Two climate science blogs Real Climate and Climate Science, run by different groups of well known climate scientists, recently answered a set of questions about climate modelling.
The answers are interesting, in terms of learning more about climate modelling and seeing how different climate models are from ecological models.
John Doyle and his colleagues published a very interesting paper on the structure of the internet and its implications for robustness. It is a popular belief that the structure of the Internet follow a scale free distribution of the number of connections, which then results in being sensitive to target attacks at the hubs. Doyle et al. dig deeper in to the real structure of the internet and falsify this myth. Indeed the number of connections follow a scale free distribution, but there are various ways to derive such a distribution. Doyle et al. find that the components of the internet with the most connections are not the crucial hubs of the internet.
Doyle et al. define an alternative model to generate networks structures of the internet (an alternative to the preferential attachment models). This alternative model is based on the highly optimized tollerance (HOT) concept and includes specific technological (bandwidth) and economic (costs) constraints. The resulting model generates statistics more in line with the real internet, and an important finding is that this structure is robust to targeted attacks to highly connected nodes.
Martin Kemp writes in Nature – Science in culture: Inventing an icon
Any public campaign benefits from having an iconic image — something that captures the essence of the message and engraves it indelibly on our memories. But it is almost impossible to predict which images will actually stick, so creating one on demand is extraordinarily difficult. …
Even so, finding an iconic image was one of the goals of a meeting, Changing the Climate, held in Oxford, UK, on 11 and 12 September. Researchers and practitioners of the visual, literary, musical and performing arts came together to publicize the predicted perils of climate change, and there was much talk about a memorable image that would encapsulate the initiative…
The data must come from the best science available, but the presentation for maximum impact is a matter of invention in art and design. Of the images produced by the scientists, one in particular seemed to have the potential to combine iconicity with complexity. This is the ‘Tipping Points Map’ devised by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and research director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, UK. This global map, shown here, outlines what Schellnhuber has identified as regions where the balance of particular systems has reached the critical point at which potentially irreversible change is imminent, or actually occurring.
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Navin Ramankutty, from the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at University of Wisconsin, has developed a Global Land Use Database that allows people to download global land datasets they have developed as either gridded maps or tabular data.
The data includes:
Jeremy Faludi’s article Biomimicry For Green Design (A How-To) on WorldChanging reviews principles designers can adopt from Nature to produce green products.
It’s easy to talk about how exciting biomimicry is, and how we’ll see more of it in the future, but it’s another thing to actually design and built things that are biomimetic. Most designers, engineers, architects, and other people who build things just don’t know that much about biology and the natural world; and even when they do, there’s often a gap of capability in available materials, manufacturing methods, and economic systems. Some of these obstacles are out of the designer’s hands, and you just have to move on to things that are more feasible. (But don’t forget your ideas; maybe ten years from now the technology will be there.) Even with existing technology, however, an enormous realm of possibilities is feasible, it just requires the right approach. Here is my attempt to describe the biomimetic approach, with a comprehensive list of principles. It combines lessons from Janine Benyus, Kevin Kelly, Steven Vogel, D’Arcy Thompson, Buckminster Fuller, Julian Vincent, and my own limited experience. I also mention at the end where biomimicry will not help you, a subject often glossed over, as well as further resources (books and schools).
Ethan Zuckerman writes about Ivan Marovic an important figure in the Otpor (Serbo-Croatian for resistance) Serbian democracy movement is working on a video game to help people learn to organize non-violent democracy movements.
Zuckerman writes:
The movement demonstrated their power in opposing Milosevic in the 2000 elections – by the time the election took place, it was quite obvious that Milosevic would lose to opposition leader Zoran Dindic. The real question was whether or not Milosevic would step down. (And, of course, he didn’t.) So the movement took the next step, and organized to actually remove Milosevic from power.
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And hundreds of thousands of activists eventually organized a nonviolent takeover of Parliament, forcing Milosevic out of power and eventually into trial at The Hague.In some ways, this was just the beginning for Otpor – Kumara, a movement in Georgia that took down Shevrednadze, used the same symbolism and the same tactics as Otpor. And the Orange Revolution in Ukraine used many of the same tactics, and the movements were in close contact.
Ivan is less interested in writing another book about non-violent organizing or making another video – instead, he’s helping build a game, called A Force More Powerful. It’s a simulation game developed with Breakaway Games. It looks a little like Sim City or Civilization, but is focused on teaching organizers the tactics of non-violent resistance.
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NASA has done a wonderful visualization of the 2005 hurricane season showing the named storms from June 1 up until Oct 17 (missing Alpha and only getting the start of Wilma).
It reveals how weather patterns (fast variables) are structured by ocean temperatures (a slower variable) along with the storm paths.
Identifying changes in slow variables is an important part of managing for resilience. For a quick introduction to this idea see Lance Gunderson’s short 1999 article Resilient management: comments on “Ecological and social dynamics in simple models of ecosystem management”.
In Playing Games with the Climate WorldChanging discusses several games sponsored by the European Climate Forum, including Keep Cool – a climate change policy board game co-developed by Gerhard Petschel Held from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
The game Keep Cool was a hit in Germany, where it sold out of stores.
The game lets:
each player takes a role within global climate politics. You have to put through economic interests, e.g. of the USA and its partners or of the Developing Countries. Yet you must not forget the strong lobby groups in your country like the oil industry or environmental groups as they also decide whether you win or loose. Within each round of the game you have to decide between measures for climate protection good for all and egoistic decisions just for your owns sake. The risk: catastrophes like droughts, floods or pandemics. The chance: welfare and a stable global climate. Whoever reaches his or her targets first wins, yet if you are not cooperative enough all players might loose due to a collapse of the world climate.
Tragically, and unexpectedly, Gerhard died in the summer of 2005. Those of us who knew him lost of great friend, while the scientific community lost a great mind.
On Sept 2 I
In another post on WorldChanging Alan AtKisson follows up in A New New Orleans – Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios
From A New New Orleans – Issues, Leverage Points, Scenarios:
Another tool for producing best-possible outcomes is scenario planning: imagining several likely future-history pathways, starting from present conditions. In a short brainstorming session, at an international conference on regional sustainability held in central Hungary, an informal workshop group produced several possible scenarios for what New Orleans could become. Three of these scenarios are named after the Dutch cities they most resemble — appropriate, given the city’s position at the end of a major river, under sea level — and they roughly correspond with some scenarios floated by other US commentators (which I had heard about largely through conversation with a BusinessWeek editor reporting on the story).
The Guardian on Sept 24th, has an article by Robert Macfarlane The burning question, which argues that writers can play a crucial role in helping us to imagine the impact of climate change, but to date there is a gap of literature on climate change that reduces the ability of people to envision possible futures and consquently make better decisions today.
From the article:
Contemplation of the situation on Banks Island prompts a broader question about the relationship of climate change and language. Where is the literature of climate change? Where is the creative response to what Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, has famously described as “the most severe problem faced by the world”?
Cultural absences are always more difficult to document than cultural outpourings. But the deficiency of a creative response to climate change is increasingly visible. It becomes unignorable if we contrast it with the abundance of literature produced in response to the other great eschatological crisis of the past half-century – the nuclear threat.