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Benno Hansen

RealClimate: The global cooling mole - 1 views

www.realclimate.org/...the-global-cooling-mole

global cooling warming climate change science

shared by Benno Hansen on 04 Mar 09 - Cached
  • To veterans of the Climate Wars, the old 1970s global cooling canard - "How can we believe climate scientists about global warming today when back in the 1970s they told us an ice age was imminent?" - must seem like a never-ending game of Whack-a-mole.
  • during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing. The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales.
  • Benno Hansen on 04 Mar 09
     
    Contrary to claims of "skeptics" 70ies scientists didn't predict global cooling.
Benno Hansen

Do nations go to war over water? : Article : Nature - 1 views

www.nature.com/...458282a.html

war nature climate change water israel palestine nile egypt sudan ethiopia india pakistan conflict

shared by Benno Hansen on 25 Mar 09 - Cached
  • There are 263 cross-boundary waterways in the world. Between 1948 and 1999, cooperation over water, including the signing of treaties, far outweighed conflict over water and violent conflict in particular. Of 1,831 instances of interactions over international freshwater resources tallied over that time period (including everything from unofficial verbal exchanges to economic agreements or military action), 67% were cooperative, only 28% were conflictive, and the remaining 5% were neutral or insignificant. In those five decades, there were no formal declarations of war over water2.
  • it is foolish for Israel, a water-short country, to grow and then export products such as oranges and avocados, which require a lot of water to cultivate
  • water 'embedded' in traded products could be important in explaining the absence of conflict over water
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  • as poor countries diversify their economies, they turn away from agriculture and create wealth from industries that use less water. As a country becomes richer, it may require more water overall to sustain its booming population, but it can afford to import food to make up the shortfall
  • Israel ran out of water in the 1950s: it has not since then produced enough water to meet all of its needs, including food production. Jordan has been in the same situation since the 1960s; Egypt since the 1970s. Although it is true that these countries have fought wars with each other, they have not fought over water. Instead they all import grain.
  • Palestinian and Israeli water professionals interact on a Joint Water Committee, established by the Oslo-II Accords in 1995. It is not an equal partnership: Israel has de facto veto power on the committee.
  • Inequitable access to water resources is a result of the broader conflict and power dynamics: it does not itself cause war.
    • Benno Hansen
      Benno Hansen on 25 Mar 09
       
      From causation to hen/egg
  • although India and Pakistan have fought three wars and frequently find themselves in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, arbitrated by the World Bank, has more than once helped to defuse tensions over water
  • predictions of armed conflict come from the media and from popular, non-peer-reviewed work
  • I offered to revise its thesis, but my publishers pointed out that predicting an absence of war over water would not sell.
  • most importantly, improve the conditions of trade for developing countries to strengthen their economies
Benno Hansen

Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times | Wired Science | Wired.com - 1 views

www.wired.com/...all

apocalypse environment apocaholism

shared by Benno Hansen on 20 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The lesson of failed past predictions of ecological apocalypse is not that nothing was happening but that the middle-ground possibilities were too frequently excluded from consideration.
Benno Hansen

'The hockey stick is broken' | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist - 1 views

gristmill.grist.org/...236

climate change global warming climatology hockey stick graph methodology science

shared by Benno Hansen on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Study of the past can be informative for scientists, but it is not explanatory of the present nor is it predictive of the future.
  • The infamous "Hockey Stick" graph was featured prominently in the IPCC TAR Summary for Policymakers.
  • Two Canadians, an economist and a petroleum geologist, took it upon themselves to verify this proxy reconstruction by getting the data and examining the methodology for themselves. They found errors in the description published in Nature of the data used -- errors that prevented them from duplicating the study. Mann et al., the hockey stick's creators, published a correction in Nature, noting where the description did not match what had actually been done.
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  • The fact is, there are dozens of other temperature reconstructions. They tend to show more variability than the original hockey stick (their sticks are not as straight), but they all support the general conclusions the IPCC TAR presented in 2001: late 20th century warming is anomalous in the last one or two thousand years, and the 1990s were likely warmer than any other time in that period.
  • dozens of other proxy reconstructions, some by the same team or involving some of its members, some by completely different people, some using tree rings, some using corals, some using stalagmites, some using borehole measurements -- all supporting the same general conclusion. That general conclusion is what's important to me, not whether or not one Bristlecone pine was or was not included correctly in a single eight-year-old study.
Benno Hansen

IRIN Middle East | Middle East | Lebanon | LEBANON: Climate change and politics threate... - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx

water palestine drought israel

shared by Benno Hansen on 02 Feb 09 - Cached
  • rising temperatures, spiralling population growth and inefficient irrigation are severely straining resources and threatening renewed economic and social breakdown.
  • Lebanon has the highest annual rainfall in the region, averaging 827mm compared to 630mm in Israel, 252mm in Syria and just 154mm in Iraq
  • Yet experts estimate that demand for water in Lebanon will have increased by more than 80 percent by 2025 as Lebanon’s population is expected to grow from four to 7.6 million. In the same period, as a result of climate change, average summer temperatures in the country are predicted to increase by 1.2 degrees centigrade.
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  • Across areas of the northern Bekaa with better irrigation, many farmers have turned land over to growing water-thirsty but economically lucrative hashish plants – totalling some 16,000 acres of land
  • The valley is an economically underdeveloped area where more than 40 percent of residents are dependent on agriculture as their main source of living
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - 'The real enemy is humanity itself' - 2 views

pambazuka.org/...82402

sustainability environment energy climate change environmentalism food green

shared by Arabica Robusta on 26 May 12 - No Cached
nehasharma786 liked it
  • the first “Earth Summit,” was held in Rio, leading to the Agenda 21 “blueprint for a sustainable planet,” UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity, and the creation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNSCD). Since then, an entire ecosystem of global, national, governmental and non-governmental organisations has emerged to advocate and implement the closer integration of human productive life with knowledge about the environment: to observe the “limits to growth.” The most notable of these is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions is being sought.
  • There is vast disparity between what the advocates of political environmentalism have claimed and reality. So why are world leaders set to meet next month in Rio at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development?
  • The 1972 Stockholm meeting discussed the “need for new concepts of sovereignty, based not on the surrender of national sovereignties but on better means of exercising them collectively, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the common good.” In other words, the world can be fed, clothed and housed at the cost of autonomy. This surrendering of autonomy is a price worth paying, according to its advocates, whose argument has been reduced to a neat little slogan: global problems need global solutions.
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  • For instance, while trying to understand why scepticism of climate-change policies seems to correspond to a conservative persuasion, the Guardian’s Damian Carrington recently opined: “The problem is that global environmental problems require global action, which means cooperation if there are to be no free-riders. That implies international treaties and regulations, which to some on the right equate with communism.”
  • James Lovelock, has distanced himself from the more extreme implications of his hypothesis. Where Lovelock once predicted “Gaia’s revenge,” he has reflected in a short interview for MSNBC.com on his alarmist tome, and criticised others such as Al Gore for their over-emphasis on catastrophic narratives. This is a remarkable volte face in itself, but reflects a broader phenomenon: the coming to fruition of environmentalism’s incoherence.
  • The idea that there are too many people, or that the natural world is so fragile that these things are too difficult for normal, democratic politics to deliver, flies in the face of facts.
  • The truth of “sustainability,” and the meeting at Rio next month, is that it is not our relationship with the natural world that it wishes to control, but human desires, autonomy and sovereignty. That is why, in 1993, the Club of Rome published its report, The First Global Revolution, written by the club’s founder and president, Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider. The authors determined that, in order to overcome political failures, it was necessary to locate “a common enemy against whom we can unite.”
  • Arabica Robusta on 26 May 12
     
    On one level, the critique of the "managerial ethos" is commendable.  On another level, the author seems content with presenting arguments that range perilously close to the James Inhofe "climate change is a hoax" camp.  This is fine, but it is not enough to claim that sustainability is all about politics.  One should offer good arguments in support of this, and in response to strong arguments from opposing perspectives.
  • rextag on 17 Mar 17
     
    If humanity don't act in time it could be the end of our lifetime soon natural gas report.
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