From Doonesbury :
Archive for January, 2007 Page 2 of 2
Most of the expected increase in the world’s population over the next forty years, 1.5-3 billion people, is expected to be located in the cities of the developing world. Previously we written about rapid urbanization in developing world in - Planet of Slums, World Urban Forum, urban innovation, and visualizing global urbanization. The UN expects that sometime in 2008 most people will live in cities. The Christian Science Monitor writes:
This demographic shift is mostly taking place in Africa and Asia, largely in low-income settlements in developing countries - much of it in the 22 “megacities” whose populations will exceed 10 million and in some cases grow to more than 20 million by 2015.
“Unplanned and chaotic urbanization is taking a huge toll on human health and the quality of the environment, contributing to social, ecological, and economic instability in many countries,” warns the report, which is written by demographers, international program officials, and other experts from the United States and other countries. …
But the news is not all bad. Researchers find examples of cities from Karachi, Pakistan to Freetown, Sierra Leone to Bogotá, Colombia with projects aimed at improving the lives of urban dwellers while reducing the environmental impact of concentrated populations. These include urban farming plots, solar water heaters, economic cooperatives, improved sewer facilities, and upgraded transportation systems.
The paper by coral reef researchers Bellwood, Hughes, & Hoey, Sleeping functional group drives coral-reef recovery in Current Biology (2006 16(24):2434 -9) shows that hidden ecological functions can be critical for ecological restoration and provides further evidence for the importance of hysteresis in ecological regime shifts.
The researchers were examining the frequently observed shift of coral reefs from being dominated coral to macroalgae. This change is often due to the overharvesting of herbivorous fishes, particularly parrotfishes and surgeonfishes, that maintain the coral regime. They showed that a shift to the marcoalgae dominated regime on the Australian Great Barrier Reef was reversed not by parrotfishes or surgeonfishes, but rather by a species of batfish, Platax pinnatus, which is relatively rare on the Great Barrier Reef, and was thought to feed only on invertebrates.
Their finding suggests three things:
- that conserving ecosystem functioning is important for both for the maintenance and recovery of ecosystems,
- that successful functional conservation requires that we need to greatly increase our functional understanding of ecosystems, and
- that research into ecosystem functioning should examine function in different ecological contexts.
Interestingly, this research finding is similar to that of common property researchers who have discovered that many local resource management institutions contain “hidden” resources management practices, that are only activated during special environmental conditions - for example a fishery may have alternative property rights emerge during periods low fish abundance.
Press coverage of this research can be found in a press release from James Cook University, the New Scientist, and the Washington Post.
The Christian Science Monitor has an article - Sustainability gains status on US campuses - about Arizona State University’s new School of Sustainability. It is the USA’s first, and it includes quite a few researchers (including archaeologists, anthropologists, economists, and ecologists.) from the Resilience Alliance.
Any new building erected at ASU - a school adding facilities quickly - must be built to exacting environmental standards. Some professors in the university’s labs are concentrating on understanding nature and then using the knowledge to solve problems. For example, a team of professors is growing a strain of bacteria that feast on carbon dioxide. The bacteria could then be used to convert emissions from a power plant into bio-fuels.
By the fall, the university hopes to integrate its work so that students in other schools, such as the law school, can minor in sustainability. Some students will come from China as part of an agreement in August to launch a Joint Center on Urban Sustainability.
In October, ASU hosted 650 academics, administrators, and students from AASHE who took part in a conference on the role of higher education in creating a sustainable world. The university is attracting donors and business people, including heiress Julie Ann Wrigley and Rob Walton, chairman of Wal-Mart, who last month agreed to chair the board of ASU’s Institute of Sustainability.
Behind the university’s efforts is its president, Michael Crow, who arrived at ASU in 2002 after 11 years at Columbia University, where he played a lead role in founding the Earth Institute. (Read an interview with Mr. Crow).
Like many environmentalists, he counts reading Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” as a landmark in his life. However, he says it wasn’t until he matured that he realized “all of these 70,000 chemicals and synthetics that we have put in the atmosphere and water were all derived mostly by universities with no thought given to what the other impacts may be to what they are doing.”
At ASU, Dr. Crow reorganized the life-science departments, and began hiring experts in sustainability. A central goal, he says, “is that we work in concert with the natural systems as opposed to in conflict with the natural systems.”
And Crow goes a step further: He believes that nature, through 4 billion years of genetic change, provides “the pathway to everything we need. Nature has adapted to all kinds of problems: hot climate, cold climate, high carbon dioxide, low carbon dioxide.”
…
Students seem excited to be part of the university’s effort. One is Thad Miller of Malverne, N.Y., who has been accepted to work on a doctorate at the new School of Sustainability. “What is appealing to me is that these problems of climate change, the urban heat island, urban planning, require a real interdisciplinary way of looking at the world, and they do this more so here than any other school,” says Mr. Miller, who is leaning toward working for a nonprofit or advising decision- makers when he graduates. “It’s fun to be a part of it.”
The USA’s National Abor Day Foundation has updated it tree hardiness maps (which are used to suggest what species of trees will grow in a particular region) based upon data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States. The site includes an animation of changes between the 1990 and 2006 maps, which shows how the tree hardiness zones have moved north over the past 15 years.
The new map reflects that many areas have become warmer since 1990 when the last USDA hardiness zone map was published. Significant portions of many states have shifted at least one full hardiness zone. Much of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, for example, have shifted from Zone 5 to a warmer Zone 6. Some areas around the country have even warmed two full zones.
… Hardiness zones are based on average annual low temperatures using 10 degree increments. For example, the average low temperature in zone 3 is -40 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit, while the average low temperature in zone 10 is +30 to +40 degrees Fahrenheit.
On RealClimate, Michael Mann has a good explanation of what is going on with North America’s unusual winter weather. He discusses what parts of the weather may be due to ENSO fluctuations and what part could be a signal of climate change.
The pattern so far this winter (admittedly after only 1 month) looks … like a stronger version of what was observed last winter … . This poses the first obvious conundrum for the pure “El Nino” attribution of the current warmth: since we were actually in a (weak) La Nina (i.e., the opposite of ‘El Nino’) last winter, how is it that we can explain away the anomalous winter U.S. warmth so far this winter by ‘El Nino’ when anomalous winter warmth last year occured in its absence?
The second conundrum with this explanation is that, while El Nino typically does perturb the winter Northern Hemisphere jet stream in a way that favors anomalous warmth over much of the northern half of the U.S., the typical amplitude of the warming (see Figure below right) is about 1C (i.e., about 2F). The current anomaly is roughly five times as large as this. One therefore cannot sensibly argue that the current U.S. winter temperature anomalies are attributed entirely to the current moderate El Nino event.
Indeed, though the current pattern of winter U.S. warmth looks much more like the pattern predicted by climate models as a response to anthropogenic forcing (see Figure below left) than the typical ‘El Nino’ pattern, neither can one attribute this warmth to anthropogenic forcing. As we are fond of reminding our readers, one cannot attribute a specific meteorological event, an anomalous season, or even (as seems may be the case here, depending on the next 2 months) two anomalous seasons in a row, to climate change. Moreover, not even the most extreme scenario for the next century predicts temperature changes over North America as large as the anomalies witnessed this past month. But one can argue that the pattern of anomalous winter warmth seen last year, and so far this year, is in the direction of what the models predict.
In reality, the individual roles of deterministic factors such as El Nino, anthropogenic climate change, and of purely random factors (i.e. “weather”) in the pattern observed thusfar this winter cannot even in principle be ascertained. What we do know, however, is that both anthropogenic climate change and El Nino favor, in a statistical sense, warmer winters over large parts of the U.S. When these factors act constructively, as is the case this winter, warmer temperatures are certainly more likely. Both factors also favor warmer global mean surface temperatures (the warming is one or two tenths of a degree C for a moderate to strong El Nino). It is precisely for this reason that some scientists are already concluding, with some justification, that 2007 stands a good chance of being the warmest year on record for the globe.
In Science (Jan 5 2007), Kathleen Morrison reviews After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies. The book sounds interesting. It is an edited volume focused of the neglected phases of reorganization and growth that have follow civilization collapse:
Glenn Schwartz’s introduction to After Collapse points out, however, not
all of these phases have been equally well studied. Studies of state
collapse and of the initial development of complex societies have
continued to be counted among the big questions of archaeology. Why the
regeneration of complex societies after episodes of collapse has not, to
date, been a major focus of research can be attributed to an
archaeological obsession with origins and in particular with “primary
states,” those six places where complex polities developed without prior
organizational models. The diffusionary logic that the idea of the state
was somehow a sufficient condition for the emergence of complex polities
has been long discredited, yet for some reason archaeological disregard
for so-called “secondary state formation” has continued. Not only do the
vast majority of cases of state development fall under this rubric, but
so do instances of regeneration after collapse. Hence, the reasons for
underanalysis of this important process are, if not clear, at least
explicable. What all this suggests is that the examples presented in
After Collapse have the potential to inform on processes of state
(re)formation more generally; addition of these important cases can only
add to our understanding of state generation as well as regeneration.