Resilience of the Poor Against Extreme Climate Change-Related Events

AbstractWe are in the depths of multiple catastrophes that Western society is seemingly unwilling and unable to address: growing inequalities between the rich and the poor, a willful blindness to climate change, and a political system mired in uncompromising and ever increasing extremism. However, there are no reality transcending dialogues, no new social imaginaries to drive change—our own dystopic reality has no utopian response. The greatest importance that the Occupy movements may play in spurring social change and revolution is their success at bringing radical discourses into mainstream society. Occupy not only occupied fixed public locations, but also occupied our social imagination.

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Quantification of impact of climate uncertainty on regional air quality

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ◽

10.5194/acpd-8-7781-2008 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 7781-7804 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

K.-J. Liao ◽

E. Tagaris ◽

K. Manomaiphiboon ◽

C. Wang ◽

J.-H. Woo ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Air Quality ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Climate Models ◽

Global Climate Models ◽

Base Case ◽

Daily Maximum ◽

Climate Scenarios ◽

Extreme Climate ◽

Regional Air Quality

Abstract. Impacts of uncertain climate forecasts on future regional air quality are investigated using downscaled MM5 meteorological fields from the NASA GISS and MIT IGSM global climate models and the CMAQ model in 2050 in the continental US. Three future climate scenarios: high-extreme, low-extreme and base, are developed for regional air quality simulations. GISS, with the IPCC A1B scenario, is used for the base case. IGSM results, in the form of probabilistic distributions, are used to perturb the base case climate to provide 0.5th and 99.5th percentile climate scenarios. Impacts of the extreme climate scenarios on concentrations of summertime fourth-highest daily maximum 8-h average ozone are predicted to be up to 10 ppbv (about one-eighth of the current NAAQS of ozone) in some urban areas, though average differences in ozone concentrations are about 1–2 ppbv on a regional basis. Differences between the extreme and base scenarios in annualized PM2.5 levels are very location dependent and predicted to range between −1.0 and +1.5 μg m−3. Future annualized PM2.5 is less sensitive to the extreme climate scenarios than summertime peak ozone since precipitation scavenging is only slightly affected by the extreme climate scenarios examined. Relative abundances of biogenic VOC and anthropogenic NOx lead to the areas that are most responsive to climate change. Such areas may find that climate change can significantly offset air quality improvements from emissions reductions, particularly during the most severe episodes.

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Impact of recent climate extremes on mosquito-borne disease transmission in Kenya

PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases ◽

10.1371/journal.pntd.0009182 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 (3) ◽

pp. e0009182

Author(s):

Cameron Nosrat ◽

Jonathan Altamirano ◽

Assaf Anyamba ◽

Jamie M. Caldwell ◽

Richard Damoah ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Disease Transmission ◽

Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay ◽

Mosquito Abundance ◽

Targeted Interventions ◽

Extreme Climate Events ◽

Extreme Climate ◽

Recent Climate ◽

Climate Events ◽

The Impact

Climate change and variability influence temperature and rainfall, which impact vector abundance and the dynamics of vector-borne disease transmission. Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events. Mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever, are primarily transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Freshwater availability and temperature affect dengue vector populations via a variety of biological processes and thus influence the ability of mosquitoes to effectively transmit disease. However, the effect of droughts, floods, heat waves, and cold waves is not well understood. Using vector, climate, and dengue disease data collected between 2013 and 2019 in Kenya, this retrospective cohort study aims to elucidate the impact of extreme rainfall and temperature on mosquito abundance and the risk of arboviral infections. To define extreme periods of rainfall and land surface temperature (LST), we calculated monthly anomalies as deviations from long-term means (1983–2019 for rainfall, 2000–2019 for LST) across four study locations in Kenya. We classified extreme climate events as the upper and lower 10% of these calculated LST or rainfall deviations. Monthly Ae. aegypti abundance was recorded in Kenya using four trapping methods. Blood samples were also collected from children with febrile illness presenting to four field sites and tested for dengue virus using an IgG enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). We found that mosquito eggs and adults were significantly more abundant one month following an abnormally wet month. The relationship between mosquito abundance and dengue risk follows a non-linear association. Our findings suggest that early warnings and targeted interventions during periods of abnormal rainfall and temperature, especially flooding, can potentially contribute to reductions in risk of viral transmission.

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Dwelling, Dispossession, and “Slow Violence” in the Time of Climate Change The Representation of Refugees in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Il Tolomeo ◽

10.30687/tol/2499-5975/2020/22/024 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Nicola Pilia

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

South Asia ◽

Historical Background ◽

The Novel ◽

Human History ◽

Amitav Ghosh ◽

Deep Time ◽

The Poor ◽

Slow Violence ◽

The Sundarbans

In this essay, I will analyse the crucial issues of dwelling and dispossession concerning refugees in the novel The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. Political and environmental displacement is addressed within the framework of ‘slow violence’ as proposed by the landmark work of Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). With the intention to define the Morichjhãpi refugees as a foreshadowing of the climate migrations involving the lives of the subalterns in South Asia, as argued by Brandon Jones (2018), the essay provides a historical background of the Morichjhãpi Massacre and studies the forced eviction narrated in the novel through the pages of Nirmal’s diary. Together with Kusum, the Marxist professor experiences the tragedy of the subalterns in the ever-changing ecosystem of the Sundarbans, bridging the gap between environmental and postcolonial categories while providing fruitful insights within the notions of human history and ecological deep time.

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Climate change will impact the protective effect of forests against rockfall

10.5194/egusphere-egu21-246 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Christine Moos ◽

Antoine Guisan ◽

Randin Christophe ◽

Lischke Heike

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Protective Effect ◽

Natural Disturbance ◽

High Elevation ◽

Swiss Alps ◽

Protective Capacity ◽

Forest Modelling ◽

Mountain Areas ◽

Protective Function ◽

Extreme Climate

<p>In mountain areas, forests play a crucial role in protecting people and assets from natural hazards, such as rockfall. Their protective effect is strongly influenced by their structure and state, which are expected to be affected by climate change. More frequent drought events, but also changing natural disturbance regimes, may lead to abrupt diebacks of contemporary species followed by a slow reforestation. In this study, we investigated how a changing climate can affect the protective capacity of mountain forests against rockfall. We therefore combined dynamic forest modelling with a detailed rockfall risk analysis at three case study sites in the Western Swiss Alps. Future forest development was simulated for a moderate and an extreme climate scenario for 200 years with the dynamic forest model TreeMig (Lischke et al., 2006). We then calculated rockfall risk for different forest states based on three-dimensional rockfall simulations with RockyFor3D (Dorren 2016). First results indicate that both at high elevation near the tree line (1500-2200 m a.s.l.) as well as at lower elevations (500-1000 m a.s.l.), increasing drought can lead to diebacks of trees and a reduction of tree density and diameters resulting in a substantial loss of the protective function. Depending on the speed of migration of other, more drought tolerant species, this loss can be partially compensated, but a permanent reduction of the protective effect is to be expected at least for an extreme climate scneario due to a reduced basal area of the forest.</p>

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