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Benjamin McKeown

Tropical Cyclones - 0 views

www.tulane.edu/...tropical_cyclones.htm

hurricanes hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • In the western Pacific they are called typhoons, and in the southern hemisphere they are called cyclones.  But, no matter where they occur they represent the same process.
  • Tropical cyclones are dangerous because of their high winds, the storm surge produced as they approach a coast, and the severe thunderstorms associated with them. Although death due to hurricanes has decreased in recent years due to better methods of forecasting and establishment of early warning systems, the economic damage from hurricanes has increased as more and more development takes place along coastlines.
  • Warm ocean waters (of at least 26.5°C [80°F]) throughout about the upper 50 m of the tropical ocean must be present.  The heat in these warm waters is necessary to fuel the tropical cyclone. The atmosphere must cool fast enough with height, such that it is potentially unstable to moist convection. It is the thunderstorm activity which allows the heat stored in the ocean waters to be liberated and used for tropical cyclone development. The mid-troposphere (5 km [3 mi] altitude), must contain enough moisture to sustain the thunderstorms. Dry mid levels are not conducive to the continuing development of widespread thunderstorm activity. The disturbance must occur at a minimum distance of at least 500 km [300 mi] from the equator. For tropical cyclonic storms to occur, there is a requirement that the Coriolis force must be present.  Remember that the Coriolis effect is zero near the equator and increases to the north and south of the equator.  Without the Coriolis force, the low pressure of the disturbance cannot be maintained.
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  • There must be a pre-existing near-surface disturbance that shows convergence of moist air and is beginning to rotate. Tropical cyclones cannot be generated spontaneously. They require a weakly organized system that begins to spin and has low level inflow of moist air. There must be low values (less than about 10 m/s [20 mph]) of vertical wind shear between the surface and the upper troposphere. Vertical wind shear is the rate of change of wind velocity with altitude.  Large values of vertical wind shear disrupt the incipient tropical cyclone by removing the rising moist air too quickly, preventing the development of the tropical cyclone. Or, if a tropical cyclone has already formed, large vertical shear can weaken or destroy it by interfering with the organization around the cyclone center.
  • unstable atmosphere
  • his instability increases the likelihood of convection, which leads to strong updrafts that lift the air and moisture upwards, creating an environment favorable for the development of high, towering clouds.
  • Surface convergence (indicated by the small horizontal arrows in the diagram below) causes rising motion around a surface cyclone (labeled as "L"). The air cools as it rises (vertical arrows) and condensation occurs.  The condensation of water vapor to liquid water releases the latent heat of condensation into the atmosphere. This heating causes the air to expand, forcing the air to diverge at the upper levels (horizontal arrows at cloud tops).
  • Since pressure is a measure of the weight of the air above an area, removal of air at the upper levels subsequently reduces pressure at the surface. A further reduction in surface pressure leads to increasing convergence (due to an higher pressure gradient), which further intensifies the rising motion, latent heat release, and so on. As long as favorable conditions exist, this process continues to build upon itself
  • When cyclonic circulation begins around the central low pressure area, and wind speeds reach 62 km/hr (39 mi/hr) the disturbance is considered a tropical storm and is given a name.  When wind speeds reach 119 km/hr (74 mi/hr) it becomes a hurricane.
Benjamin McKeown

Climate Prediction Center - Cold Episodes - 0 views

www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/...cold_impacts.shtml

la nina

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • At times ocean surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are colder than normal. These cold episodes, sometimes referred to as La Niña episodes, are characterized by lower than normal pressure over Indonesia and northern Australia and higher than normal pressure over the eastern tropical Pacific. This pressure pattern is associated with enhanced near-surface equatorial easterly winds over the central and eastern equatorial Pacific.
  • bnormally cold waters in the equatorial central give rise to suppressed cloudiness and rainfall in that region, especially during the Northern Hemispherel winter and spring seasons. At the same time, rainfall is enhanced over Indonesia, Malaysia and northern Australia. Thus, the normal Walker Circulation during winter and spring, which features rising air, cloudiness and rainfall over the region of Indonesia and the western Pacific, and sinking air over the equatorial eastern Pacific, becomes stronger than normal.
  • Significant departures from normal are shown in the accompanying figures for the Northern Hemisphere winter and summer seasons.
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  • During cold episodes, the colder than normal ocean temperatures in the equatorial central Pacific act to inhibit the formation of rain-producing clouds over that region. Wetter than normal conditions develop farther west over northern Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia, during the northern winter, and over the Philippines during the northern summer. Wetter than normal conditions are also observed over southeastern Africa and northern Brazil, during the northern winter season. During the northern summer season, the Indian monsoon rainfall tends to be greater than normal, especially in northwest India. Drier than normal conditions during cold episodes are observed along the west coast of tropical South America, and at subtropical latitudes of North America (Gulf Coast) and South America (southern Brazil to central Argentina) during their respective winter seasons.
Benjamin McKeown

THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE EXPLAINED - Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization - 0 views

www.earthorganization.org/cs-of-climate-change-explained

climate change kyoto

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 08 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • More than 150 nations signed it back in December 1997 at a meeting in Kyoto.
  • eorge W. Bush was installed as President soon afterwards, and announced that he was pulling the US out of the deal altogether. Since the US is the source of a quarter of emissions of greenhouse gases that was a big blow, but the other nations decided to carry on and they finally reached agreement in Marrakech in November 2001.
  • ndustrialised nations have committed themselves to a range of targets to reduce emissions between 1990
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • he base year, and 2010.
  • an average 8 per cent cut for most of Europe to a maximum 10 per cent increase for Iceland and an 8 per cent increase for Australia.
  • European Union have agreed to share out their entitlement
  • atification of the treaty in national legislatures.
  • “flexibility mechanisms”
  • meet some targets by encouraging the natural environment to soak up more CO2 rather than by cutting emissions.
  • carbon sinks”
  • qualify for carbon credits by planting forests that soaked up CO2.
  • It was finally agreed that countries will be able to claim some carbon credits for planting forests in developing countries. And they will also be able to allow countries to claim credit for activities such as soil conservation, which will allow more carbon to be soaked up in soils.
  • carbon trading
  • But the fear is that some countries may find themselves with spare credits to sell just because their economies have slowed down, which would undermine the whole purpose of the protocol.
  • hot air”. Japan, Canada and perhaps others would like to buy up Russia’s spare permits.
  • But sceptics still see hot-air trading as a Trojan Horse for undermining the protocol.
  • lean Development Mechanism. This allows industrialised countries to claim credit for various activities in developing countries. It could become a major engine for getting clean energy technologies into poorer countries, so heading them off the dirty path to industrialisation that the rich nations took.
  • And the rules are biased towards small energy projects – solar cell systems, for exampl
  • he protocol allows industrialised countries to plant “carbon sink” forests in the tropics, for instance, where they will grow faster. They can also invest in clean energy technologies in the developing world, and claim carbon credits for doing so.
  • The US has demanded, both before and after Kyoto, that developing countries should accept their own specific emissions targets
  • it was intended to cut emissions by industrialised countries by an average of slightly over 5 per cent by the year 2010
  • hard to police, particularly the clauses on carbon sinks.
  • at perhaps 1.5 per cen
  • Will the Kyoto measures solve the problem of global warming? They will hardly scratch the surface. T
  • say it will buy us 10 years at most
  • . A reasonable target might be twice pre-industrial levels, which works out at 50 per cent above today’s levels.
  • Cutting emissions by 60 per cent is a suggested figure.
  • The Kyoto Protocol was drawn up with the long term as the primary focus. In essence, the protocol assumes that what we really need to worry about is the climate in a century’s time, not today.
  • CO2 sticks around for about a century. Methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, generally lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade. But while it’s there it is many times more potent.
  • This “hundred-year rule” has the effect of downgrading the importance of methane, and giving only small credit to countries that try to cut methane emissions.
  • the protocol gives a country that reduces its methane emissions by a tonne 20 times as much credit as for reducing CO2 emissions by a tonne.
  • Cows can be given less gas-inducing feed. Leaks in gas pipelines can be plugged. And so on.
  • Technically, we are going to have to find many more ways of producing energy without burning fossil fuels – the so-called carbon-free economy. Politically, we are going to have to find a way of doing so which doesn’t affect the growing economies of the developing nations, whose responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases so far has been minimal. Some people think this will require moving towards equal pollution rights for every citizen on the planet, a policy endorsed by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution earlier this year.
Benjamin McKeown

Kayapo Courage - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...brown-text

HL remote society environment

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 14 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • five officially demarcated tracts of contiguous land that in sum make up an area about the size of Kentucky. T
  • 9,000 indigenous people, most of whom can’t read or write and who still follow a largely subsistence way of life in 44 villages linked only by rivers and all-but-invisible trails.
  • Kendjam,
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  • Xingu,
  • itself a major tributary of the Amazon.
  • shorts
  • kids wearing only
  • ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs
  • Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes
  • ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.
  • Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,
  • chief, Pukatire,
  • wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.
  • English he’d picked up on a trip to North America
  • dispute about logging.
  • Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.
  • a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.
  • ngobe, or men’s house
  • shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.
  • crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter
  • loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.
  • soccer ball
  • swallows; o
  • kingbird
  • evening baths,
  • caimans
  • persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.
  • In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.
  • 1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs
  • Ropni and Mekaron-Ti
  • organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure
  • even kill people caught trespassing on their land.
  • ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.
  • the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese
  • enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,
  • 1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.
  • Kararaô Dam
  • Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.
  • the Altamira Gathering.
  • Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”
  • e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.
  • shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.
  • hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.
  • based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.
  • 1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.
  • Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves
  • the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”
  • At least for the moment. It’s one thing to teach the skills and ceremonies of traditional culture; it’s another to inspire a sense of why knowledge of how to make arrow-tip poison (from herbs and snake venom with beeswax as an adhesive) or stack tortoises or stun fish using oxygen-depriving timbo vines might be valuable to a generation beguiled by iPhones and the convenience of store-bought food. Interest in traditional dress, beadwork, and ancestral practices is still strong in Kendjam, but it’s not uniform, and even if it were, the threats from outside are daunting.
  • 400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.
  • a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A
  • . The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.
  • n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)
  • two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors
  • a bow and arrows over his shoulder
  • Okêt a shotgun.
  • It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.
  • plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.
  • peacock bass and piabanha.
  • Bic lighters a
  • freshly whittled skewers.
  • flashlight.
  • he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”
  • his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.
  • Portuguese from missionaries
  • the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,
  • “Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”
  • “I am worried about our young people who are imitating whites, cutting their hair and wearing stupid little earrings like you see in town. None of the young people know how to make poison for arrows.
  • You can’t use the white man’s stuff. Let the white people have their culture, we have ours.’ If we start copying white people too much, they won’t be afraid of us, and they will come and take everything we have. But as long as we maintain our traditions, we will be different, and as long as we are different, they will be a little afraid of us.”
  • construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.
  • he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam
  • on the Xingu
  • Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.
  • the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.
  • nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.
  • ho still wear the lip disk
  • carried a wooden war club,
  • woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.
  • “I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”
  • the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.
  • money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.
  • he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”
  • More and more sad leaves were a part of Kayapo life,
  • specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.
  • pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.
  • In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”
  • FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.
  • , 26 eastern Kayapo leaders met in Tucumã and signed a letter rejecting further money from the dambuilding consortium: “We, the Mebengôkre Kayapo people, have decided that we do not want a single penny of your dirty money. We do not accept Belo Monte or any other dam on the Xingu. Our river does not have a price, our fish that we eat does not have a price, and the happiness of our grandchildren does not have a price. We will never stop fighting... The Xingu is our home and you are not welcome here.”
  • painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,
  • chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.
  • Can you be a Kayapo and not live in the forest?” Djyti thought for a while, then shook his head and said no. Then, as if contemplating something unthinkable, he added: “You are still a Kayapo, but you don’t have your culture.”
  • In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?
  • now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.
Benjamin McKeown

Why Ebola is terrifying and dangerous: It preys on family, caregiving, and human bonds. - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._on_family_caregiving_and.html

health disease

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • 75 percent of Ebola victims are women, people who do much of the care work throughout Africa and the rest of the world. In short, Ebola parasitizes our humanity.
  • Its kill rate: In this particular outbreak, a running tabulation suggests that 54 percent of the infected die, though adjusted numbers suggest that the rate is much higher. Its exponential growth: At this point, the number of people infected is doubling approximately every three weeks, leading some epidemiologists to project between 77,000 and 277,000 cases by the end of 2014. The gruesomeness with which it kills: by hijacking cells and migrating throughout the body to affect all organs, causing victims to bleed profusely. The ease with which it is transmitted: through contact with bodily fluids, including sweat, tears, saliva, blood, urine, semen, etc., including objects that have come in contact with bodily fluids (such as bed sheets, clothing, and needles) and corpses. The threat of mutation: Prominent figures have expressed serious concerns that this disease will go airborne, and there are many other mechanisms through which mutation might make it much more transmissible.
Benjamin McKeown

Global warming 'will make our winters colder' - Climate Change - Environment - The Inde... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ur-winters-colder-9819825.html

climate climate change

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 02 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Climate scientists believe they have found evidence to suggest that the loss of floating Arctic sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas north of Scandinavia can affect the global circulation of air currents and lead to bitterly cold winds blowing for extended periods in winter over Central Asia and Europe, including the UK.
  • the cooling effect is unlikely to last beyond this century
  • Rising global temperatures will eventually cancel out any localised cooling caused by loss of Arctic sea ice, although they said it is not possible to predict when this will happen.
Benjamin McKeown

Canada Breaking Logjam on Arctic Equipment - 0 views

www.defensenews.com/...24318527

oceans oil climate change arctic

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • irst with new patrol ships and then by upgrading utility aircraft for operations in the country's northern regions.
  • Five ships will be constructed by Irving Shipbuilding of Canada, while Lockheed Martin is handling onboard combat systems in the CAN $3.5 billion (US $3.4 billion) project.
  • Royal Canadian Air Force's CC-138 Twin Otter aircraft, which are used for utility transports in the Arctic. The project is expected to cost $20 million to $49 million.
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  • "Up in the north, it's still about survival," he said.With that in mind, the Canadian Army plans to outfit individual soldiers with new winter warfare equipment, including snowshoes, skis and toboggans. Up to $49 million will be spent on that gear with deliveries to begin in 2021.
  • he Army plans to purchase up to 100 all-terrain vehicles capable of operations in the snow.
  • Increasing the Canadian government and military's presence in the resource-rich Arctic is a key defense platform for Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
  • Harper contends that the increased military and government presence is needed because oil, gas and minerals in the Arctic are critical to the country's economic growth. The types of incidents the Canadian Forces would most likely have to respond to in the Arctic, Jolin said, would be a major environmental disaster or a search-and-rescue operation, such as aiding a commercial cruise ship that has capsized after hitting an uncharted obstacle.
  • "The biggest thing will be coordination, so you'll want to have the ability to mount a command post, have good radios and radars, good surveillance," he said. "It's about command and control, power generation and communications."
  • construction of two polar communications and weather satellites.
  • The Canadian military also has an increased surveillance capability planned for the Arctic, dubbed Polar Epsilon 2. The system will use the data produced by the Canadian government's Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) spacecraft currently under design. The RCM satellites are scheduled for launch in 2018.
  • Originally the plan was to build a deep-water port at Nanisivik, but because of the high costs of construction in the Arctic that has been scaled back to a $130 million refueling site for the Royal Canadian Navy. The site will be used to support the new Arctic offshore patrol ships.
Benjamin McKeown

[Letter From the Sea of Cortez] | Emptying the World's Aquarium, by Erik Vance | Harper... - 0 views

harpers.org/...7

fisheries overfishing Environment

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 16 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • What he has realized is that to save the aquarium of the world, you have to help the fishermen help themselves.
  • “It’s cabrilla.” Cabrilla is a cheap seabass sold in tacos on Mexico City streets that I wolf down on my way to the subway.
  • It sells for sixteen cents a pound and is piled into trucks, eventually to be chopped into indistinguishable bits, mixed with lemon juice to hide the stink, and labeled fish.
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  • Puerto Adolfo López Mateos is a town on the Pacific Coast similar to Kino. But the López Mateos fisherman didn’t toss this fish from the net to the beach and then to a truck. It was caught by hook and line, placed in ice water, and processed by the fisherman’s wife in an air-conditioned plant. The fisherman earns many times as much money as Kino fishermen, doesn’t have bycatch, and the fish makes for an amazing meal. Peckham says that when he first showed the fish to this restaurant, they refused to believe it was cabrilla. He’s become a cheerleader for something he calls “value rescue”; that is, if the fishermen can cut out some of the middlemen, care for and market their fish better, and make more money per fish, they can be better stewards of their coastline.
  • ProMar
Benjamin McKeown

A complete guide to carbon offsetting | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...fset-projects-carbon-emissions

climate change consequences management carbon offsetting

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 28 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Carbon offset schemes allow individuals and companies to invest in environmental projects around the world in order to balance out their own carbon footprints.
  • designed to reduce future emissions
  • energy technologies or purchasing and ripping up carbon credits from an emissions trading scheme.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • oaking up CO2 directly from the air through the planting of trees.
  • Some people and organisations offset their entire carbon footprint while others aim to neutralise the impact of a specific activity, such as taking a flight
  • visits an offset website, uses the online tools to calculate the emissions of their trip, and then pays the offset company to reduce emissions elsewhere in the world by the same amount – thus making the flight "carbon neutral".
  • £8/$12 for each tonne of CO2 offset
  • carbon neutrality included as part of the price.
  • most of the best-known carbon offset schemes have long-since switched from tree planting to clean-energy projects – anything from distributing efficient cooking stoves through to capturing methane gas at landfill sites.
  • many people argue that offsetting is unhelpful – or even counterproductive – in the fight against climate change
  • Just as indulgences allowed the rich to feel better about sinful behaviour without actually changing their ways, carbon offsets allow us to "buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction"
  • "Our guilty consciences appeased, we continue to fill up our SUVs and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the planet … it's like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it."
  • "a positive approach to offsetting could have public resonance well beyond the CO2 offset, and would help to build awareness of the need for other measures."
  • This boils down not just to the effectiveness of the project at soaking up CO2 or avoiding future emissions. Effectiveness is important but not enough. You also need to be sure that the carbon savings are additional to any savings which might have happened anyway.
  • The carbon savings would only be classified as additional if the project managers could demonstrate that, for the period in which the carbon savings of the new lightbulbs were being counted, the recipients wouldn't have acquired low-energy bulbs by some other means.
  • The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove additionality with absolute certainly, as no one can be sure what will happen in the future,
  • If that happened, the bulbs distributed by the offset company would cease to be additional, since the energy savings would have happened even if the offset project had never happened.
  • To try and answer these questions, the voluntary offset market has developed various standards, which are a bit like the certification systems used for fairly traded or organic food
  • Voluntary Gold Standard (VGS) and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
  • One VGS-certified biomass power plant refused to allow her around, though staff there reported a number of concerns such as trees being chopped down and sold to the plant, which was designed to run on agricultural wastes.
  • f we're to tackle climate change, they argue, the projects being rolled out by offset companies should be happening anyway, funded by governments around the world, while companies and individuals reduce their carbon footprints directly.
  • Only in this way – by doing everything possible to make reductions everywhere, rather than polluting in one place and offsetting in another – does the world have a good chance of avoiding runaway climate change, such critics claim.
  • some carbon-neutrality advocates suggest offsetting carbon-intensive activities such as flights two or three or even ten times ove
  • The point is simply that the world is full of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions. In theory, if enough people started offsetting, or if governments started acting seriously to tackle global warming, then the price of offsets would gradually rise, as the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings – the easiest and cheapest "quick wins" – would get used up.
Benjamin McKeown

In Peru's Deserts, Melting Glaciers Are a Godsend (Until They're Gone) - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...peru-climate-change.html

climate change consequences peru

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 27 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • has shrunk by 40 percent since 1970 and
  • . It is currently receding by about 30 feet a year, scientists say.
  • The retreat of the icecap has exposed tracts of heavy metals, like lead and cadmium, that were locked under the glaciers for thousands of years, scientists say. They are now leaking into the ground water supply, turning entire streams red, killing livestock and crops, and making the water undrinkable.
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  • pests that now thrive in the warmer air.
  • worm that became the scourge for him and neighboring farmers. It suddenly started devouring their crops in the early 2000s.
  • last year, came the rats.
  • the breaking point for his cotton crops came when red ants ate away the buds.
  • he has decided to plant sugar cane instead and move some of his production to higher altitudes where it is colder.
  • The idea’s supporters promised profits through exports to markets in North America, Asia and Europe, where the fruit seasons were reversed.
  • hey are shipped to China, where they are prized. Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times
  • All told, more than 100,000 acres of desert were brought into cultivation.
  • With enough water and fertilizer, asparagus could be grown directly in the sand — and at yields per acre far higher than in the United States because Peru has no cold season and more days of sun.
  • A reservoir was created out of a dune. More than 8,000 tons of produce grows here every year.
  • The temperature at the site of the glaciers rose 0.5 to 0.8 degrees Celsius from the 1970s to the early 2000s, causing the glaciers of the Cordillera Blanca to double the pace of their retreat in that period
  • It was the start of a wave of migration from the mountainside to the coast set off by the arrival of the water.
  • 14,000 feet above sea level.
  • “In years to come, we will be fighting over water,” said Mr. Gómez.
  • Meanwhile, planners here continue to push for more irrigation.
  • “Because of this water, our children have been able to go to university,” he said. “But if there is no water from the Santa River, that all changes.”
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