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Watching Climate Change Through a Farmer’s Eyes
Sara Reardon, Science
In the last few decades, farmers in the heavily-forested Darjeeling Hills of the Himalayas in India and Nepal have noticed something strange. Rivers and streams are drying up, crop yields are plummeting, and trees have begun to flower long before spring arrives. The experiences of these villagers match satellite data, according to a new study, suggesting that local knowledge may help climate and biodiversity researchers better track the devastating impacts of global warming in specific areas.
When studying the effects of climate change, “we have all these models, but they’re global models,” says conservation biologist Kamaljit Bawa of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Global warming is not as simple as a universal increase in temperature, and its effects can vary by region. To predict how a certain area will be affected, “we have to scale down,” he says.
In the largest study of its kind, Bawa and his graduate student Pashupati Chaudhary interviewed 250 households in 18 Himalayan villages that are between 2000 and 3000 meters above sea level. Rather than asking specifically about weather patterns, which could skew answers, the researchers first asked participants what general differences they had observed in their lifestyles over the past 20 years. Then, they followed with more specific, quantifiable questions about phenomena such as drought frequency and average temperature.
This method of questioning elicited some surprising revelations. A group of women told the researchers that all their lives they had washed their food containers every 3 or 4 days. But recently, they found that they had to wash them every 2 days: a few degrees increase in temperature was causing food to spoil more rapidly. In addition, villagers who lived at higher altitudes spoke of unusually hot summers and early springs. At lower altitudes, they complained of mosquitoes that had never before infested the area, the team reports online today in Biology Letters.
Villagers also noted that common plants such as rhododendrons had moved upward into cooler areas and that other species had disappeared, backing up a number of studies in the scientific literature that illustrate how specific plants and animals have responded to a warming climate.
(26 April 2011)
Also at Common Dreams. -BA
The Banksters and the Climate Fund
Patrick Bond, CounterPunch
South Africa’s most vocal neoliberal politician, Trevor Manuel, is apparently being seriously considered as co-chair of the Green Climate Fund. On April 28-29 in Mexico City, Manuel and other elites meet to design the world’s biggest-ever replenishing pool of aid money: a promised $100 billion of annual grants by 2020, more than the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and allied regional banks put together.
The Climate Justice lobby is furious, because as a network of 90 progressive organizations wrote to the United Nations, “The integrity and potential of a truly just and effective climate fund has already been compromised by the 2010 Cancún decisions to involve the World Bank as interim trustee.” A Friends of the Earth International study earlier this month attacked the Bank for increased coal financing, especially $3.75 billion loaned to South Africa’s Eskom a year ago.
Manuel chaired the Bank/IMF Board of Governors in 2000, as well as the Bank’s Development Committee from 2001-05. He was one of two United Nations Special Envoys to the 2002 Monterrey Financing for Development summit, a member of Tony Blair’s 2004-05 Commission for Africa, and chair of the 2007 G-20 summit.
Manuel was appointed UN Special Envoy for Development Finance in 2008, headed a 2009 IMF committee that successfully advocated a $750 billion capital increase, and served on the UN’s High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Finance in 2010. (Within the latter, he suggested that up to half the $100 billion climate fund be sourced from controversial private-sector emissions trading, not aid budgets.)
No one from the Third World has such experience, nor has anyone in these circuits such a formidable anti-colonial political pedigree, including several 1980s police detentions as one of Cape Town’s most important anti-apartheid activists. Yet despite occasional rhetorical attacks on “Washington Consensus” economic policies (part of SA’s “talk left walk right” tradition), since the mid-1990s Manuel has been loyal to the pro-corporate cause.
(25 April 2011)
Related: Manuel extends his green fingers (Business Day, South Africa). -BA
The culture and discourse of climate skepticism (PDF)
Andrew J. Hoffman, University of Michigan, USA
Introduction
The current public debate over climate change centers on two primary themes. The first is the scientific consensus that human behavior is causing a rise in greenhouse gas (GHG) levels, and that these gases are altering the global climate. The second is the policy consensus that the solutions to this problem lie in technological development and behavior change that must be spurred by a government-induced carbon price. To many, these two themes cover the entire climate change debate. They are wrong.
While the scientific, technical and policy components of the issue are critical, climate change is also a cultural issue. More importantly, it is a highly contested cultural issue in which competing movements engage in discursive debates – or framing battles – over the interpretation of the problem and the necessity of solutions. This dimension of the issue is overlooked because social scientists who can identify and analyze it have been notably absent from the public debate. Even more surprising, they have largely neglected to attend to the issue even within their own academic realms.
Climate change in the social and managerial sciences has been very slow to develop (Goodall, 2008), and more recent attention to the issue by business and social science researchers has ignored debates over the reality of climate change and moved straight to an assessment of strategy options available to individual and organizations to address the issue. In fact, our social science discipline either takes a relatively dismissive attitude toward those who challenge the scientific view that climate change is real – dubbed ‘climate skeptics’ – or subscribes to them sinister motives and neglects their beliefs altogether (see McCright and Dunlap, 2000, 2003, 2010 for exceptions for exceptions). In this article, I argue that this neglect is a problem and highlight how researchers can advance their scholarship and social relevance by studying the ongoing debate over climate change.
Andrew J. Hoffman is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan; a position that holds joint appointments at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment. Within this role, Andy also serves as associate director of the Frederick A. and
Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. His research uses a sociological perspective to understand the cultural and institutional aspects of environmental issues for organizations. He has published eight books and over 90 articles and book chapters on these issues.
(2011)
Suggested by EB contributor Bill Henderson who writes:
“a good short read. Good info as well as research perspectives.
Still very much in the box (Well it’s Pew – what do you expect?) Like N&S [Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger]: ‘We’ve polled the kids and toys for Christmas isn’t negotiable so were looking for toys that don’t waste time and potential, don’t engineer and have no carbon footprint, etc’. There is a conservative skeptic community that views climate change as just a sham tactic for libs to impose big gov’t instead of markets, etc. and if we are going to address climate change we must understand and accomodate their perspective in our present politics. No solution in time down this path. ”
Article about the study from New York Times (Snubbing Skeptics Threatens to Intensify Climate War, Study Says):
“Listening to climate change doubters, and not dismissing them, might avert a “logic schism” similar to the political stalemate on abortion, according to a new paper involving research on skeptics.
… That insight by social scientists was illustrated by what the paper describes as the “climate whiplash” of the last two years, when polling showed an eroding number of people who believe in global warming. Establishing a scientific consensus on warming represents the beginning, not the end, of building a “social consensus,” the paper says.
“You’re asking people to rethink their values, and that’s not gonna go down easy,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor of business and environmental policy at the University of Michigan and the paper’s author.
He holds his colleagues in the social sciences partly responsible for failing to foresee the growing impasse, or perhaps even contributing to it. The paper contends that researchers have largely ignored the conservative politics around climate change, describing it as a “critical component” of the debate.
“The dearth of research on climate resistance, uncertainty and apathy must change to understand the full landscape of the conflict,” the 54-page paper says. “In short, it is problematic to sample on the dependent variable, and it is folly to only research organizations and debates among groups that already agree that solutions to climate change are necessary.”
Why I’ve avoided commenting on Nisbet’s ‘Climate Shift’ report
Dave Roberts, Grist
Last week, Matt Nisbet, an associate professor at American University, released a report called “Climate Shift.” It argued that, contrary to what most people think, pro-climate-bill forces spent more than their opponents, media coverage of climate science has been generally fair, and Al Gore is just as responsible as Republicans for politicizing the subject of climate change. It recommends that greens drop their push for cap-and-trade, stop talking about climate science, and focus instead on innovation and economic competitiveness. If those arguments sound familiar, it’s because they faithfully echo a long-running critique of the environmental movement by a group of people I call, for lack of a better term, the “Breakthrough crowd,” after the folks at the Breakthrough Institute (BTI). I don’t mean anything nefarious or conspiratorial by this — as far as I know, Nisbet has no formal ties to BTI — just that there’s a distinct set of political and policy arguments, and to some extent a distinct style, being put forward by a distinct set of people. So I named ’em.
I’ve been assiduously refraining from any discussion of Nisbet’s report, for reasons I explain below. But I’ve read enough annoying stuff about it now that I feel I have to weigh in. Naturally I’ll need two posts to do it.
First I want to address the reason I’ve been avoiding it and, more broadly, what I see as a fairly dysfunctional social dynamic that’s developed around the Breakthrough crowd and the journalists who cover it. The second post will be about the substantive issues Nisbet et al raise, and will likely include fewer instances of the word “douchecanoe.”
So, why have I been avoiding this? To really tell that story, we need to travel back to 2005, when Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus published “The Death of Environmentalism” and Grist hosted a big discussion of it.
(26 April 2011)
Suggested by Bill Henderson who writes: “More on N&S [Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger] and conservatives punching hippie enviros.”
