Category Archives: Tools

Regime Shifts, Visualization

Mapping impact of snow and ice feedbacks on climate

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NASA Earth Observatory Image of the day has some powerful figures created with data from a new paper by Mark Flanner and others Radiative forcing and albedo feedback from the Northern Hemisphere cryosphere between 1979 and 2008. in Nature Geoscience. They use satellite data to estimate how changes in snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere have contributed to rising temperatures over the last 30 years. They found that these changes in albedo have warmed the planet more than expected from models.

NASA Earth Observatory writes:

The left image shows how much energy the Northern Hemisphere’s snow and ice—called the cryosphere—reflected on average between 1979 and 2008. Dark blue indicates more reflected energy, in Watts per square meter, and thus more cooling. The Greenland ice sheet reflects more energy than any other single location in the Northern Hemisphere. The second-largest contributor to cooling is the cap of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean.

The right image shows how the energy being reflected from the cryosphere has changed between 1979 and 2008. When snow and ice disappear, they are replaced by dark land or ocean, both of which absorb energy. The image shows that the Northern Hemisphere is absorbing more energy, particularly along the outer edges of the Arctic Ocean, where sea ice has disappeared, and in the mountains of Central Asia.

“On average, the Northern Hemisphere now absorbs about 100 PetaWatts more solar energy because of changes in snow and ice cover,” says Flanner. “To put it in perspective, 100 PetaWatts is seven-fold greater than all the energy humans use in a year.” Changes in the extent and timing of snow cover account for about half of the change, while melting sea ice accounts for the other half.

Flanner and his colleagues made both calculations by compiling field measurements and satellite observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, and Nimbus-7 and DMSP SSM/I passive microwave data. The analysis is the first calculation of how much the energy the entire cryosphere reflects. It is also the first observation of changes in reflected energy because of changes in the entire cryosphere.

Inequality, Visualization

Plutocracy in the USA: four views

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1) From State of Working America an interactive graph of changes in average income and the top percentiles of US income.

From  1939 to 1973, during the 24 years from the start of WW2 to the first oil crisis the US’s average income grew by $30,500.  72% of this economic growth in incomes went to the poorest 90%, and 28 % went to the richest 10%.

Over the following 24 years, between 1974 and 2008, the US’s average income grew by $11,000 – average income of the poorest 90% declined, and all the growth went to the richest 10%, mostly to the richest 1%.

The data on the website comes from economist Emmanuel Saez’s work.

2) Economist Daron Acemoglu of MIT is interviewed by EconTalk about the role income inequality may have played in creating the financial crisis.

… Acemoglu suggests a simpler story where the financial sector through its political influence distorted the rules of the game, benefiting executives in the industry, which in turn led to outsized rewards and ultimate instability in the financial industry.

3) From the Washington Post Federal investigators expose vast web of insider trading.

“Given the scope of the allegations to date, we are not talking simply about the occasional corrupt individual; we’re talking about something verging on a corrupt business model,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

The heightened focus on insider trading by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission comes as the financial crisis has shaken confidence in the honesty of the financial markets.

Far from being a victimless crime, insider trading takes advantage of honest investors. In a series of cases, financiers are accused of gaining – or avoiding the loss of – more than $100 million trading such familiar stocks as Google, IBM, Hilton and Intel.

“What’s at stake is the credibility of our markets,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), chairman of a panel Congress created to review the Treasury Department’s $700 billion bailout of financial companies. Insider trading, he said, “sends a clear message to people who want to invest in the United States that . . . I’m not going to get a fair shake in the market. And that’s very dangerous.”

4) Economist Robert Schiller is an expert on speculative bubbles. He was recently interviewed by the Browser and recommends five books about human behaviour, inequality and the financial crisis. Among other books he recommends Winner-Take-All Politics (mentioned earlier on Resilience Science). He says:

This is a new book – it just came out. It’s about rising inequality and it traces back to fundamental causes.

… In the US, we’ve seen a rapid concentration of wealth at the extreme high end. The top tenth of a per cent of the top hundredth of a per cent of the population is getting wealthy very fast. They point out that this is not true in Europe, and yet the economies are very similar and growing at similar rates. If the technology is the same, why would there be a difference at the extreme high end? And they argue that the answer is really political. There have been political changes in the US that allow the extreme high end to garner more wealth. Ultimately, it represents a failure of our society to take account of the fact that the extreme high end can lobby and can organise for its own interests, and we’ve let it happen.

Visualization

Modernist agricultural diversity

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Agricultural Fields near Perdizes, Minas Gerais, Brazil from NASA EOS

The visual diversity of the field forms is matched by the variety of crops: sunflowers, wheat, potatoes, coffee, rice, soybeans, and corn are among the products of the region. While the Northern Hemisphere is still in the grip of winter, crops are growing in the Southern Hemisphere, as indicated by the many green fields. Fallow fields—not in active agricultural use—display the violet, reddish, and light tan soils common to this part of Brazil. Darker soils are often rich in iron and aluminum oxides, and are typical of highly weathered soil that forms in hot, humid climates.

Visualization

Mapping Greenland’s melt

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The same arctic weather patterns that have been cooling N. Europe and the Eastern USA have been warming Greenland as is shown in NASA’s image of the day Record Melting in Greenland during 2010:

2010 was an exceptional year for Greenland’s ice cap. Melting started early and stretched later in the year than usual. Little snow fell to replenish the losses. By the end of the season, much of southern Greenland had set a new record, with melting that lasted 50 days longer than average.

This image was assembled from microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program. Snow and ice emit microwaves, but the signal is different for wet, melting snow than for dry. Marco Tedesco, a professor at the City College of New York, uses this difference to chart the number of days that snow is melting every year. This image above shows 2010 compared to the average number of melt days per year between 1979 and 2009.

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When snow melts, the fine, bright powder turns to larger-grained, gravely snow. These large grains reflect less light, which means that they can absorb more energy and melt even faster. When the annual snow is melted away, parts of the ice cap are exposed. The surface of the ice is also darker than snow. Since dark ice was exposed earlier and longer in 2010, it absorbed more energy, leading to a longer melt season. A fresh coat of summer snow would have protected the ice sheet, but little snow fell.

Ecological Economics, Visualization

Energy intensity convergence

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In climate change discussions, energy intensity is the amount of energy required to produce a dollars worth of GDP.  While there are big differences in energy intensity around the world.  Generally poor countries are more energy intensive than rich, and the US, Canada and Australia are more energy intensive than Europe and Japan.  A recent graph from the Economist illustrates how energy intensities are falling and converging, unfortunately at a slower rate than economic growth, meaning that energy use, and hence CO2 emissions, continue to grow.

From the Economist:

Ecological Management

Special feature on interdisciplinarity in Environmental Conservation on

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Environmental Conservation has published a thematic issue on Interdisciplinary Progress in Environmental Science & Management (Vol. 37 Issue 04) which looks quite interesting.  The table of contents is below:

  • Berkes, F. 2010. Devolution of environment and resources governance: trends and future. Environmental Conservation 37:489-500.
  • Brunckhorst, D. J. Using context in novel community-based natural resource management: landscapes of property, policy and place. Environmental Conservation 37:16-22.
  • D’Agnes, L., H. D’Agnes, J. B. Schwartz, M. L. Amarillo, and J. Castro. 2010. Integrated management of coastal resources and human health yields added value: a comparative study in Palawan (Philippines). Environmental Conservation 37:398-409.
  • Evely, A. C., I. Fazey, X. Lambin, E. Lambert, S. Allen, and M. Pinard. 2010. Defining and evaluating the impact of cross-disciplinary conservation research. Environmental Conservation 37:442-450.
  • Fearnside, P. M. 2010. Interdisciplinary research as a strategy for environmental science and management in Brazilian Amazonia: potential and limitations. Environmental Conservation 37:376-379.
  • Hicks, C. C., C. Fitzsimmons, and N. V. C. Polunin. 2010. Interdisciplinarity in the environmental sciences: barriers and frontiers. Environmental Conservation 37:464-477.
  • Khagram, S., K. A. Nicholas, D. M. Bever, J. Warren, E. H. Richards, K. Oleson, J. Kitzes, R. Katz, R. Hwang, R. Goldman, J. Funk, and K. A. Brauman. 2010. Thinking about knowing: conceptual foundations for interdisciplinary environmental research. Environmental Conservation 37:388-397.
  • Newing, H. 2010. Interdisciplinary training in environmental conservation: definitions, progress and future directions. Environmental Conservation 37:410-418.
  • Ommer, R. E. 2010. The Coasts Under Stress project: a Canadian case study of interdisciplinary methodology. Environmental Conservation 37:478-488.
  • Ostrom, E. and M. Cox. 2010. Moving beyond panaceas: a multi-tiered diagnostic approach for social-ecological analysis. Environmental Conservation 37:451-463.
  • Perz, S. G., S. Brilhante, F. Brown, A. C. Michaelsen, E. Mendoza, V. Passos, R. Pinedo, J. F. Reyes, D. Rojas, and G. Selaya. 2010. Crossing boundaries for environmental science and management: combining interdisciplinary, interorganizational and international collaboration. Environmental Conservation 37:419-431.
  • Reyers, B., D. J. Roux, and P. J. O’Farrell. 2010. Can ecosystem services lead ecology on a transdisciplinary pathway? Environmental Conservation 37:501-511.
  • Szabo, P. 2010. Why history matters in ecology: an interdisciplinary perspective. Environmental Conservation 37:380-387.
  • Young, J and M. Marzano. 2010. Embodied interdisciplinarity: what is the role of polymaths in environmental research? Environmental Conservation 37: 373-375
Ideas, Regime Shifts, Visualization

Reading through computer eyes

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by Juan Carlos Rocha (PhD student at Stockholm Resilience Centre working on Regime Shifts)

An N-gram is a sequence of characters separated by a space in a text. An N-gram may be a word, a number or a combination of both. The concept of N-grams simplifies the application of statistical methods to assess the frequency of a word or a phrase in body of text. N-gram statistical analyses have been around for years, but recently Jean-Baptiste Michel and collaborators had the opportunity to applying N-gram text analysis techniques to the massive Google Books collection of digitalized books. They analyzed over 5 million documents which they estimate are about 4% of all books ever published, and published their work in Science [doi].

The potential of exploring huge amounts of text, which no single person could read, provides the opportunity to trace the use of words over time. This allows researchers to track the impact of events on word use and even the evolution of language, grammar and culture. For example, by counting the words used in English books, the team found that in the year 2000 the English lexicon had over one million words, and it has been growing about 8500 words per year. Similarly, they were able to track word fads, for example the changes in the regular or irregular forms of verb conjugations over time (e.g. burned vs burnt). More interestingly, based on particular events and famous names they identified that our collective memory, as recorded in books, has both a short-term and long-term component; we are forgetting our past faster than before; but we are also learning faster when it comes to, for example, the adoption of technologies.

The options for reading books with machine eyes does not end there. Censorship during the German Nazi regime was identified by comparing the frequency of author’s names in the German and English corpus. The researchers could detect a fingerprint of the suppression of a person’s ideas in the language corpus.

The researchers term this quantitative analysis of our historic knowledge and culture through the analysis of this huge amount of data – culturomics. They plan further research will incorporate newspapers, manuscripts, artwork, maps and other human creations. Possible future applications are the development of methods for historical epidemiology (e.g. influenza peaks), the analysis of conflicts and wars, the evolution of ideas (e.g. feminism), and I think, why not ecological regime shifts?

Above you can see the frequency of some of the regime shifts we are working with in the English corpus. Soil salinization and lake eutrophication appear in 1940’s and 1960’s respectively, probably with the first description of such shifts. Similarly, coral bleaching take off during the 1980’s when reef degradation in the Caribbean basin began to be documented. Similarly, the concept of regime shift has been more and more used since 1980’s, probably not only to describe ecological shifts but also political and managerial transitions.

Although data may be noisy, the frequency of shock events may be tracked as well. Here for example we plot oil spill and see the peak corresponding to the case of January 1989 in Floreffe, Pennsylvania. Note that it does not show the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year because the database is updated to 2008.

If you want to play around with your favorite words or your theme of interest, have a look to the n-gram viewer at Google Labs and have fun!

General, Networks, Reflections, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Impacts of the 2010 tsunami in Chile

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UPDATE: Here is a link to a video to Prof. Castilla’s talk (via @sthlmresilience)

03:34 a.m. February 27th 2010. Suddenly, a devastating earthquake and a series of tsunamis hits the central–south coast of Chile. An earthquake so powerful (8.8 on the moment magnitude scale), that not only is the fifth largest recorded on earth, but also moves the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina, 10 feet (!) to the west.

Juan Carlos Castilla from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, recently visited Stockholm, and gave an update about the tsunamis’ impact on coastal communities. The effects of the tsunami were devastating, and the death toll from the 2-3 tsunamis alone was between 170-200 in the coastal areas of regions VI, VII and VIII. The most noticeable biophysical impact in the region is the elevation of the whole coastal area, ranging from 1.5 to 3 meters. This obviously has had big impacts on the composition of species and vegetation on the coast. The impacts on coastal ecosystems and fisheries is however still unclear.

Based on extensive field studies two months after the disaster, Castilla and his research team noted that only 8-12 (about 6%) of the 200 deceased where from fisherman families. According to Castilla, this low figure can be explained by the existence of strong social networks, and local knowledge passed on from generation to generation. As an artisan fisherman in the study, summarized one shared local saying:

“if an earthquake is so strong you can not stand up: run to the hills”

Luckily, February 27th was a night of full moon. This allowed people to more easily run for protection in the hills. According to Castilla, the combination of full moon, local knowledge, and strong bonds between neighbors, made it possible for members of fishermen communities to rapidly act on the first warning signal: the earthquake. The fact that locals also were taught not to leave the hills after at least a couple of hours after an earthquake, also helped them avoid the following devastating tsunamis. Unfortunately, visitors and tourists in the tsunami affected coastal areas, were not.

Read more:

Marín, A et al. (2010) ”The 2010 tsunami in Chile: Devastation and survival of coastal small-scale fishing communities”, Marine Policy, 2010, 34:1381-1384.

Gelchich, S et al. “Nagivating transformations in governance of Chilean marine coastal resources”, PNAS, 107(39): 16794-16799.

See Henrik’s post just the days after the Chilean earthquake here.

Visualization

Brisbane floods: before and after

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From Australian Broadcasting Company the Brisbane floods: before and after:

High-resolution aerial photos taken over Brisbane last week have revealed the scale of devastation across dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

The aerial photos of the Brisbane floods were taken in flyovers on January 13 and January 14.

See part one and part two.

Ecological Management

BP wins ‘2010 Accidental Earth Experiment’ Prize

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Bill Chameides Dean of the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke awards BP his 2010 Accidental Earth Experiment’ Prize!!! on his blog the Green Grok.  His award recognizes that BP’s incompetence created a disaster that created novel conditions allowing scientists to learn how the Earth works.  He writes:

For the Environmental Scientist, the Ultimate Lab Is Earth

Science is at its core an empirical endeavor. You can come up with all the clever and compelling theories you want, but data gathered from experiments are and will always be the ultimate arbiters of truth. That presents a problem for environmental and Earth scientists. The only laboratory that accurately replicates the thing we study is our little blue planet.

As a result, environmental scientists are forever looking for real-world events that, like a chemist’s laboratory experiments, directly test specific aspects of the Earth system. For example, volcanoes that spew tons of small particles into the upper atmosphere and variations in sunspots provide unique experiments to test the accuracy of climate models built on the basis of our understanding of climate.

The Accidental Experiments

But natural events are not the only sources of environmental experiments. Humanity is now arguably the greatest driver of environmental change on the globe, and as a result is increasingly and inadvertently causing events that double as experiments for inquisitive environmental scientists.

Unfortunately these “accidental experiments” often carry devastating consequences, but nevertheless provide a kind of consolation prize in the form of unique data to learn about the Earth with.

Case in Point: The Oil Rig Blowout in the Gulf of Mexico Last Spring

We can all agree the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a mess. But let’s not forget it’s also a grand experiment. How else could we learn what happens when you dump billions of barrels of oil into the gulf roughly a mile below the surface?

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For example, we’ve learned that some bugs that inhabit the gulf’s waters have been effective in gobbling up the stuff the blown wellhead spewed into their home turf. A paper published last year in the journal Science by Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and colleagues reported on the discovery of a heretofore unknown voracious hydrocarbon-eating microbe.

Just last week came another paper in Science, this one by John Kessler of Texas A&M University and colleagues, which showed that other microbes had also made short work of most of the natural gas released from the blowout.

This is a great example of the natural system’s adaptability and ingenuity. Put a bunch of oil and gas in the ocean, and native bug populations swell to take advantage of it. I should note that we were somewhat lucky in this regard. The Gulf of Mexico was the beneficiary of an in situ population of bugs due to natural gas and oil seeps. Without these microbes the environmental consequences of the disaster (still the largest in marine history) would no doubt be worse.