Searching for Other Earths ByYaleUniversity

E120, e130, e145,

Valuing the Ocean: Preview Summary

http://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=2064

This study, the work of an international, multi-disciplinary team of experts coordinated by SEI, will be published as a peer-reviewed book later this year; this summary is being released to inform preparations for the Rio+20 Earth Summit.

The ocean faces a multitude of interconnected threats that is unprecedented in modern history. This book intends to help crystallise our understanding of the value of ocean services to humankind, allowing them to be accounted for as we plan for a future fraught with risk and uncertainty.

This book is a link in a chain rather than an end in itself. The conclusions and monetary figures it presents are not definitive – too much is yet unknown and uncertain for that – but are intended to contribute towards a new approach to ocean governance, one that is fully integrated and prioritised within the broader picture of social, environmental and economic policy. We critically need to go beyond the current approach of addressing (or ignoring!) one problem at a time. We must create management strategies that are aimed at optimising the sustainable benefits we can obtain from marine resources across scales from local to global, and in the face of several interacting and escalating threats.

….(read more).

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120
Food-Matters http://Food-Matters.TV

Why Divestment Fails | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/30/why-divestment-fails/

By Victor C. Wu
8 hours ago

Surging sea levels and drowning cities. Hurricanes and heat waves. Drought and destruction. As activists have warned us with ever-increasing urgency, we face this stark reality within a century if we fail to address the looming issue of climate change. In the worst-case scenario, life on Earth as we know it will be destroyed. All this may be true, and the scientific consensus is that it is in fact true. So we have a real problem.

But divestment is not a real answer.

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120

Geoengineering: Opportunity or folly? | Harvard Gazette

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/10/geoengineering-opportunity-or-folly/

Keith, Hamilton differ sharply on climate change proposal

October 29, 2013 | Editor’s Pick

By Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer

The technology to shield Earth from sunrays and cut the harmful warming expected in the coming decades is so cheap and readily available that the hurdles to doing it are social, not technical, says Harvard’s David Keith, a supporter of geoengineering.

Opponents say the idea would not only drain energy from efforts to address climate change’s causes, but also is loaded with unknown risks and the potential for abuse.

The nascent debate over geoengineering as a solution to our accelerating climate problem was aired Monday at the Science Center. In an event co-sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, the authors of books taking opposing sides made their cases, one offering a scenario in which technology blunts the very worst of warming and buys time for other efforts to take hold, the other describing a future where the root causes of warming are ignored while weather is controlled by corporations or governments far removed from the effects.

….(read more).

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120

How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/397-science/20136-how-science-is-telling-us-all-to-revolt

Author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein says her choice to risk arrest at the XL Pipeline protest ‘was a last-minute decision,’ 09/02/11. (photo: Shadia Fayne Wood/Tar Sands Action)

By Naomi Klein, NewStatesman

29 October 13

Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.

n December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

….(read more).

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120