

Cancún agreement rescues UN credibility but falls short of saving planet

Published on December 12, 2010 in News. 0 Comments


From Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian:

The modest deal wrangled out by the 200 countries meeting at the Mexican resort of Cancún may have done more to save a dysfunctional UN negotiating process from collapse than protect the planet againstclimate change, analysts said today.

“The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine,” said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “The agreement falls short of the emissions cuts that are needed, but it lays out a path to move towards them.”

The agreement produced in the early hours of Saturday reinforces the promise made by rich countries last year to mobilise billions for a green climate fund to help poor countries defend themselves against climate damage.

It was not clear how the funds would be raised. At Copenhagen last year, rich countries agreed to raise $100bn (£63bn) a year by 2020 for the fund. However, US officials said at the weekend that most of this would come from the private sector.

For more…

And God said to Noah: Don't Fret about Global Warming

Published on December 10, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Andrew Leonard, Salon.com

Back in March 2009, when Nancy Pelosi ruled the House of Representatives with an iron fist, one could chuckle at Republicans who came to committee hearings quoting scripture as the rationale for their positions on energy policy.

But now, when one of those very same Republicans is in the running for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce committee, it just doesn’t seem so funny.

Juan Cole does us the unpleasant service of bringing back to life the comments of John Shimkus, R-Ill., a year and a half ago.

Shimkus starts by quoting Genesis 8, Verses 21 and 22, in which God makes Noah a promise.

Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.

As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.

Shimkus continues: “I believe that is the infallible word of god, and that’s the way it is going to be for his creation… The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”

To Read More…