Skip to main content

Cabot office weekly roundup – 3 August 2012

Image
By

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez
What has been interesting to me this week is a real shift in people’s perceptions of environmental risk, global environment change and resilience.  It is like the world has finally woken up.  Only this week climate sceptics have changed their minds and now believe climate change is man-made.  Also we are definitely facing 2 degrees of warming and reversing it is now looking highly unlikely.  By analysing current events held on the subject of climate change, it is clear that they are no longer asking what can we do to prevent it?  Climate change is happening and it is too late.  What everyone wants to know now is, how can we adapt to climate change and how can we be resilient to the global environmental and social changes which will result from at least 2 degrees of warming.

This year we have some exciting speakers talking about resilience, so I know at least the Cabot community will be prepared!  The Cabot events are:
Other news this week
Jonathan Bamber - Glaciology

 Jonathan Bamber in Glaciology, has had a paper published in Science entitled ‘Aerial Photographs Reveal Late–20th-Century Dynamic Ice Loss in Northwestern Greenland’.  Read more about his findings.

Steve Simpson - Cabot Fellow
Our Cabot Fellow, Dr Steve Simpson, joined an expert panel to brief the world’s media on sustaining fish populations at the Coral Reef Symposium in Australia.  He said that recent research has shown that fish larvae have highly developed senses, included smell and hearing, and can actively swim back to their home reefs.  But that means the reef habitat and adult fish populations need to be intact for them to find their way home.  That’s exactly what Marine Protection Areas can provide, with spillover benefits for neighbouring reefs.  Steve said “This research is the strongest support for management strategies that adopt marine protected areas as a fundamental tool for sustaining fish populations”.  

Popular posts from this blog

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

By
This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment.  If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For exa...
Read more

1-in-200 year events

By
You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve...
Read more

Your Waste of Time: Art-Based Geographical Practices and the Environment

By
This blog post thinks through the themes of aesthetic interventions, sensing time and engendering response-ability using artistic responses to climate change. Here, these themes are drawn from one piece of art, Your Waste of Time, by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. This performative showcasing of glacial ice establishes interactions and relations between human bodies and icy materialities- but what is at stake here and what potentialities could be created through artistic practices? These are questions that have arisen through my current dissertation, where I hope to explore artistic responses to environmental degradation through the materialities of ice and plastic. For the piece Your Waste of Time, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson transported several large blocks of ice from Vatnajökull, the largest and oldest glacier in Iceland, to the Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider (Eliasson, 2006). This glacier is almost incomprehensibly ancient, with some parts dating fro...
Read more