17 May 2017, Yale Climate Connections, Sea-level rise, but no mention of ‘climate change’. A film maker documents sea-level rise risks facing Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, and avoids the baggage of the terms ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming.’ In Hampton Roads, a moniker for both a massive natural harbor in southeast Virginia and a metropolitan region comprising 17 small cities and municipalities, tidal flooding is as common as Chesapeake Bay blue crabs. Oh yes. Lest one forget, Hampton Roads is also home to the world’s largest Naval base. Low-lying roads flood so often that drivers use depth markers positioned on highway shoulders to gauge whether they’ll be able to pass through. Why is this happening? Sea level rise. And why are the seas rising? Well, let’s not talk about that. Shortsighted!, you might say. Or worse. But to film director Roger Sorkin, talking about sea-level rise – and more importantly, how to adapt to it and build more resilient, forward-thinking communities – without talking about climate change is a well-considered strategy. Avoiding buzz words that may turn people off For the record, Sorkin is no climate change contrarian. He acknowledges that carbon emissions are responsible for sea-level rise. And that we humans are responsible. But he also believes in meeting folks where they are. That’s why, he explains, his audiences do not hear the words “climate change,” “global warming,” or “carbon” in “Tidewater,” his documentary film about sea-level rise in Hampton Roads. “Stories matter to us,” Sorkin says. “And the building blocks are the words that you use to tell stories. Certain words press peoples’ buttons and produce visceral reactions.” Sorkin hopes to use “Tidewater” as a way of engaging conservative coastal communities and Republican lawmakers in swing states. His hope is that the film’s apolitical tack will appeal to viewers who tend to associate all things related to climate change with liberalism. “It’s really intended to nationalize the story of Hampton Roads as a real national security concern,” he says. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
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
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