Signs From Earth

Climate Fight Site: Carbon War Room

Sir Richard Branson is behind Carbon War Room, a new web effort designed to ramp up action on reducing carbon emissions and move the world "beyond the carbon economy." With a growing research database, resources, and widgets to post to your own website, the site's "About Us" page reveals:

"The Carbon War Room is a global philanthropic inititative, founded to harness the resource and skills of the Planet’s entrepreneurs and institutions to urgently deliver solutions that enable humanity to prosper beyond the carbon economy. Our Founders include some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs and institutions who are passionate about solving this problem..."

The website's creators envision the "battles" against carbon in seven "theatres," including: transportation, electricity, the built environment, industrial processes, agriculture and deforestation, development of transition economies, and in "adaptation mitigation." Thanks to Joel Makower for the tip...

Desert Dust Alters Mountain Meadows

 

More dust in Colorado mountains causes earlier spring snow melt. Photo: Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies

Following on an earlier post here on dust covering the snowpack of southwest Colorado mountains this year, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals that the increased dust cover on snow is altering the behavior of mountain plants.  

According to the study, meadow plants typically time their flowering to rising temperatures and melting of snow, but the heat-absorbing dust causes snow to melt before ground temperatures are warm enough for plant growth. 

Dust levels in the mountains have increased about five times since the mid-1800s, mostly due to human activity in the deserts nearby, the study said. The researchers say the change in timing of snowmelt could change the composition of alpine plant communities as some species decline in abundance and others increase.

NASA Top 10 Image: Ocean Sand, Bahamas

While poking around the NASA Earth Observatory website I came across a page for the the Top 10 Images of the Day. The Top 10 Images page is part of NASA Earth Observatory's 10th Anniversary celebration. The website began on April 29, 1999.

Ranked third among those "Top 10" images is Atafu Atoll, which has been among the most visited postings here at Signs From Earth. Perhaps more pictures and less writing are what the visitors seek...

Ranked second is this amazing 2002 satellite image (above) of sands in the Bahamas. From the description: "...Tides and ocean currents in the Bahamas sculpted the sand and seaweed beds into these multicolored, fluted patterns in much the same way that winds sculpted the vast sand dunes in the Sahara Desert.."

Numbers Alone Show Vote Rigging

Figuring out whether election results from Iran are fraudulent is simple, according to New York University political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco. In their June 20 Washington Post op-ed The Devil is in the Digits, they discuss the lack of randomness in the last digit of polling results from each province:

"...Last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags...."

"...The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers...."

From Bernd Beber website: Annotated Version of The Devil is in The Digits

From Alexandra Scacco website: Election Results Data Used in Analysis

Climate Change Bell Tolls for People, Too

If we all wake up one day surprised in the grip of some massive drought, crop failure, or endless heat wave, we can't claim we weren't warned. The United States climate impacts study released by the government this week is only one of several reports out in just the past month addressing the issue. 

This idea of consequences begins to take hold, that our profligate burning of fossil sunshine coal and oil will come home to roost in ways far beyond disappearing Arctic ice. No longer are we just pondering a planet where polar bears float around stranded on Arctic ice remnants. We are beginning to realize that climate change means changes in the climate for us too.

I've been in Geneva as a panelist this week at a United Nations conference on what they call "Disaster Risk Reduction." Impacts of climate change now and upcoming -- rising seas, loss of land and homes, floods, drought, loss of stable food supplies -- are all front-burner topics here. 

The idea is that we can spend money now to reforest millions of acres, replant coastal mangroves as coastal storm defense, restore damaged watersheds or produce drought- and heat-tolerant crops to prepare in advance and reduce the cost of projected impacts. But that means money spent now to avoid something that hasn't happened yet, and in a cash-strapped world this is a hard sell. Money and help seems so much easier to find once a catastrophe has happened.

Climate and Migration: A report last week from CARE, Columbia University's CIESIN program and the UN focuses on climate migration. Called "In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement," it focuses on people in several vulnerable regions who will need to move around within the regions where they live now. They include regions of Asia that depends on glacial meltwater from the Tibetan plateau, Mexico and Central America, the Sahel, several low-lying river deltas, and low-lying islands.

Climate, Conflict, and National Security: Dan Smith of International Alert discussed his report A Climate of Conflict last week in Washington at ECSP on the links between climate change, peace and war. The Center for New American Security initiated its new program, blog, and "working paper" on a similar idea: that the future security of nations depends on preservation of natural systems now being threatened by rampant consumption and the rising effects of climate change. And there is also the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report "From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment." (PDF file here.)

Climate and Health: Finally, there is the extensive report out last month from English medical journal The Lancet saying that climate change is the biggest global health threat of this century.

Resources:

Look Here: Look at LOOK3

Those who know me know I've been deep into photography and photojournalism for about 40 years. Had fun this weekend at the third outing of "The Festival of the Photograph," LOOK3, in Charlottesville, VA. 

Here from a selection of pictures I've put up over on my page at flickr, is festival Master of Ceremonies Vince Musi and his son on Saturday during the master's lecture for Callie Shell (Musi's wife), who has been photographing Barack Obama for Time Magazine for years. For eight years before that Callie was official photographer for  Al Gore when he served as Vice President.

National Security Equals Natural Security

 

The New Security Beat reports on a conference, new blog, and paper out this week from the Center for a New American Security, highlighting the intertwined relationship between national security and natural resources security.

Abstract of Paper, Natural Security: "In the 21st century, the security of nations will increasingly depend on the security of natural resources, or “natural security.”  This concept paper outlines a new program of study at the Center for a New American Security to look at emerging natural resources challenges in six key areas of consumption and consequences – energy, minerals, water, land, climate change, and biodiversity – as well as the ways in which these challenges are linked together. Any solution to the country’s energy insecurity is likely to involve water, non-fuel minerals, and land-use issues; climate change and biodiversity cut across all concerns, with broad effects on resource vulnerability. Without an integrated, national-level approach that links together natural security challenges, the United States runs the risk of trading one dependency for another and exacerbating the consequences."

PDF of CNAS Working Paper: Natural Security

Natural and Economic Disasters in Parallel

McKinsey and Co. has posted a short essay by Michele Zanini that begins exploring similarity in behavior between man-made and natural systems. She discusses correlative frequency and magnitude of failure in man-made systems and of similarly complex natural ones, and says we should pay greater attention to behavior of natural systems to help us understand vulnerability and instability in the systems we create, like the economy:

'Power Curves' What natural and economic disasters have in common (registration required).

"...the parallels between the dynamics and failures of man-made systems, such as the economy or the electricity grid, and similarly complex natural ones are bringing new ideas to economic forecasting, strategic planning, and risk management. This trend may have profound implications for policy makers, economists, and corporate strategists alike."

There are similiarities in this discussion with the work of Nicholas Taleb vis a vis societal and economic effects of low frequency, high impact disruptive events he calls "Black Swans." 

Signs From Earth: Tips to Avoid "Black Swan" Events

Signs From Earth: Turbulence in Our Midst

More Heat, Less Money

Andrew Leonard at Salon notes research indicating that national per capita income drops 8.5 percent for each degree Celsius increase in temperature. This by Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken and summarized at VoxEu: Does Climate Change Affect Economic Growth?

"Hot countries tend to be poorer, but debate continues over whether the temperature-income relationship is simply a happenstance association. This column uses within-country estimates to show that higher temperatures have large, negative effects on economic growth – but only in poor countries. The findings are big news for future global inequality."

Dell, Jones and Olken: Climate Change and Economic Growth over the Last Half Century

Climate Change: The Problem for Others

The political reporting site fivethirtyeight has produced an inverted pyramid graphic that well explains why concern for climate change, global warming, global weirding, you name it, is a problem not for us to worry about. 

It's just too abstract, far off, something for others to furrow their brows for.

According to the results of a survey out this spring, climate change is something for plants and animals, future generations, people in developing countries, and others, but not me, to be concerned with. And this is why little or nothing gets done to reduce carbon emissions. If we have to choose between solving the problems in front of us or those facing others or the future which to choose?

This is a visualization of the results of a study, Climate Change in the American Mind, published recently by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication.  

Yet the main problem we face with kicking the can down the road, allowing heat-trapping carbon to keep building in the atmosphere, is that unless we set ourselves on a pathway towards drastically reducing our emissions now, little we do in the future will matter, as has been written here and many places elsewhere previously:

Signs From Earth: A Thousand Years of Warming Ahead

Signs From Earth: Hot Planet - Our Path Ahead

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