china
China's Great Diversion
02/06/11 07:09
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Webinar: Changing climate, hydrology of the Tibetan plateau
08/11/10 13:41
Please join the Environmental Change and Security Program for a
discussion of Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia:
Developing a Blueprint for Addressing Glacier Melt in the Region
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discussion of Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia:
Developing a Blueprint for Addressing Glacier Melt in the Region
Read More...
Video: Green Glaciers: The Melting Grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau
04/08/10 19:37
A video followup about climate change impacts and adaptation options on the Tibetan plateau. Read More...
Madonna and Child, with Climate Change
02/08/10 09:02
This is a story about what fear for the climate of the future looks like, on a personal level. I usually try to be optimistic in these entries. This one is less so.
We had been touring the eastern plateau in Qinghai province, western China, for over a week, slowly making our way up to the headwaters of the Mekong river. Each day was sunny and clear, but every evening clouds would gather rapidly. A wall of blustery rain would approach, pushing us to set up our little tents quickly under cover and have a wet meal under plastic.
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We had been touring the eastern plateau in Qinghai province, western China, for over a week, slowly making our way up to the headwaters of the Mekong river. Each day was sunny and clear, but every evening clouds would gather rapidly. A wall of blustery rain would approach, pushing us to set up our little tents quickly under cover and have a wet meal under plastic.
Read More...
Green Glaciers: The Melting Grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau
31/07/10 12:18
An enormous amount of attention has been paid to the loss of the ancient glaciers in the Himalayas and across the Tibetan plateau. Their retreat and the loss of glacial mass have been tied to rising air temperatures, longer warm seasons, and shifting precipitation patterns. But while dramatic and newsworthy, the loss of glaciers does not have an 
immediate impact on most people and ecosystems in the region beyond dry-season flows. Glaciers represent old reservoirs of water that build up over decades, centuries, and even millennia. However, most of the liquid water resources in the Himalayas and plateau come from seasonally frozen rain, groundwater, and snow, which accumulate each winter and melt over the following spring and summer to enter the rivers, groundwater, and lakes of south and central Asia.
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Where People Are: Hope and Fear
02/06/10 05:01
How do you engage ordinary people in the need to prepare for climate change? This is a problem the environmental movement has struggled with for a long time. My particular area of focus — climate change adaptation — is new enough that trying to describe what we do in this field can take more time than more people have patience for, much less trying to show how the field is relevant to their lives and their children’s lives.
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Climate of Doubt
02/06/10 04:59
A Chinese colleague turned to me when we were alone after a meeting. John: Do you truly believe that humans have caused climate change? I was shocked by the question. As a scientist working on climate change issues, I have seen and read many lines of evidence that the climate is changing rapidly, that humans have caused these changes, and that we must (and can) actively respond to these shifts. Almost as strange as being asked the question was having the question come from a colleague whom I believe to be one of the most effective members of our organization’s climate adaptation staff.
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Friends in High Places
19/05/10 16:18
I have just returned from the first of three quick trips to China. Even by my standards, the first journey was extremely peripatetic, full of constant motion. But sometimes having so many changes in quick succession shows surprising connections — hidden threads and themes.
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NEWS: climate adaptation case studies
22/08/08 13:31
A colleague closely affiliated with WWF who is now at Australian National University has just written an excellent series of climate adaptation case studies. Read More...
The Round Tables
09/04/08 15:56
Perhaps my favorite anecdote about China is the prevalence of round tables in restaurants. I almost never saw square tables, and I quickly learned upon entering a room -- even for a relatively casual meal — to turn to a ranking Chinese colleague and ask, Where do you want me to sit?
Almost invariably we were seated in private rooms with our own set of dedicated serving staff. A rotating lazy susan sat in the middle of each table. All of these features are quite different than in the West, of course. But the seating rank was perhaps the surprising element. Asking where to sit was important because these seating positions are carefully ranked. Some restaurants even had numbers at the seats, and two very nice private dining rooms actually had a small LED screen in front of each chair that could be recalibrated for groups that were smaller than the total number of seats available.
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Almost invariably we were seated in private rooms with our own set of dedicated serving staff. A rotating lazy susan sat in the middle of each table. All of these features are quite different than in the West, of course. But the seating rank was perhaps the surprising element. Asking where to sit was important because these seating positions are carefully ranked. Some restaurants even had numbers at the seats, and two very nice private dining rooms actually had a small LED screen in front of each chair that could be recalibrated for groups that were smaller than the total number of seats available.
Read More...
Aquatic Synergasms
06/04/08 16:31
A few years ago, the term “synergistic” was all the rage for National Science Foundation grant proposals and probably elsewhere in scientific funding venues. The term still seems to rage across the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; the U.N. body that focuses on “global warming” ). Synergistic basically means that the interaction between two of more forces is different than simply adding the forces together. In the western portions of North America, for instance, annual precipitation is becoming more variable (particularly with more droughts and higher rates of evaporation, resulting in drier and more frequently dry periods). Although fire is a natural part of the landscape in the region, the interaction of more fire and a drier climate is likely to transform the region as fires become more frequent and more intense. That’s a synergistic interaction. Read More...
