Climate Change // Current TV

Very "unusual" start to tornado season

Tornado season is only just beginning, but already this year has seen dozens of... more

JanforGore
added this
1 month ago
|
6 comments

Heat trapping atmospheric nitrous oxide traced to fertilizer use

A detailed analysis of global nitrogen cycles shows without a doubt that a spike in... more

JanforGore
added this
1 month ago
|
5 comments

A Brief Explanation of Humankind

Historian Herber Farquar, DMV, explains how humanity has been genetically programmed... more

Progresshiv
added this
1 month ago
|
11 comments

Article: Losses from Natural Disasters Reach New Peak in 2011

so who pays?

frankpatton
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Margaret Hiza Redsteer uses Navajo memories to track climate change

Margaret Hiza Redsteer has long known the Navajo Nation. Of Crow descent, she grew up near the Montana-Wyoming border, and in the 1970s moved to an area of Arizona then shared by the Navajo and Hopi tribes. She married a Navajo man and they had three children. While living on the reservation, she often heard people talk about how much the land's vegetation had changed. "But at that point," she says, "it hadn’t really clicked what that meant – that it indicated climate change."

In 1986 the 29-year-old Hiza Redsteer and her family resettled in Flagstaff, where she began to study geology at the university. After 14 years of schooling, she returned to the Navajo Nation with a Ph.D., as an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey in the early 2000s. Her research specialty was studying volcanic deposits near Yellowstone. But, as she grew convinced of the harmful effects of climate change on reservation livelihoods, she decided to switch focus. Her pioneering work using aerial photographs, GPS maps and remote laser sensing data to track landscape level changes on the Navajo Nation was written about in "Shifting sands in Navajoland," (HCN story; 6/23/08).

Now, Hiza Redsteer is pushing to find out even more about ecological changes her original data could not track by incorporating a rarely-used form of climate data into her research -- the accounts of Indian elders. She has extensively interviewed many elders, and now their perspective is illuminating new aspects of the region's environmental history.

High Country News If I was a Navajo child, what would I hear about the weather and climate growing up?

Margaret Hiza Redsteer The elders often talk about the difference in grass, how tall, how thick, how much of it there used to be. Some people say when they were young and herding sheep they had to stay right with the herd. If they didn’t the sheep would get lost in the grass. It's not like that now.

HCN What have you learned from these oral histories?

Hiza Redsteer The elders' memories can give us information that the physical records can’t. They give a much better picture of what the ecological changes have been. For example, people talk about how, in the winter, the snow was chest high on the horses. They talk about using particular streams for irrigation of crops, but many of those aren’t even flowing now,

It helps us fill in gaps too. There are huge time gaps in some of the earlier photography. We have a photo set from 1936, for instance, but then the next photo set we have from the area is from 1954. That’s a huge gap in time when you’re trying to unravel how the landscape changed and what caused it.

HCN Is there a difference between the kind of information you can get through oral and analytical methods?

MHR We can model evapotranspiration rates based on temperature; we can make observations of soil moisture. But one thing that we can't do very easily is project back to what those conditions were like when there was more snow. One of the things we’ve learned (from oral accounts) is that soil moisture conditions were much different. In the Southwest we expect precipitation during two distinct periods: winter rains, followed by a dry windy spring, then the summer monsoons. Springs have become much warmer; we can see that in the meteorological record.

We've learned from the elders that the soil stayed moist all through the spring until the summer monsoon arrived. Now, if you were to go out in the springtime during the dry windy season, you could dig a very big trench and not run into any wet sand or soil. The ecological effects are huge because shallow rooted plants aren't going to do as well.

It's also hard to reconstruct where plants and animals were in the past. The elders have told us that when there were cottonwoods in the Little Colorado river there were lots of beavers. They used to see cranes migrate through the area in the spring, stopping in the marshes around lakes that aren't there now.
by Danielle Venton
More at the linkMargaret Hiza Redsteer has long known the Navajo Nation. Of Crow descent, she grew up... more

JanforGore
added this
1 month ago
|
14 comments

Increasing carbon dioxide levels ended the last ice age

Using data from ice cores and underwater sediment, new research shows that carbon... more

Vierotchka
added this
1 month ago
|
3 comments

Global Warming Caused by Earth's Orbit

About 55 million years ago, an intense heat wave hit the planet. Earth's surface... more

Mitekillem1
added this
1 month ago
|
5 comments

The new geopolitics of climate change and conflict

Climate change, largely abstract in the United States, is already shaping conflicts... more

JanforGore
added this
1 month ago
|
5 comments

Article: Acknowledging Climate Science Doesn't Make You A Liberal

guess what there is climate change

frankpatton
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Fox Again Turns To Tabloid For Climate Science

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid that has repeatedly misrepresented climate... more

McSpocky
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Africa's Great Green Wall Of Trees

Africa is turning to desert. Studies show that as much as two thirds of the... more

JanforGore
added this
1 month ago
|
24 comments

Global Warming Denialism ‘Just Foolishness,’ Scientist Peter Raven Says

U.S. prestige falling as world has ‘pretty well given up’ on any American... more

Vierotchka
added this
1 month ago
|
25 comments

General Motors Stops Funding The Heartland Institute

General Motors has decided to discontinue funding of the Heartland Institute, an organization that downplays the risks of climate disruption, three weeks after GM Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson was asked about it during a Climate One radio interview. GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss confirmed the move today.

Hours before Mr. Akerson went on stage March 7th at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to record the interview before a live audience of about 200 people, several questions were submitted via Facebook about GM’s financial support of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based group that advocates free market ideas. Climate One is the sustainability project of The Commonwealth Club of California, a non-profit and non-partisan public forum.

This question was posted from Bruce:

“Please ask Mr. Akerson why GM funds the Heartland Institute, a group that has tried to push misinformation about climate change into our public schools. Is this funding consistent with their company’s message in marketing of the Chevy Volt?”

That sounded fair game. So during the hour-long conversation I posed that question to Mr. Akerson. His response made it clear he accepts the scientific consensus that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other pollutants are increasing the Earth’s average temperatures.

“The first time I was interviewed by the press, I was stunned with the following reaction,” Akerson said. “Some guy says, ‘Do you believe in global warming?’ And I said, ‘Well yeah, I do.’ Several GM executives said, ‘You don’t say that in public. Well this may surprise you, my underwear doesn’t have GM stamped on it and I am an individual and I do have my own convictions and it may sometimes they — they agree and sometimes they don’t. I think it’s actually healthy to have different points of view and perspectives around the table.”

He went on to address the funding question more directly. “This is $15,000 that was committed to before I came in. I also think the Heartland Institute, I’m told, does other things and I find this interesting. I won’t go any further but I’m going to take another look at it when I get back to Detroit. I’ll leave it at that.” Disclosure: General Motors is also a corporate funder of Climate One.

Mr. Akerson said “actions speak louder than words” and mentioned zero-emission auto plants that run off methane and other measures the company has taken to reduce its carbon footprint. Of course, most of the pollution from automobiles comes from driving them around, not making them. That’s on us consumers.

GM famously killed the electric car ten years ago and often obstructed efforts to combat severe climate change. Now, that is changing. GM is producing the Chevy Volt, which runs on electricity and gasoline, and consumers have more options than ever for moving away from oil. GM can still do a lot more with its money and muscle to advance the transition to clean transportation. And my bet is they will, because the free and global auto market is headed toward an electrified future.
by Greg Dalton, reposted from Climate One

More at the linkGeneral Motors has decided to discontinue funding of the Heartland Institute, an... more

JanforGore
added this
1 month ago
|
6 comments

Climate Change Denial and the Conservative Brain

Someone has actually gone to great lengths to examine the conservative brain and label... more

StewSteve
added this
1 month ago
|
1 comment

Biorhythms: Presidential candidates betray Americans on climate change

"Presidential" candidates of the two party system we have in place are... more

JanforGore
added this
1 month ago
|
30 comments

Maldives today, Manhattan tomorrow

Island President Mohamed Nasheed Talks To Andrea Mitchell About Saving His Nation From... more

coolplanet
added this
2 months ago
|
25 comments

Raising Resistance: The GM soya war in South America

Beautifully shot and interweaving interviews with scenes from soy fields in Paraguay,... more

JanforGore
added this
2 months ago
|
3 comments

A Message From A Republican Meteorologist On Climate Change

Acknowledging Climate Change Doesn’t Make You A Liberal by Paul Douglas, via... more

JanforGore
added this
2 months ago
|
39 comments

Fake Historian David Barton on the Environment, Abortion and Michael Vick? (VIDEO)

In his warped and faulty series “Building on the American Heritage,”... more

StewSteve
added this
2 months ago
|
0 comments

Arctic sea ice may have passed crucial tipping point

The disappearance of Arctic sea ice has crossed a "tipping point" that could soon make ice-free summers a regular feature across most of the Arctic Ocean, says a British climate scientist who is setting up an early warning system for dangerous climate tipping points.

Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter has carried out a day-by-day assessment of Arctic ice-cover data collected since satellite observation began in 1979. He presented his hotly anticipated findings for the first time at the Planet Under Pressure conference in London on Monday.

Up until 2007, sea ice systematically fluctuated between extensive cover in winter and lower cover in summer. But since then, says Lenton, the difference between winter and summer ice cover has been a million square kilometres greater than it was before, as a result of unprecedented summer melting. These observations are in contrast to what models predict should have happened.

Permanent alteration

Despite fears of runaway sea-ice loss after summer cover hit an all-time low in 2007 – opening the Northwest Passage for the first time in living memory – modelling studies based on our best understanding of ice dynamics indicated the ice cover should fully recover each winter. "They suggest that even if the ice declined a large amount in one year, it should bounce back," says Walt Meier of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Instead, Lenton's research shows a permanent alteration. According to data from the past five years, the Arctic sea ice has not recovered from the 2007 extreme low. "The system has passed a tipping point," he says.

What caused the change is still unclear. Lenton speculates that the exceptional low in 2007 (pictured, above right) might have allowed the ocean to absorb so much heat that a lot of the thicker multiyear ice, which used to persist through the summer, was melted. Alternatively, the loss of ice may have changed air circulation patterns above the Arctic in ways that have similarly "locked in" the change.

More at the linkThe disappearance of Arctic sea ice has crossed a "tipping point" that could... more

JanforGore
added this
2 months ago
|
45 comments

select your country

Community Spotlight

TAGS

tagged w/ Climate Change

top videos

find current on tv

find current online

recent comments

© 2012 Current TV, LLC All Rights Reserved

the basics

follow us online

tools

stay in touch

© 2012 Current TV, LLC
All Rights Reserved