Monthly Archive for April, 2011

Larry Pryor to Speak at 2011 Climate Change Conference

Published on April 30, 2011 in Conference and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Larry Pryor has worked as a reporter, writer, editor and photographer, first at the Louisville Courier-Journal and later at the Los Angeles Times. At those publications, he covered the environment and became an assistant metropolitan editor at the Times with responsibility for topics involving science, medicine, urban affairs and the environment. He left journalism to work with Gov. Jerry Brown as press secretary in a presidential campaign and published a novel. He went back to the Times and took part in new media projects there, starting in the 1980s. He became editor of latimes.com, before moving to USC in 1997 to head the Online Journalism and Communications Program at the Annenberg School and to edit the Online Journalism Review. He has since returned to concentrating on environmental journalism. In addition to teaching, he researches topics associated with climate change and public discourse.

Finalists for the International Award for Excellence

Published on April 29, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

climate_frontCongratulations to all of the finalists for the International Award for Excellence in the area of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses:

Tornadoes, Climate Change and the Disaster Gap

Published on April 19, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Bryan Walsh, Time

There are storms and then there is what happened to the town of Sanford, North Carolina on the night of April 16. A boisterous storm system had begun in Oklahoma on April 14, bringing flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms from the Midwest through the Southeast, part of a massive weather system that could be felt as far as the New York City area over the weekend. But North Carolina took the brunt—on April 16, the state experienced a record 92 tornadoes, killing at least 22 people and injuring at least 80 others. Sanford, a town of 29,000 in the center of the state, was one of the hardest-hit areas, with one tornado completely destroying a Lowe’s big-box store. The outlet’s manager moved quickly to corral an estimated 70 customers and staff in the building’s windowless storeroom, just before the tornado hit. “We’re beginning to recover from what we believe is the most widespread tornadoes we’ve seen since the mid-80s,” North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue told reporters after the storms had passed.

So now the question I’m all but contractually obligated to ask after a major weather disaster: did climate change play a role in this violent outbreak of tornadoes? The answer is maybe—but that’s not the right question to ask. Tornadoes—even more than other severe weather events like hurricanes or floods—are inherent unstable and difficult for forecasters to predict. That’s part of what makes cyclones so dangerous and so frightening—while meterologists can identify the conditions that lead to tornadoes, there’s still no way to pinpoint exactly when and where one will touch down. And that uncertainty also makes it harder to gauge what impact warming temperatures might have on tornado frequency and intensity. After all, while there’s fairly robust science on the connection between climate change and hurricanes—the short version seems to suggest that warming might make storms stronger, if not necessarily more common—there’s still plenty of room for vigorous disagreement on that score.

To Read More…

New York set to be big loser as sea levels rise

Published on April 9, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Image from the BBC article

From Richard Black, BBC News:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 2007 that sea levels would rise at least 28cm (1ft) by the year 2100.

But this is a global average; and now a Dutch team has made what appears to be the first attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations.

Other researchers say the IPCC’s figure is likely to be a huge under-estimate.

Whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be regional differences.

Ocean currents and differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater are among the factors that mean sea level currently varies by up a metre across the oceans – this does not include short-term changes due to tides or winds.

So if currents change with global warming, which is expected – and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea – the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.

“Everybody will still have the impact, and in many places they will get the average rise,” said Roderik van der Wal from the University of Utrecht, one of the team presenting their regional projections at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.

The certainty of rising waters increases steadily. What will be the energy cost and environmental impact of removing what can be made portable and leaving behind humanity’s huge physical plant close to current sea-level? What will be the parallel cost and impact of rebuilding a satisfactory physical plant on higher ground?

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20 Years Later, Again Assigned to Fight Climate Change

Published on April 8, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times

Gro Harlem Brundtland is back on the case.

Twenty years ago, the former Norwegian prime minister and public health doctor directed a United Nations commission seeking ways to balance the human enterprise and the planet’s limits.

The human population was then spiking toward five billion. Scientists were raising early concerns about a buildup of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. The Amazon was ablaze. The latest African famine had struck. The eco-disasters of Bhopal and Chernobyl still resonated.

What became known as the Brundtland Commission concluded in a report titled “Our Common Future” that a global goal should be to make social and economic development sustainable, meaning that it “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Today, the human population is more than 6.5 billion, and nearly half the people in the world live on less than $2 a day. Emissions are rising relentlessly in established and emerging economic powers, and economic expansion is still the prime goal around the world.

And at 68, after a stint directing the World Health Organization, Dr. Brundtland is being asked to attack global environmental problems once more.

To Read More…