Climate Change Society

Coffee Megaproject- Unleashing the power of Ethiopia’s genes and beans for a flourishing industry - Addis Standard By Teshome Hunduma (PhD)  A potential transformative coffee megaproject can amplify Ethiopian coffee’s rich history and untapped potential, leveraging its remarkable genetic diversity for global impact while reaping significant national benefits. Addis Abeba – For centuries, tes...

2 February is World Wetlands Day!

Across the world, wetlands are of great importance to humanity. All agricultural production depends on water which is transported and provided to humankind through wetlands. More than half of the world relies on wetland-grown produce for their staple diet, for example from rice paddies. Wetlands also provide more than a billion livelihoods across the world in an array of activities that also deliver food, water supplies, transport, and leisure. Wetlands loss contributes to poverty and food insecurity.

The focus of the World Wetlands Day campaign is to protect and use wisely the world's wetlands and the resources they provide, to save them from disappearing and to restore those we have degraded.

The Ramsar Convention is the oldest of the modern global intergovernmental environmental agreements. In the fifty years since it was founded, a lot more became known about the importance of wetlands for water security, disaster risk reduction, mitigating climate change, supporting biodiversity and providing livelihoods. Discover actions to conserve, restore and sustainably manage wetlands: https://www.worldwetlandsday.org/actions

via The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands

Syukuro Manabe – awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics – demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth.

In the 1950s, Japanese atmospheric physicist Manabe was one of the young and talented researchers in Tokyo who left Japan, which had been devastated by war, and continued their careers in the US. The aim of Manabes’s research was to understand how increased levels of carbon dioxide can cause increased temperatures. He led work on the development of physical models to incorporate the vertical transport of air masses due to convection, as well as the latent heat of water vapour.

To make these calculations manageable, he chose to reduce the model to one dimension – a vertical column, 40 kilometres up into the atmosphere. Even so, it took hundreds of valuable computing hours to test the model by varying the levels of gases in the atmosphere. Oxygen and nitrogen had negligible effects on surface temperature, while carbon dioxide had a clear impact: when the level of carbon dioxide doubled, global temperature increased by over 2°C.

The model confirmed that this heating really was due to the increase in carbon dioxide, because it predicted rising temperatures closer to the ground while the upper atmosphere got colder. If variations in solar radiation were responsible for the increase in temperature instead, the entire atmosphere should have been heating at the same time.

Sixty years ago, computers were hundreds of thousands of times slower than they are now, so this model was relatively simple, but Manabe got the key features right. You must always simplify, he says. You cannot compete with the complexity of nature – there is so much physics involved in every raindrop that it would never be possible to compute absolutely everything. The insights from the one-dimensional model led to a climate model in three dimensions, which Manabe published in 1975; this was a milestone on the road to understanding the climate’s secrets.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/3iB0LP2

“You know, we’ve got it pretty good here on Earth.” - Brenna Quinlan

Deforestation dropped by an average of 18% across nine central African countries after the alerts were introduced, according a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change! 🌱 The study looked at whether the alert system - launched by the Global Forest Watch monitoring project in 2016 - was affecting tree losses. The system uses satellite images updated every 8 days, and uses artificial intelligence to identify where trees are vanishing by comparing pictures. It then warns subscribers covering the area so they can investigate and take action!

Civilization in action!