Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In 2012, the Arctic Sea Ice hit a stunning new record low. Rutgers scientist Jennifer Francis explains how this changes weather for billions of people in the Northern Hemisphere. Plus the Director of the Snow and Ice Data Center, Mark Serreze on record and what it means, and analysis from polar scientist Jennifer Bitz, U of Washington. In depth, direct from top scientists.
Radio 4’s Farming Today recently focused on the role co-operatives might play in supporting the incomes of farmers, especially dairy farmers, and increasing their ability to withstand the oppressive power of the supermarkets. In the Year of Co-operation this is to be welcomed, and the comparisons with the situation in other countries, where more than 90% of dairy farmers sell their milk through co-operatives, are particularly useful. However, it is not just a question of transferring a business model: we need to understand how our political and economic history has left us with a different attitude towards co-operatives.
Mainstream discourse about cities is dominated by free-market, pro-growth ideas that has continued unabated even after the flaws of capitalism were made glaringly obvious by the 2008 financial meltdown…The commons is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Without the commons, there is no market or future. If every resource is commodified, if every square inch of real estate is subjected to speculative forces, if every calorie of every urbanite is used to simply meet bread and board, then we seal off the future. Without commons, there’s no room for people to maneuver, there’s no space for change, and no space for life. The future is literally born out of commons.
Ouse Valley Energy Supply Company, or Ovesco as it is commonly known, is a powerful inspiration for enthusiasts of community renewable energy….Standing on a hill above Lewes you can not only see the solar PV installations completed by Ovesco but also arrays of panels inspired by their projects. The local football club, the leisure centre and many local homes, have all followed the example of Ovesco. Other sites are looking to follow and there are also plans for community wind and hydro-electric schemes.
An urbanizing world requires major policy initiatives to make urban resource use compatible with the world’s ecosystems. Metropolitan Adelaide has adopted this agenda and is well on its way to becoming a pioneering regenerative city region. New policies by the government of South Australia on energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable transport, zero waste, organic waste composting, water efficiency, wastewater irrigation of crops, peri-urban agriculture, and reforestation have taken Adelaide to the forefront of eco-friendly urban development. Working as a thinker in residence in Adelaide in 2003, I proposed linking policies to reduce urban eco-footprints and resource use with the challenge of building a green economy.
Larry Elliot writes in the Gaurdian that ‘the era of cheap food may be over’. He’s absolutely right in one crucial fact; the world faces some tough decisions. Aside from that, however, this was an article from a business desk: a lightened version of human and environmental damage and a broken agricultural system that agricultural solutions will fix. But it’s the wider problem that needs to be addressed.
-An open letter to Owen Paterson, the new environment secretary
-“The 1%”: The Pluses and Minuses of an Historic Term
-We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
-EOG Says U.S. Fracking Rule to Cost $1.5 Billion a Year
-Shale gas will not cut EU import dependence: study
-EU study sparks regulation debate over ‘high-risk’ shale gas
-Davey takes aim at shale gas lobby with defence of Energy Bill
-California fracturing takes less water than Texas
I wanted to cross-check for myself some of the work Chris Reynolds has done looking at changes in weather patterns since 2007 (the beginning of the recent sea ice collapse)…So, it does rather look like an abrupt shift in the early summer northern hemisphere circulation has occurred since 2007 and is having multiple effects – poor summers in the UK, melting sea ice – and presumably accelerated warming of the Greenland ice sheet also.
The obvious questions are: why? and will it continue?
I just don’t see local communities making better choices than those made at the state and federal level. This may happen in isolated pockets, but by the same token you could see vast swaths of places overturning the few gains the environmental movement has achieved on the level of federal and state policies and regulations, which is exactly what the Tea Party wants to do.
Personally I’m at the cusp of stay-at-home-mom returning to the workforce. The landscape of the working world has completely transformed during the decade-and-a-half I’ve been out of it. I’d done quite a bit of volunteer work, but that is a very different scene. I was facing going back to classes to gear up to reenter the corporate world I left many years ago, all the while knowing that corporate world was on self-destruct like some massive Death Star, or …
Or what?
As we progress further into descent, we will see more electricity brownouts, blackouts, and other events where there is a sudden failure of complexity, resulting in a shutdown of productivity. This failure of complexity has created a new urban word: “digital snow day.” And since our digital snow day in Anchorage coincided this time with termination dust on the mountains, the name is especially fitting. When we lose complexity suddenly, much of modern life stops, as our subsystems are highly connected. When complexity brownouts occur, what systems will be impacted, and what will some of those snow days look like? Does digitization make the failures worse, with a drop to a lower trophic level than would have occurred without digitization?
