Earlier today the creation of the world’s largest Marine Protected Area (MPA) was announced. The newly protected Northwest Hawaiian Islands and surrounding waters and reefs is slightly larger than the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia (139,793 and 128,960 square miles respectively). Today’s announcement, combined with the recent listing of two coral species (Elkhorn and Staghorn) on the U.S. Endangered Species Act, suggests momentum towards strengthening the resilience of marine ecosystems.

With many marine protected areas being both small and isolated, a move toward creating very large MPA’s is a more effective strategy. Larger areas allow for more widespread dispersal of species, including coral offspring, which provides greater insurance against changing conditions. Even better would be the linking together of MPA’s in a global network. Authors of a paper published this past March in Nature (“Coral reef diversity refutes the neutral theory of biodiversity”), have called for the worldwide networking of tropical marine parks and protected areas to reduce risks of extinction under climate change.

One of the paper’s authors, Prof. Terry Hughes, is Centre Director of the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, based in Townsville, Australia, as well as the project leader for the Resilience Alliance’s Marine Resilience Program. Later this summer, Prof. Hughes, along with other researchers will gather in Maine for a meeting with the theme “Social-ecological traps and transformations in marine fisheries”. More information at: http://www.resalliance.org/1608.php.

The Society of Environmental Journalists: SEJ Publications has an interesting set of articles on climate change and journalism – an interview with NYTimes journalist Andrew Revkin and an article on journalistic balance.

Do you think that climate change is covered adequately by the media? I mean, what kind of job do you think they’re doing?

AR: It’s certainly a decent amount of coverage these days, but I still…I don’t think people are covering it wrong. It doesn’t fit the norms of journalism. The heft of the story is not conveyed. Either the uncertainties make us all fuzz out and look at something more germane like a new explosion in Iraq or the latest scandal in Washington with lobbyists. So we turn away from it. Or we latch onto some new finding that feels like news (abrupt change) and our endless sift for the “front-page thought” makes us minimize the uncertainties.

But it’s not just a journalism problem. After covering it for twenty years…you can write the perfect story capturing both the gravitas and the uncertainties of human-induced climate change, perfect on every level, and it won’t change things.

We are not attuned to things on this time scale and with this level of uncertainty. Partly because of our political system being so short term, our business cycle being so short term, and because our concerns are focused mainly on what affects my family, then what affects my community, then what affects my state, then what affects my country, and then what affects my globe.

What would be the key points you’d stress with other journalists about climate change? What subjects should they hit?

AR: Not just for climate change, but just in general. When you can step back, whether it’s sprawl or nonpoint source pollution or climate change, there are things going on around you that are profound, that are transforming landscapes. And we ignore them because they are happening in this incremental fashion that journalism just does not recognize.

And it’s not the kind of thing that you can do daily or maybe even yearly. But once in a while, when there’s a slow news cycle, step back and see how many houses are being built on steep slopes, or how much leakage there is from underground gas tanks. Or what ecologists and biologists are saying about the way a valley, watershed or coast will be transformed over the next century and how does that relate to the surrounding institutions?

A perfect example is coastal development and sea level rise. One of the firmest things coming out of any climate model is that rising seas are the new normal for centuries to come. So if you are a journalist on the coast, this immediately starts a series of stories to see what is being done to reflect that.

You have to look at the world and ask, “Do our institutions reflect, are we still granting flood insurance to low lying areas?” It can lead to these types of stories.

On the mitigation side, college activism is exploding now. When I went to Montreal to cover the last round of climate-treaty talks the only people there who seemed to be talking sense were the youngest ones.

Earth and Sky site also has an interview with Andrew Revkin about his interest in the North Pole.

Tipping points cause some important ecosystem surprises.  Examples include collapses of rangelands, water quality, and some fisheries.  The trouble with tipping points is that they are hard to anticipate in advance.  However, tremors may provide an advance warning of some tipping points.

The graphic shows a model of a pastoral system .  There is a tipping point when the stocking level of herbivores is about 5.  Above the tipping point, grassy vegetation disappears and the grazing system collapses.  As the tipping point is approached from low levels of herbivores, the standard deviation of grass biomass rises sharply before the tipping point is reached.  If the herbivore level is rising slowly enough, the rise in standard deviation could provide advance warning of impending collapse.  If the pastoralist was attentive to the warning, sheep numbers could be reduced in time to prevent the collapse.
 

 Thomas Kleinen and colleagues have shown that reddening of the variance spectrum can anticipate rapid climate changes such as those that could result from a breakdown in ocean circulation.  Steve Carpenter and Buz Brock have analyzed water pollution, air pollution, and social systems that tremble before they tip.  They demonstrate increases in variance, which may be more easily detected than reddening of spectra.  Importantly, the variance increases can be detected with simple statistical filters using common time-series data.  No particular knowledge of the actual ecosystem dynamics is required.  Berglund and Gentz compare hard losses of stability in which an attractor vanishes (such as the pastoral system shown here) with soft losses of stability where an attractor divides like a braided river.  Hard losses of stability — the regime shifts that cause resource collapses — may provide stronger advance warnings than soft losses of stability — the regime shifts that gradually and imperceptibly create traps for ecosystem management.  Ludwig, Walker and Holling provide a more general discussion of hard and soft losses of stability in ecosystems.

Nature (March 30, 2006) has an profile of the father and son scientists Roger Pielke Jr and Roger Pielke Sr. Each of them run a climate weblog. Pielke Sr focuses on climate science, while Pielke Jr focuses on science policy. Below are their explanations to Nature on how their weblogs help their research.

Roger Pielke Jr runs Prometheus: The Science Policy Weblog

“It started as an experiment for our centre, and now it serves a number of different purposes. It is kind of like an extra hard drive for my brain. I can search for things that I’ve written, something I might want later, sort of like my professional notes in a public format. “I’m surprised at the reach the blog has, which is rewarding for this centre with only eight of us here. We can put an argument on it and it shows up out there in the real world. I get contacted by professionals in the United States or elsewhere that I would have never met otherwise. “Blogs are also out there for the public, and it gives you an entirely different perspective on how well the public is getting your message.”

Roger Pielke Sr runs the weblog Climate Science

“My weblog was completely motivated by my son’s. I was sending all these e-mails out to people about committee reports and he said, ‘Why don’t you just do a weblog?’ “With so many journals out there now, it is hard to keep track. When a peer reviewed paper comes out, I can put up the abstract and a summary of key points on the blog. “Now I’m making my arguments to a broader community to see how well they stand up. I also use it as a professional diary and it has increased my network. “The feedback has been wonderful.”

I have been using this weblog in a similar way to Roger Pielke Jr. I have been posting articles of things that I have been reading in my research or teaching that I think will be interesting to the larger resilience community. I frequently use the weblog to show colleagues and students articles, figures, or ideas that I think are relevant to our work. From the posts on the site you are probably able to guess that I am working on the impacts of inequality in social-ecological systems and connections between agriculture and water.

Nature (440:7083) has a Microsoft sponsored freely available special feature on the future of scientific computing – the articles focus on sensor networks, database management, and automated learning.

Declan Butler 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere

Data networks will have gone from being the repositories of science to its starting point. When researchers look back on the days when computers were thought of only as desktops and portables, our world may look as strange to them as their envisaged one does to us. Although we might imagine a science based so much on computing as being distanced from life’s nitty gritty, future researchers may look back on today’s world as the one that is more abstracted. To them the science practised now may, ironically, look like a sort of virtual reality, constrained by the artificialities of data selection and lab analysis: a science not yet ready to capture the essence of the real world.

Computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernon Vinge writes on the internet as The Creativity Machine

All this points to ways that science might exploit the Internet in the near future. Beyond that, we know that hardware will continue to improve. In 15 years, we are likely to have processing power that is 1,000 times greater than today, and an even larger increase in the number of network-connected devices (such as tiny sensors and effectors). Among other things, these improvements will add a layer of networking beneath what we have today, to create a world come alive with trillions of tiny devices that know what they are, where they are and how to communicate with their near neighbours, and thus, with anything in the world. Much of the planetary sensing that is part of the scientific enterprise will be implicit in this new digital Gaia. The Internet will have leaked out, to become coincident with Earth.

How can we prepare for such a future? Perhaps that is the most important research project for our creativity machine. We need to exploit the growing sensor/effector layer to make the world itself a real-time database. In the social, human layers of the Internet, we need to devise and experiment with large-scale architectures for collaboration. We need linguists and artificial-intelligence researchers to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialties, bringing research groups with complementary problems and solutions together — even when those groups have not noticed the possibility of collaboration. In the end, computers plus networks plus people add up to something significantly greater than the parts. The ensemble eventually grows beyond human creativity. To become what? We can’t know until we get there.

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In the next fifty years the world’s population is expected to increase by roughly 50%. Almost of of this population growth is expected to be in cities in the developing world. Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums presents one vision of the developing world’s megacities. Below are three others.

Robert Neuwrith’s informative and novel book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (see review on WorldChanging) is about the one billion people who live in informal settlements in the world’s megacities. Neuwrith lived in informal settlements in Bombay (Mumbai), Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and Nairobi. Based on his experience he argues that rather than being zones of chaos and crime, shantytowns are innovative and adaptive responses to poverty that allow poor people to improve their lives – as long as their governments don’t evict and destroy their settlements. Neuwirth also maintains a weblog that comments on new related to his book.

Suketu Mehta‘s great book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found presents a rich evocative picture of Bombay (Adam Hochschild review in Harpers). Mehta tells the stories of gansters, policemen, politicians, dancers, Bollywood stars, the middle class, the poor, and the rich. He tells of the failure of state justice, police assassinations of gangsters, and the intertwined stories of gangsters and movie stars – as well as Bombay’s connection with Dubai, India and the West.

Finally, a Guardian article tells the story of a day in Chongqing – the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet – just upstream from the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam (see Edward Burtynsky photos).

China’s development is one of humanity’s worst environmental disasters. Cheap coal and a doubling of car ownership every five years has made the country the second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. According to the World Bank, 16 of the planet’s 20 dirtiest cities are in China, and Chongqing is one of the worst. Every year, the choking atmosphere is responsible for thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis. Last year, the air quality failed to reach level 2, the government health standard, one day in every four. Today’s haze is so thick that I still haven’t seen the sun.

Outside at midnight, the bright lights cannot mask a seedier side of city life – the poor trawling through rubbish bins, the homeless on street corners, the touts offering drugs and sex for sale. Many of the women working as prostitutes are rural migrants. Their children are left with relatives or sent to the streets to beg, sell flowers or sing songs for money until the early hours.