From Al Jazeera; visit the site to view it better, where you can also use its interactive capability and read more.
The authors are Ben Willers and Sophie Sportiche.
Probably a little warm in Doha right now.
“There’s a swim beach, there’s sailing, and there will be eight well pads. You come out here to relax. You don’t come out here to have your air polluted.” - Kaye Fissinger, supporter of a fracking ban in Longmont, CO (quoted in the New York Times)
No Wars for Water: Why Climate Change Has Not Led to Conflicts is the title of an article that recently appeared online in Foreign Affairs. My OSU colleague Aaron Wolf is a co-author.
The photo is from the article and is over the Mediterranean Sea looking south down the Nile.
A brief summary of the article:
The policy community has long prophesied about the coming water wars. But don't expect them anytime soon. More likely, tensions over access will merely exacerbate existing regional conflicts.
Here are the first two paragraphs:
The world economic downturn and upheaval in the Arab world might grab headlines, but another big problem looms: environmental change. Along with extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels, and other natural hazards, global warming disrupts freshwater resource availability -- with immense social and political implications. Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a report, Global Water Security, assessing hydropolitics around the world. In it, the authors show that international water disputes will affect not only the security interests of riparian states, but also of the United States.
In many parts of the world, freshwater is already a scarce resource. It constitutes only 2.5 percent of all available water on the planet. And only about .4 percent of that is easily accessible for human consumption. Of that tiny amount, a decreasing share is potable because of pollution and agricultural and industrial water use. All that would be bad enough, but many freshwater bodies are shared among two or more riparian states, complicating their management.
The comments (scroll to the bottom) raise some good points. The first one by Michael Clark caught my eye:
This article has left me befuddled. It's ill-conceived and nearly nonsensical on many levels. I will, however, only focus on one sentence, which is the first in the last paragraph: "If the past is any indication, the world probably does not need to worry about impending water wars. "
I would argue that the past is not, indeed, any indication of the probability of water-based conflict now or in the future. I base this on scientific reasons. First, there is climate science itself. Perhaps the authors are unaware that we are living in a time characterized by an anomalously high concentration of atmospheric carbon. This condition, in geological time, is a blip and, in human time, brand spanking new. The levels of carbon since 1950 have skyrocketed. Prior to this, variability in water availability was much less volatile.
Second, there is population. The world's population has grown massively in the last century and will continue to do so geometrically. This, in concert with an increasing variability in water availability, will surely result in future conflicts predicated solely on water.
Anyway, all of this is simply meant to say: utilizing the past as a means by which to predict the probability of future water wars is a poorly conceived methodology. Of course we need to worry about water wars, and policy considerations should be developed as such.
Interesting. Clark posits that we are in a 'nonstationary' phase, where what has happened in the past cannot be relied upon to accurately predict the future. In hydrology we now realize that nonstationary processes are no longer the exception, so it stands to reason that conflict, as influenced/exacerbated by hydrology and climate change, could now be a nonstationary process as well.
Food for thought, that's for sure.
THe following quote raised a few eyebrows, mine included. Perhaps a WTF? candidate?
"During the Soviet era, these two rivers were managed relatively effectively." - from the article, referring to the Syr Darya and Amu Darya river basins of Central Asia.
Dr. Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories, recently gave this TEDxABQ global warming presentation.
Some information:
Dr. Mark Boslough is a world-renowned expert on global catastrophies. As a
Caltech-trained physicist, member of the technical staff of Sandia National Laboratories, and adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, he is regularly seen on science documentaries and news reports explaining his research on planetary impacts and participating in expeditions to remote destinations around the world.
He also runs the puckerclust blog ("shining a spotlight on climate denialism and pseudoscholarship") and Tweets as well.
One very smart guy.
But remember - while it's easy to blame the energy companies for global warming, let's not forget to recognize those others who are complicit in this disaster. Just look in the mirror.
“Unilateral economic restraint in the name of fighting global warming has been a tough sell in our communities, where much of the state is buried under snow.” - Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), December 2009
Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Prof. Dr. Indroyono Soesilo, the Secretary of the
Coordinating Ministry for People’s Welfare for the Republic of Indonesia, and a senior advisor on climate change, spoke at OSU tonight on Global Climate Change: Role of Indonesian Archipelago and Global Challenges.
The lecture dealt with general aspects of global warming, starting with the emissions, emitters, consequences, and those who will suffer the most. It then pivoted to a focus on Indonesia - especially its forest and marine resources, how they will be impacted and how they can be used to mitigate GHGs. He spoke of Indonesia's cooperation with nations, and what it is doing with respect to mitigation and adaptation.
He noted that Indonesia has already 'lost' some islands (it has about 13,500) and is slated to lose 2,000 more by 2030. He also showed a 2050 map of Jakarta showing areas of potential inundation.
Fascinating, informative, sobering lecture.
Here is a (large) PDF of his PPT:
Download Soesilo_Indonesia_Climate_Change_Fulbright_2012
At dinner he informed us that he will be leaving his post (with his country's blessing) to become the head of FAO's aquaculture program in Rome.
A most enjoyable evening spent with a most enjoyable, intelligent, and engaging individual.
"A smart man is usually humble." - Indonesian proverb
Playing fast and loose with the days of the week.
Three excellent publications from the National Academies Press. You can read online, purchase, or download a free PDF.
1) A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling
As climate change has pushed climate patterns outside of historic norms,
the need for detailed projections is growing across all sectors, including agriculture, insurance, and emergency preparedness planning. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling emphasizes the needs for climate models to evolve substantially in order to deliver climate projections at the scale and level of detail desired by decision makers, this report finds. Despite much recent progress in developing reliable climate models, there are still efficiencies to be gained across the large and diverse U.S. climate modeling community. Evolving to a more unified climate modeling enterprise-in particular by developing a common software infrastructure shared by all climate researchers and holding an annual climate modeling forum-could help speed progress.
Throughout this report, several recommendations and guidelines are outlined to accelerate progress in climate modeling. The U.S. supports several climate models, each conceptually similar but with components assembled with slightly different software and data output standards. If all U.S. climate models employed a single software system, it could simplify testing and migration to new computing hardware, and allow scientists to compare and interchange climate model components, such as land surface or ocean models. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling recommends an annual U.S. climate modeling forum be held to help bring the nation's diverse modeling communities together with the users of climate data. This would provide climate model data users with an opportunity to learn more about the strengths and limitations of models and provide input to modelers on their needs and provide a venue for discussions of priorities for the national modeling enterprise, and bring disparate climate science communities together to design common modeling experiments.
In addition, A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling explains that U.S. climate modelers will need to address an expanding breadth of scientific problems while striving to make predictions and projections more accurate. Progress toward this goal can be made through a combination of increasing model resolution, advances in observations, improved model physics, and more complete representations of the Earth system. To address the computing needs of the climate modeling community, the report suggests a two-pronged approach that involves the continued use and upgrading of existing climate-dedicated computing resources at modeling centers, together with research on how to effectively exploit the more complex computer hardware systems expected over the next 10 to 20 years.
You will be able to download a free PDF. Jay Famiglietti was a committee member.
2) Science for Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead
In anticipation of future environmental science and engineering challenges and technologic advances, EPA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to assess the overall capabilities of the agency to develop, obtain, and use the best available scientific and technologic information and tools to meet persistent, emerging, and future mission challenges and opportunities. Although the committee cannot predict with certainty what new environmental problems EPA will face in the next 10 years or more, it worked to identify some of the common drivers and common characteristics of problems that are likely to occur.
Tensions inherent to the structure of EPA's work contribute to the current and persistent challenges faced by the agency, and meeting those challenges will require development of leading-edge scientific methods, tools, and technologies, and a more deliberate approach to systems thinking and interdisciplinary science. Science for Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead outlines a framework for building science for environmental protection in the 21st century and identified key areas where enhanced leadership and capacity can strengthen the agency's abilities to address current and emerging environmental challenges as well as take advantage of new tools and technologies to address them. The foundation of EPA science is strong, but the agency needs to continue to address numerous present and future challenges if it is to maintain its science leadership and meet its expanding mandates.
You can download a free PDF.
From the use of personal products to our consumption of food, water, and air, people are exposed to a wide array of agents each day--many with the potential to affect health.Exposure Science in the 21st Century: A Vision and A Strategy investigates the contact of humans or other organisms with those agents (that is, chemical, physical, and biologic stressors) and their fate in living systems. The concept of exposure science has been instrumental in helping us understand how stressors affect human and ecosystem health, and in efforts to prevent or reduce contact with harmful stressors. In this way exposure science has played an integral role in many areas of environmental health, and can help meet growing needs in environmental regulation, urban and ecosystem planning, and disaster management.
Exposure Science in the 21st Century: A Vision and A Strategy explains that there are increasing demands for exposure science information, for example to meet needs for data on the thousands of chemicals introduced into the market each year, and to better understand the health effects of prolonged low-level exposure to stressors. Recent advances in tools and technologies--including sensor systems, analytic methods, molecular technologies, computational tools, and bioinformatics--have provided the potential for more accurate and comprehensive exposure science data than ever before. This report also provides a roadmap to take advantage of the technologic innovations and strategic collaborations to move exposure science into the future.
Download a free PDF.
Enjoy!
"Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work." - Laurence J. Peter
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