Ecocriticism extends its boundaries

Based on the hydrological and meteorological data of the upper reaches of Shiyang River basin in Northwest China from 1960 to 2009, this paper analyzed the change in runoff and its related climatic factors, and estimated the contribution of climate change and human activity to runoff change by using the moving T test, cumulative analysis of anomalies and multiple regression analysis. The results showed that temperature revealed a significant increasing trend, and potential evaporation capacity decreased significantly, while precipitation increased insignificantly in the past recent 50 years. Although there were three mutations in 1975, 1990 and 2002 respectively, runoff presented a slight decreasing trend in the whole period. The contributions of climate change and human activity to runoff change during the period of 1976-2009 were 45% and 55% respectively.

Download Full-text

Climatic controls on watershed reference evapotranspiration vary dramatically during the past 50 years in southern China

10.5194/hess-2017-241 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Mengsheng Qin ◽

Lu Hao ◽

Lei Sun ◽

Yongqiang Liu ◽

Ge Sun

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Resource Management ◽

Water Resource ◽

Air Temperature ◽

Water Resource Management ◽

Reference Evapotranspiration ◽

Southern China ◽

The Past ◽

Increasing Trend ◽

The Individual

Abstract. Reference evapotranspiration (ETo) is an important hydrometeorological term widely used in water resource management, hydrological modeling, and understanding and projecting the hydrological effects of future climate change and land use change. Identifying the individual climatic controls on ETo helps better understand the processes of global climatic change impacts on local water resources and also simplify modeling efforts to predict actual evapotranspiration. We conducted a case study on the Qinhuai River Basin (QRB), a watershed dominated by a humid subtropical climate and mixed land uses in southern China. Long term (1961–2012) daily meteorological data at six weather stations across the watershed were used to estimate ETo by the FAO-56 Penman−Monteith model. The seasonal and annual trends of ETo were examined using the Mann−Kendall nonparametric test. The individual contributions from each meteorological variable were quantified by a detrending method. The results showed that basin-wide annual ETo had a decreasing trend during 1961–1987 due to decreased wind speed (WS), solar radiation (Rs), vapor pressure deficit (VPD), and increased relative humidity (RH). These variables had different magnitudes of contribution to the ETo trend in different seasons examined during 1961−1987. However, during 1988–2012, both seasonal and annual ETo showed an increasing trend, mainly due to increased VPD and decreased RH and, to lesser extent, to decreased absolute humidity (AH) and a rising air temperature. We show that the key climatic controls on ETo have dramatically shifted as a result of global climate change during the past five decades. Now the atmospheric demand, instead of air temperature alone, is a major control on ETo. Thus, we conclude that accurately predicting current and future ETo and hydrological change under a changing climate must consider changes in VPD (i.e., air humidity and temperature) in the study region. Water resource management in the study basin must consider the increasing trend of ETo to meet the associated increasing water demand for irrigation agriculture and domestic water uses.

Download Full-text

Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination

Exchanges The Interdisciplinary Research Journal ◽

10.31273/eirj.v8i2.555 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 99-119

Author(s):

Chiara Xausa

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental Crisis ◽

Environmental Harm ◽

Literary Representations ◽

Environmental Humanities ◽

Indigenous Australian ◽

Environmental Racism ◽

Slow Violence ◽

Climate Fiction ◽

Climate Crisis

This article analyses the representation of environmental crisis and climate crisis in Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright. Building upon the groundbreaking work of environmental humanities scholars such as Heise (2008), Clark (2015), Trexler (2015) and Ghosh (2016), who have emphasised the main challenges faced by authors of climate fiction, it considers the novels as an entry point to address the climate-related crisis of culture – while acknowledging the problematic aspects of reading Indigenous texts as antidotes to the 'great derangement’ – and the danger of a singular Anthropocene narrative that silences the ‘unevenly universal’ (Nixon, 2011) responsibilities and vulnerabilities to environmental harm. Exploring themes such as environmental racism, ecological imperialism, and the slow violence of climate change, it suggests that Alexis Wright’s novels are of utmost importance for global conversations about the Anthropocene and its literary representations, as they bring the unevenness of environmental and climate crisis to visibility.

Download Full-text

A Rights Turn in Climate Change Litigation?

Transnational Environmental Law ◽

10.1017/s2047102517000292 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 37-67 ◽

Cited By ~ 33

Author(s):

Jacqueline Peel ◽

Hari M. Osofsky

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Human Rights ◽

The United States ◽

The Philippines ◽

Paris Agreement ◽

Address Climate Change ◽

The Past ◽

The Us ◽

Increasing Trend ◽

Significant Milestone

AbstractIn 2015, a Pakistani court in the case ofLeghariv.Federation of Pakistanmade history by accepting arguments that governmental failures to address climate change adequately violated petitioners’ rights. This case forms part of an emerging body of pending or decided climate change-related lawsuits that incorporate rights-based arguments in several countries, including the Netherlands, the Philippines, Austria, South Africa, and the United States (US). These decisions align with efforts to recognize the human rights dimensions of climate change, which received important endorsement in the Paris Agreement. The decisions also represent a significant milestone in climate change litigation. Although there have been hundreds of climate-based cases around the world over the past two decades – especially in the US – past and much of the ongoing litigation focuses primarily on statutory interpretation avenues. Previous efforts to bring human rights cases have also failed to achieve formal success. The new cases demonstrate an increasing trend for petitioners to employ rights claims in climate change lawsuits, as well as a growing receptivity of courts to this framing. This ‘rights turn’ could serve as a model or inspiration for rights-based litigation in other jurisdictions, especially those with similarly structured law and court access.

Download Full-text

Towards an Intermedial Ecocriticism

Beyond Media Borders, Volume 2 ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-49683-8_5 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 117-148 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jørgen Bruhn

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Analytical Approach ◽

Scientific Research ◽

Popular Science ◽

Ecological Crisis ◽

Environmental Crisis ◽

Environmental Humanities ◽

Starting Point ◽

Media Types ◽

Basic Ideas

Abstract The starting point for this chapter is that natural scientific research on the ecological crisis must be communicated by media products to the general public, industries, and policymakers. Such communication takes place via a wide array of different media types, from arts and literature to journalism and politics—media types that are, broadly speaking, the objects of environmental humanities. The problem is that it is very difficult to analyse, discuss, and compare such a diversity of texts or media products (here called ecomedia). This chapter tries to combine the basic ideas of ecocriticism concerning the environmental crisis with the vocabulary and analytical possibilities developed in intermedial studies to perform such a task, resulting in what the author calls intermedial ecocriticism. The chapter sketches out the main theoretical backgrounds of this position and suggests taking an analytical approach. It also compares and discusses two different media products: an online popular science article from CarbonBrief and a Danish novel about climate change.

Download Full-text

Impact of climate change and human activity on the runoff in the upper reaches of the Shiyang River, Northwest China

10.7287/peerj.preprints.187v1 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Peng Li ◽

Jianhua Xu ◽

Zhongsheng Chen ◽

Benfu Zhao

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Human Activity ◽

Climatic Factors ◽

Meteorological Data ◽

Northwest China ◽

Potential Evaporation ◽

The Past ◽

Shiyang River Basin ◽

Runoff Change ◽

Increasing Trend

Based on the hydrological and meteorological data of the upper reaches of Shiyang River basin in Northwest China from 1960 to 2009, this paper analyzed the change in runoff and its related climatic factors, and estimated the contribution of climate change and human activity to runoff change by using the moving T test, cumulative analysis of anomalies and multiple regression analysis. The results showed that temperature revealed a significant increasing trend, and potential evaporation capacity decreased significantly, while precipitation increased insignificantly in the past recent 50 years. Although there were three mutations in 1975, 1990 and 2002 respectively, runoff presented a slight decreasing trend in the whole period. The contributions of climate change and human activity to runoff change during the period of 1976-2009 were 45% and 55% respectively.

Download Full-text

Spatiotemporal Variations of Freezing and Thawing Indices During the Past Four Decades in Tibet

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution ◽

10.3389/fevo.2021.750961 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

Author(s):

Ying Liao ◽

Yiying Li ◽

Jihui Fan ◽

Majid Galoie ◽

Artemis Motamedi

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Spatiotemporal Variations ◽

Freezing And Thawing ◽

Upward Trend ◽

The Past ◽

Daily Data ◽

Significant Downward Trend ◽

Increasing Trend ◽

The Mean ◽

Climate Change Assessment

Freezing and thawing indices (FI and TI) are commonly used as indicators for climate change assessment and permafrost extent estimation in cold regions. In this study, based on the meteorological daily data (1978–2017) among 34 meteorological stations in Tibet, the temperature in space has been interpolated and FI and TI have been calculated. Finally, spatiotemporal variations have been analyzed and the permafrost area has been estimated. The results showed the mean annual of FI and TI in Tibet are 1241.36 and 1290.22°C⋅day, respectively. A significant downward trend in freezing index (FI) and an upward trend in thawing index (TI) have been reported in the time series, in against, analyzing the spatial distribution showed there is an increasing trend from southeast to northwest for FI while TI was decreased gradually in the same region in Tibet. This research indicates that altitude has a significant influence on the change of FI and TI. With the increase of altitude, FI decreased and TI increased more significantly. The permafrost area was estimated at about 0.59 × 106 km2 in Tibet.

Download Full-text

Increase in occurrence of large glacier-related landslides in the high mountains of Asia

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-81212-9 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Jia Liu ◽

Yuming Wu ◽

Xing Gao

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

High Mountain ◽

High Mountains ◽

Mountain Areas ◽

The Past ◽

Area Distribution ◽

Increasing Trend ◽

Recent Trends ◽

Frequency Area ◽

Insight Into

AbstractGlobally, a large number of glaciers are retreating due to global warming. Along with climate change, glacial melting has been identified as one of the main triggers of landslide activity in high mountain areas. Evaluations of the triggered mechanism alone do not provide comprehensive insight into the overall impact of glacier accumulation and ablation on landslide-induced denudation. To investigate recent trends, we built landslide and glacier datasets for the HMA using a Landsat time-series covering the past 21 years (1998–2018). Landslides that may have been caused by major earthquakes were identified and removed, leaving an inventory that is used to explore changes that may be related to climate change. Our results show a shift in the frequency–area distribution that indicates an increasing trend of large landslides in the HMA over the last decade. A decline in glacier area is associated with the increase in landslide area.

Download Full-text

Ale na razie tu cisza” – fotografie sprzed katastrofy w wybranych zapisach literackich (Stefan Chwin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Wisława Szymborska)

Przegląd Humanistyczny ◽

10.32798/2657-599x.ph.2020-1.5 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 65-80

Author(s):

Magdalena Strąk

Keyword(s):

Time Perspective ◽

Terrorist Attack ◽

First World War ◽

General Concept ◽

Literary Texts ◽

World War ◽

The Past ◽

The First World War ◽

History Of ◽

First World

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.

Download Full-text

Denouement: World Politics, Systemic Leadership, and Climate Change

10.1093/oso/9780190699680.003.0013 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

William R. Thompson ◽

Leila Zakhirova

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Global Warming ◽

World Politics ◽

First Century ◽

Modern World ◽

Climate Fluctuations ◽

The Past ◽

Agrarian Economy ◽

Historical Processes

In this final chapter, we conclude by recapitulating our argument and evidence. One goal of this work has been to improve our understanding of the patterns underlying the evolution of world politics over the past one thousand years. How did we get to where we are now? Where and when did the “modern” world begin? How did we shift from a primarily agrarian economy to a primarily industrial one? How did these changes shape world politics? A related goal was to examine more closely the factors that led to the most serious attempts by states to break free of agrarian constraints. We developed an interactive model of the factors that we thought were most likely to be significant. Finally, a third goal was to examine the linkages between the systemic leadership that emerged from these historical processes and the global warming crisis of the twenty-first century. Climate change means that the traditional energy platforms for system leadership—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—have become counterproductive. The ultimate irony is that we thought that the harnessing of carbon fuels made us invulnerable to climate fluctuations, while the exact opposite turns out to be true. The more carbon fuels are consumed, the greater the damage done to the atmosphere. In many respects, the competition for systemic leadership generated this problem. Yet it is unclear whether systemic leadership will be up to the task of resolving it.

Download Full-text