22 May 2017, The Conversation, The weather is now political. Until recently, weather talk was an easy filler for any awkward silence. But tragically for polite conversationalists everywhere, the weather is no longer mundane. Especially in summers like the one we just had in Sydney, weather talk has many of us breaking a surprising sweat — and not only from the heat. With climate change a hot-button issue globally (in spite and even because of its lack of mention in national budgets, or erasure from government websites), talk about the weather now has an unavoidably political tinge. While it may not lead directly to impassioned critiques of climate governance, nor immediately sort the sceptics from the believers, talk of brewing storms or dried-up reservoirs now carries with it a whiff of trepidation about our collective forecasts. Bridging the divide Despite the growing politicisation of weather talk, weather and climate are usually understood as empirically distinct bodies of knowledge. Climate is, to quote British comedy duo Armstrong and Miller, “a long-term trend averaged over many years”, as opposed to weather, “which is what’s going on outside the window right now”. The problem with this distinction is that climate change’s global reach and extended time scale can make it seem like it is happening somewhere else and to someone else (or, indeed, not at all). So perhaps the distinction is not useful for the cultural processes of adaptation. What might happen if we were to breach official definitions and disciplinary lines and think of the two things together? Closing the distance between weather as event and climate as pattern can accomplish several things. Most obviously, it reminds us that there is a relationship between the two. Without weather, there would be nothing to amalgamate as climate. While one heatwave does not equate to “climate change”, many and increasing ones give us pause to wonder. Leslie Hughes and Will Steffen are doing the data-driven work in this regard. Ironically, though, while the complexity of climate data might put me off engaged concern for the global climate, the exhaustion I feel cycling behind a truck in 30℃-plus weather might do the opposite. Maybe this bodily discomfort is part of the point. In other words, bringing climate and weather together can remind us that climate change is not only about abstract calculations on scales too big for our small and ultimately short-lived human forms to fathom. Thinking about weather as part of climate underscores that we experience climate change with and on our bodies; climate change is lived by us at a very human scale, too. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
18 May 2017, New York Times Antarctic Dispatches: Miles of Ice Collapsing Into the Sea. The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration. Because the collapse of vulnerable parts of the ice sheet could raise the sea level dramatically, the continued existence of the world’s great coastal cities — Miami, New York, Shanghai and many more — is tied to Antarctica’s fate. Four New York Times journalists joined a Columbia University team in Antarctica late last year to fly across the world’s largest chunk of floating ice in an American military cargo plane loaded with the latest scientific gear. Inside the cargo hold, an engineer with a shock of white hair directed younger scientists as they threw switches. Gravity meters jumped to life. Radar pulses and laser beams fired toward the ice below. On computer screens inside the plane, in ghostly traces of data, the broad white surface of the Ross Ice Shelf began to yield the secrets hiding beneath. Read More here
17 May 2017, Nature, Trees in eastern US head west as climate changes. Breaking from the general poleward movement of many species, flowering trees take an unexpected turn. Ecologists have long predicted that climate change will send plants and animals uphill and towards the poles in search of familiar temperatures. Such movements have increasingly been documented around the world. But a study now shows that changing rainfall patterns may be driving some tree species in the eastern United States west, not north. Songlin Fei, a forest ecologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his colleagues tracked the shifting distributions of 86 types of trees using data collected by the US Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program during two periods: from 1980 to 1995 and between 2013 and 2015 for all states. They found more species heading west than north, probably partly because of changing precipitation patterns, the team reported on 17 May in Science Advances1. “That was a huge surprise for us,” says Fei. This study suggests that, in the near-term, trees are responding to changes in water availability more than to temperature changes, he says. The team measured shifts in the centres of abundance for the 86 types of tree and found that over the past 30 years or so, 34% showed statistically significant poleward shifts at an average rate of 11 kilometres per decade. Forty-seven per cent made statistically significant westward shifts at an even faster rate — 15.4 kilometres per decade. Hardly any types of tree moved south or east. A new direction Most of the trees that shifted west were angiosperms, or flowering trees. Northbound trees were usually gymnosperms, which are mostly conifers in North America. Increased precipitation in the central United States could be one explanation for the angiosperms’ westward movement, says Fei. The increase in moisture is still subtle enough that only the more drought-tolerant and faster-growing flowering trees, which have more-efficient and robust vascular systems, can take advantage for now. Read More here
15 May 2017, Climate Home, Bangladesh faces food supply crunch after flash floods. The price of rice has spiked in Bangladesh after flash floods wiped out vast stretches of paddy field just ahead of harvest time. Unusually heavy pre-monsoon rainfall submerged 400,000 hectares of wetland in the northeast of the country, damaging some 2 million tonnes of rice. It is already having an impact on the market. Agricultural economist Quazi Shahabuddin, former head of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, told Climate Home it will cause suffering across the country this year. A kilogram of coarse rice costs 38 Bangladeshi taka ($0.57), a 58% hike since the same period in 2016, according to official data. The government is planning to procure 600,000 tonnes of rice from countries including India and Thailand, the first time in six years it has relied on international markets. The food department has put out a tender for the first 100,000-tonne tranche. “The sudden flash flood has forced us to do that,” explained Badrul Hasan, director general of the food department. The affected districts Netrokona, Sunamganj, Brahmanbaria, Moulovibazar, Hobignaj, Kishoreganj and Sylhet are located at the foothills of Indian Meghalaya and Assam states. Known as “haor” or wetland, this region is typically inundated every year in mid-May and stays underwater for six months. The problem this year was not the volume of rain, but the timing. Flash floods came at the end of March, before the farmers had harvested the “boro” crop they rely on for their annual income. Read More here