Links on climate change: First half of 2015

In this post I curate a few links related to climate change research, that in some way relate to the focus of our research project on diverse knowledges on the relations between changing climate and water.

For a history of climate change science (until 2009), look at the OSS Foundation’s site.

On Wednesday the blog GlacierHub, about research and information on glaciers around the world, will be one year old – congrats, and thanks for sharing!

Interactions of drought and climate adaptation for urban water is the website of a project about drought management strategies to support urban water systems.

Read John Dryzek, Richard Norgaard and David Schlosberg’s book Climate-challenged society. The publisher writes about the book: “This book is an original, accessible, and thought-provoking introduction to the severe and broad-ranging challenges that climate change presents and how societies can respond. It synthesises and deploys cutting-edge scholarship on the range of social, economic, political, and philosophical issues surrounding climate change. The treatment is introductory, but the book is written ‘with attitude’, for nobody has yet charted in coherent, integrative, and effective fashion a way to move societies beyond their current paralysis as they face the challenges of climate change. The coverage begins with an examination of science, public opinion, and policy making, with special attention to organised climate change denial. The book then moves to economic analysis and its limits; different kinds of policies; climate justice; governance at all levels from the local to the global; and the challenge of an emerging ‘Anthropocene’ in which the mostly unintended consequences of human action drive the earth system into a more chaotic and unstable era. The conclusion considers the prospects for fundamental transition in ideas, movements, economics, and governance.”

There’s also Mike Hulme’s 2014 book, Exploring climate change through science and in society. It is an anthology of his essays, interviews and speeches from the late 1980s. His other books on climate change are Can science fix climate change: A case against climate engineering, and Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity. 

Another book is by Candis Callison, How climate change comes to matter: The communal life of facts. The publisher describes the book as: “During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility. The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.”

For reviews of Naomi Klein’s book on climate change, This changes everything, read John Gray, or read Elizabeth Kolbert’s review, and Naomi’s response in The New York Review of Books.

(Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/07/niels-bugge-cartoon-award_n_5455509.html)

The Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup of the USA’s Third National Climate Assessment in 2014 released Guidelines for Considering Traditional Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives.

Have a look at the presentation of the key findings related to Africa of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report: What’s in it for Africa?

One of the research projects of the Centre for Science & Technology is about Knowledge, power and the coproduction of climate information for adaptation to climate change in Tanzania. The website describes the projects as follows: “Lisa Dilling, Meaghan Daly, Mara Goldman and Eric Lovell are conducting a project that aims to improve understanding of processes to effectively link climate information and adaptation at national and local scales in Tanzania. The approach is to explicitly recognise and examine the ways in which the varying epistemological traditions and relations of power among vulnerable communities, disaster management professionals, and climate experts influence the perceived value of climate information for improved early warning and climate adaptation. The primary research question is ‘what processes or institutions can support improved application of technical climate information to facilitate successful adaptation to climate related disasters?’ This research draws upon theoretical contributions from the fields of science policy, disaster research, science and technology studies, and political ecology to support a mixed-methods research approach to explore practices and modes of engagement that may best facilitate the production of usable science that can be successfully integrated within adaptation decision-making and policy development processes.”

Specific to South Africa, Gina Ziervogel and colleagues from mainly UCT has an article in WIREs Climate Change on Climate change impacts and adaptation in South Africa. The abstract of their paper states: “In this paper we review current approaches and recent advances in research on climate impacts and adaptation in South Africa. South Africa has a well-developed earth system science research program that underpins the climate change scenarios developed for the southern African region. Established research on the biophysical impacts of climate change on key sectors (water, agriculture, and biodiversity) integrates the climate change scenarios but further research is needed in a number of areas, such as the climate impacts on cities and the built environment. National government has developed a National Climate Change Response White Paper, but this has yet to translate into policy that mainstreams adaptation in everyday practice and longer-term planning in all spheres and levels of government. A national process to scope long-term adaptation scenarios is underway, focusing on cross-sectoral linkages in adaptation responses at a national level. Adaptation responses are emerging in certain sectors. Some notable city-scale and project-based adaptation responses have been implemented, but institutional challenges persist. In addition, a number of knowledge gaps remain in relation to the biophysical and socio-economic impacts of climate change. A particular need is to develop South Africa’s capacity to undertake integrated assessments of climate change that can support climate-resilient development planning.”

In the South African Journal of Science, there is an article on Observed and modelled trends in rainfall and temperature for South Africa: 1960–2010.

Have a look at the 2010 book by PG Alcock, called Rainbows in the mist: indigenous weather knowledge, beliefs and folklore in South Africa.

Interesting links: June 2015

Regarding climate change, June 2015 is about Pope Francis’ encyclical – see articles in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Huffington Post.

Next week, 7-10 July, there will be an international scientific conference in Paris, called Our common future under climate change. Follow the conference twitter account @ClimatParis2015 and look at the hashtag #CFCC15.

Watch this short video on Meltwater Pulse 2B, by Peter Sinclair on recent research about Antarctic glacial melting.

Here’s another video, this time a talk by Charles Vörösmarty on Water in the 21st century: Sources of pessimism, sources of optimism (link seen on Jeremy Schmidt’s The Anthropo.Scene).

And then there is a video of a conversation between Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour on cosmopolitics and re-thinking the nation-state. Beck starts by explaining his idea of metamorphosis, which is the topic of his new book The metamorphosis of the world: How climate change is transforming our concept of the world, to be released in January 2016.

See the call for papers for an international conference on political ecology, called Undisciplined Environments, on 20-23 March 2016. The deadline for submissions is 30 September 2015.

Prof Anna Tsing has a new book out in September, called The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. The write-up on the publisher’s website states: “Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction. By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.”

The South African Department of Home Affairs has released a study on the local knowledge associated with the rooibos and honeybush species in South Africa. “The study has revealed that there is no evidence to dispute the claim by the San and the Khoi people of South Africa that they are the rightful holders of traditional knowledge associated with rooibos and honeybush. In light of the finding, the department therefore urges any individual or organisation involved in bioprospecting or biotrade using rooibos and honeybush species to engage with the Khoi and San communities or people to negotiate a benefit sharing agreement in terms of NEMBA and the BABS Regulations.”

“Liquid Power”: An interview with Erik Swyngedouw

Erik Swyngedouw on Liquid Power: “I mobilise H2O and Spain’s tumultuous socio-economic and politico-cultural transformations during the 20th century as a heuristic device. It is used as a methodological entry, and provides narrative anchors, for excavating the society-nature imbroglio in a way that transcends the binary conceptualisation of the nature-society relationship that has dominated (and plagued) much of environmental theory and practice during the 20th century. Moreover, the book demonstrates how socio-physical transformations unfold through myriad of interrelated social power relations and dynamics.”

ENTITLE blog - a collaborative writing project on Political Ecology

Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester, on his new book, research experiences in Spain, Spanish literary inspirations and next research project.

The cover of Erik Swyngedouw’s new book, Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth Century Spain. Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/liquid-power

For most (urban) political ecologists, Erik Swyngedouw needs little introduction. Erik is a prolific writer and inspiring intellectual whose research over the past decades has focused on geographical political economy,  the governance, politics and economics of water resources and, more recently, interrogating the political. Two decades of research in Spain, from which many articles were written including an historical reading of the production of the Spanish waterscape and the role of desalinisation as a hydro-social fix, have culminated in Erik’s new book Liquid Power published by MIT Press. We recently asked Erik a few questions about his new publication, his research experiences in Spain, his Spanish…

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Understanding ‘climate change’ and related concepts

In the Anthropology Honours class about science and society that I am currently facilitating, we talked about climate change this week. If you want to understand the debates and issues related to climate change, you have to clearly differentiate between the various related concepts, such as weather versus climate, climate variability versus anthropogenic climate change, and global warming (in another posting I will add ‘changing climate’ to these concepts).

The most useful discussion on the difference between weather and climate most surely is from Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of Cosmos. He explains weather as the short-term (daily and weekly) highly unpredictable changes in atmospheric conditions (measured through quantities such as temperature, precipitation and wind), whilst climate is the longer-term (over years) ‘average weather’, that is more predictable. The analogy he uses of him walking with his dog is revealing: the meandering dog that is running around all over the place (though within the parameters of the leash he is on), indicates the weather. The steady progress of Neil, and the much-more straight path he is walking on, is the climate.

Source: http://plannedresilience.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/weather-climate.jpg

Weather then is short-term meteorological events in terms of days, weeks, and months. The popular definition of climate is from the World Meteorological Organisation that explains climate as “a statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant meteorological quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years.” The interactions between the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere explains climate.

Whilst this natural science definition indicating the physicality of climate is crucial, the social understanding of climate is just as important. David Hulme (2015:175) states: “My argument is that climate—as it is imagined and acted upon [my emphasis] — needs to be understood, first and foremost, culturally and that the environmental humanities can enrich and deepen such an understanding.”

Another crucial distinction to make is between climate variability and climate change. Climate on earth has always been variable, meaning it had never been constant but has been changing due to various natural process, such as the earth’s tilting, volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate movement, eruptions on the sun, etc. The occurances of ice ages in previous millennia indicates such climate variability. Climate change though is climate variability due to anthropogenic (human-induced) causes; in this definition I am following the  United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Such climate change is occurring, and thus only observable, over decades and centuries.

The main human-induced cause is rapidly increasing the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, leading to an enhanced greenhouse effect, that is causing the average temperature on earth to rise. And that then is global warming:  It is mainly through our burning of fossil fuels for our energy-hungry economies and lives, increased deforestation, and other land-use changes, that we are increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And this is leading to “overall warming of the earth, based on average increases in temperature over the entire land and ocean surface” (Davis 2011:16).

For further clarification of various climate change related concepts, see the FAO Climate Change and Bio-energy Glossary.

List of reference

Davis C (ed) 2011 Climate risk and vulnerability: A handbook for southern Africa. Pretoria: CSIR

Hulme M 2015 Climate. Environmental Humanities 6: 175-178