scholarly journals Climate, Energy and Community: Vermont 2018

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Betts
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Systems Perspective ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Climate Change Denial ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Weather And Climate

This is a compilation of my 2018 columns from the Sunday Rutland Herald and Barre/Montpelier Time Argus. This is the eleventh year of a series that started in January 2008; and a 2012 overview paper is available .These columns go through the seasons, dealing with weather, climate, climate change, energy and policy issues. They blend science and opinion with a systems perspective, and encourage the reader to explore alternative and hopeful paths for their families and society. They are framed so that a scientist will perceive them as technically accurate (although simplified); while the public can relate their tangible experience of weather and climate to the much less tangible issues of climate change, energy policy and strategies for living sustainably with the earth system. The politically motivated attacks on climate science by the current administration have however sharpened my political commentary; since climate change denial may bring immense suffering to our children and all life on Earth.I believe that earth scientists have a responsibility to communicate clearly and directly to the public –as we all share responsibility for the future of the Earth. We must deepen our collective understanding, if we are to we can make a collective decision to build a resilient future.

scholarly journals Alan Betts: Green Energy Times, 2018

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Betts
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Energy Policy ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Green Energy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
The Public ◽  
Systems Perspective ◽  
Climate Change Denial ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Future

This is a collection of my 2018 articles in the Green Energy Times (http://www.greenenergytimes.org/ ).This series started in 2016. Many of these articles have been edited or updated from articles I wrote forthe Rutland Herald, sometimes with different titles and pictures.They blend science and opinion with a systems perspective, and encourage the reader to explorealternative and hopeful paths for their families and society. They are written so that a scientist willperceive them as accurate (although simplified); while the public can relate their tangible experience ofweather and climate to the much less tangible issues of climate change, energy policy and strategies forliving sustainably with the earth system.The politically motivated attacks on climate science by the current president have sharpened my politicalcommentary this year; since climate change denial may bring immense suffering to our children and lifeon Earth.I believe that earth scientists have a responsibility to communicate clearly and directly to the public1 –aswe all share responsibility for the future of the Earth. We must deepen our collective understanding, sowe can make a collective decision to build a resilient future.

Making the Climate a Part of the Human World

2011 ◽  
Vol 92 (10) ◽  
pp. 1297-1302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon D. Donner
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Outreach Programs ◽  
The Public ◽  
Weather And Climate ◽  
Human World ◽  
City States

Doubts about the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change persist among the general public, particularly in North America, despite overwhelming consensus in the scientific community about the human influence on the climate system. The public uncertainty may be rooted in the belief, held by many cultures across the planet, that the climate is not directly influenced by people. The belief in divine control of weather and climate can, in some cases, be traced back to the development of agriculture and the early city-states. Drawing upon evidence from anthropology, theology, and communication studies, this article suggests that in many regions this deeply ingrained belief may limit public acceptance of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change. Successful climate change education and outreach programs should be designed to help overcome perceived conflict between climate science and long-held cultural beliefs, drawing upon lessons from communication and education regarding other potentially divisive subjects, such as evolution.

Climate-Challenged Society

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek ◽  
Richard B. Norgaard ◽  
David Schlosberg
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Climate Change Denial ◽  
The Earth

This book is an original, accessible, and thought-provoking introduction to the severe and broad-ranging challenges that climate change presents and how societies can respond. It synthesizes and deploys cutting-edge scholarship on the range of social, economic, political, and philosophical issues surrounding climate change. The treatment is introductory, but the book is written "with attitude", for nobody has yet charted in coherent, integrative, and effective fashion a way to move societies beyond their current paralysis as they face the challenges of climate change. The coverage begins with an examination of science, public opinion, and policy making, with special attention to organized climate change denial. The book then moves to economic analysis and its limits; different kinds of policies; climate justice; governance at all levels from the local to the global; and the challenge of an emerging "Anthropocene" in which the mostly unintended consequences of human action drive the earth system into a more chaotic and unstable era. The conclusion considers the prospects for fundamental transition in ideas, movements, economics, and governance.

Dryland Degradation and Expansion: Implications for Mexican Policies from the Earth System Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Gabriel Lopez Porras
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Land Degradation ◽  
Water Scarcity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Sustainable Land Management ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
The Earth

Despite international efforts to stop dryland degradation and expansion, current dryland pathways are predicted to result in large-scale migration, growing poverty and famine, and increasing climate change, land degradation, conflicts and water scarcity. Earth system science has played a key role in analysing dryland problems, and has been even incorporated in global assessments such as the ones made by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. However, policies addressing dryland degradation, like the ‘Mexican programme for the promotion of sustainable land management’, do not embrace an Earth system perspective, so they do not consider the complexity and non-linearity that underlie dryland problems. By exploring how this Mexican programme could integrate the Earth system perspective, this paper discusses how ’Earth system’ policies could better address dryland degradation and expansion in the Anthropocene.

scholarly journals Politics of Strata

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 211-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Power Source ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
The Third ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways.

scholarly journals Organizing in the Anthropocene

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wright ◽  
Daniel Nyberg ◽  
Lauren Rickards ◽  
James Freund
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Introductory Article

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.

scholarly journals A Thought Experiment on Sustainable Management of the Earth System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Heitzig ◽  
Wolfram Barfuss ◽  
Jonathan F. Donges
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Game Theory ◽  
Optimal Control ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Right ◽  
Safe Operating ◽  
Qualitative Decision

We introduce and analyse a simple formal thought experiment designed to reflect a qualitative decision dilemma humanity might currently face in view of climate change. In it, each generation can choose between just two options, either setting humanity on a pathway to certain high wellbeing after one generation of suffering, or leaving the next generation in the same state as this one with the same options, but facing a continuous risk of permanent collapse. We analyse this abstract setup regarding the question of what the right choice would be both in a rationality-based framework including optimal control, welfare economics and game theory, and by means of other approaches based on the notions of responsibility, safe operating spaces, and sustainability paradigms. Despite the simplicity of the setup, we find a large diversity and disagreement of assessments both between and within these different approaches.

1. Making Sense of Earth’s Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
Wilderness Preservation ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Environmental Discourses ◽  
Nature Preservation

This chapter introduces the politics of the Earth, which has featured a large and ever-growing range of concerns, such as pollution, wilderness preservation, population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change, biodiversity loss, and destabilization of the Earth system. It explains how the issues of Earth’s politics are interlaced with a range of questions about human livelihood, social justice, public attitudes, and proper relation to one other and other entities on the planet. It also discusses the consequences of discourses for politics and policies. The chapter clarifies how environmental issues like ecological limits, nature preservation, climate change, biodiversity, rainforest protection, environmental justice, and pollution are interconnected in all kinds of ways. It develops an environmental discourse analysis approach and shows how this approach will be applied in subsequent chapters, beginning with the positioning of environmental discourses in relation to the long dominant of discourse of industrialism.

Measuring climate change on Twitter using Google’s algorithm: perception and events

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abdeen Hamed ◽  
Alexa A. Ayer ◽  
Eric M. Clark ◽  
Erin A. Irons ◽  
Grant T. Taylor ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Ranking Algorithm ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Worldwide Population ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Earth Day

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis of whether more complex and emergent hashtags can be sufficient pointers to climate change events. Human-induced climate change is one of this century’s greatest unbalancing forces to have affected our planet. Capturing the public awareness of climate change on Twitter has proven to be significant. In a previous research, it was demonstrated by the authors that public awareness is prominently expressed in the form of hashtags that uses more than one bigram (i.e. a climate change term). The research finding showed that this awareness is expressed by more complex terms (e.g. “climate change”). It was learned that the awareness was dominantly expressed using the hashtag: #ClimateChange. Design/methodology/approach – The methods demonstrated here use objective computational approaches [i.e. Google’s ranking algorithm and Information Retrieval measures (e.g. TFIDF)] to detect and rank the emerging events. Findings – The results shows a clear significant evidence for the events signaled using emergent hashtags and how globally influential they are. The research detected the Earth Day, 2015, which was signaled using the hashtag #EarthDay. Clearly, this is a day that is globally observed by the worldwide population. Originality/value – It was proven that these computational methods eliminate the subjectivity errors associated with humans and provide inexpensive solution for event detection on Twitter. Indeed, the approach used here can also be applicable to other types of event detections, beyond climate change, and surely applicable to other social media platforms that support the use of hashtags (e.g. Facebook). The paper explains, in great detail, the methods and all the numerous events detected.

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