Culture of Climate Change

Spencer Weart’s website on the history of climate change science is a fabulous resource.

Gender Justice in Times of Climate Change was an international conference hosted in Poznan in December of 2008.  GenderCC and Genanet sponsored the events.

A commissioned study on gender and climate change in Ghana, Senegal and Bangladesh was published in 2008, and the World Conservation Union published a fact sheet on gender and climate change in 2007.  The Canadian International Development Agency published a similar fact sheet.

The United Nations Development Program hosts a site on women and climate change.

Kathleen Mogelgaard minces no words with the title to her recent article, “Climate Change is sexist“.  Mogelgaard writes on behalf of Population Action International.

Rachel Masika, writing for the Oxfam project on Gender, published Gender,  Development, and Climate Change in 2002.

Living on Earth hosted a show on gender and climate change in February 2009.  It has the transcript posted on-line.

In October of 2008 a group of European and Chinese artists met in Beijing for a cross-cultural dialogue on how the arts can respond to climate change.  The events were ponsored by the Asia-Europe Foundation, Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Chinese Academy of Social Science, the Research Centre for Sustainable Development (RCSD), the China Meteorological Administration, and Cultura21.

Dialogue on the Arts, Culture and Climate Change hosted forty participants from Europe and Asia.

The Huffington Post story is here.

How can we measure the growth in interest in climate change?  It seems like lately television is awash in big corporate advertisements claiming to make contributions to climate change prevention.  The number of websites, blogs, and media reports on climate change and its impact seems to grow daily.  But how can we measure this?  How can we know how much interest has changed between 2008 and 2009?  Or, over the past ten or twenty years?

One way of measuring interest is to sign up with Morningside Analytics, the brainchild of John Kelly.  Kelly’s company will map the social networks of particular interest groups, and keep track of how these change, grow, or shrink.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society has partnered with Thomson Reuters to offer Media Cloud as a free service that does much the same thing.

Both services track only current presence of an issue in new media.  The past is past and must be gotten at in other ways.  Nonetheless, these services offer powerful tools for a study like Culture of Climate Change, which will be able to track new media presence and networking around climate change issues over the duration of its study.

Culture of Climate Change is dedicated to making visible the impacts of climate change within the past decades.  Part of our working assumption is that generally when people think about the impact of climate change (that is, if they think about it at all)  they think of it as something that will happen in the future — maybe during the lifetime of their children or grandchildren.

Climate Change is happening now; its impacts are wide spread if not generally visible.  This site, Culture of Climate change,  focuses on the impacts of climate change policies and programs.

Writing for Salon.com, Peter Dizikes interviewed Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolf, the authors of  “Climate Change: Picturing the Science,”  on how and why climate change has been invisible.   Dizikes review follows the format of Laura Shin’s review of the same for the NY Times blog Green Inc.  Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, along with other scientists present the images (by photographer Joshua Wolf)  in this book in reference to climate change science.   Climate Change: Picturing the Science is published by Norton.

The summer of 2008 seems deep history by now.  Back then, climate change was feebly engaged by the George W. Bush administration in terms of the now largely forgotten proposal for a Clean Technology Fund.  The Obama administration is confronting climate change through multiple programs.  The White House blog has featured climate change several times:  they note the creation of a new Culture of Climate Change, and tout the double savings of energy efficiency .  The Obama administration has announced a bilateral framework for clean energy with Mexico. The administration is also planning a Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate to take place in Modena, Italy in July of this year.

These White House initiatives are in addition to major commitments to combatting climate change undertaken via the budget process (including major funding for such climate change actions items as renewable energy, biofuels and advanced technologies (see separate post)), and the carbon emissions Cap and Trade legislation currently being hammered out.   For a critical analysis of the Cap and Trade legislation see Martin Feldstein’s editorial in the Washington Post.

GREEN LEAP FORWARD :  For a finger on the pulse of Chinese policies on climate change read Julian Wong’s blog.

The Reuters News Service report (below) on the likeliness that climate change will drastically reduce the amount of land suitable for farming in Africa is sobering.   According to the report, “farming on up to 1 million square kilometers (247 million acres) of land in Africa could subside by 2050 as climate change makes areas too hot and dry for growing crops.”

This report emphasizes that land which cannot be farmed may nonetheless be suitable for raising livestock.  No mention is made here of the common gendered division of labor in Africa: women raise crops, men tend animals.  Bringing crops to market is a significant source of income for African women.  If cattle or goats replace crops, will the division of labor between genders change?  Or, will women simply lose their livelihoods and men gain?  How will policies implemented to address the loss of agricultural land take into account the gendered impact of this loss?

Climate change threatens African farmland -study
Tue Jun 2, 2009 8:00pm EDT

By Jasmin Melvin

WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) – Climate change could cost the African continent more farmland than the United States uses to plant its eight major field crops combined, according to a study published in the June issue of Environmental Science and Policy.

Farming on up to 1 million square kilometers (247 million acres) of land in Africa could subside by 2050 as climate change makes areas too hot and dry for growing crops, the study said.

The latest U.S. Agriculture Department data puts plantings of the eight major U.S. field crops combined at 246 million acres for the coming year.

Though unsuitable for crops, the land could still sustain livestock, which are more tolerant to heat and drought, researchers from the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute and the United Kingdom’s Waen Associates found.

Boosting livestock production could provide the 20 million to 35 million people living in these areas with a means to stay on their land and make an income, researchers said.

“Livestock can provide poor households with a buffer against the risk of climate change and allow them to take advantage of the increasing demand for animal products in Africa,” said Philip Thornton, a scientist at the Institute and co-author of the paper.

Carlos Sere, the Institute’s director general, noted that the addition of livestock would have to be done sustainably. But changing weather conditions and increasing demand for meat will make the addition inevitable, he said.

Thornton, along with Peter Jones of Waen Associates, looked at dry regions across Africa and identified areas already struggling with crop failures in at least one of every six growing seasons.

Using climate models, they determined that if carbon emissions remain high by 2050, the number of reliable crop growing days would fall below 90 for almost 1 million square kilometers of arid and semi-arid lands in Africa.

With fewer carbon emissions, the number of growing days would still fall below 90 for some 500,000 square kilometers (124 million acres), the study found.

Maize, the most widely grown staple crop in Africa, “will basically no longer be possible” to cultivate with fewer than 90 days to grow, the study said.

Even millet, a staple grain in Africa considered to be a drought-tolerant crop, would be at risk of crop failure in areas unable to meet the 90-day mark, the researchers found.

INVESTMENT NEEDED FOR MORE ACCURACY

The study pinpointed areas in Africa where small farmers would be best served by transitioning more of their enterprise to livestock than crops.

But much remains unknown about local impacts of climate change as current climate science and models today are best suited for regional studies, the researchers said.

“There is currently a mismatch between the kind of localized climate change impact information that is urgently needed, and what can objectively be supplied,” the study said.

Investment to improve the accuracy of climate models could help groups determine the communities most at risk from global warming, the researchers said.

But there is a “point at which households and farming systems become so stressed that there are few alternatives to an exit from farming,” the study said.

Identifying areas at risk could help governments and aid groups limit poor farmers’ need to abandon agriculture by developing policy and agendas that mitigate climate change.

Climate change talks are now going on in Bonn, Germany, with delegates from 182 countries. The meetings may lay the framework for an international climate change deal to be discussed in Copenhagen in December.

(Reporting by Jasmin Melvin; Editing by David Gregorio)

In this chapter Naomi Oreskes, Professor at the University of San Diego, gives an analysis of climate change science based on her extensive evaluation of the literature.  She argues that the science community ended controversy over human-generated global warming in or around 2004.  The popular opinion in the U.S., she notes, lags behind the science, with much of the population continuing to express doubts and reservations.