Climate and related

Alaska natives left out in the cold While the rest of the world argues about the best way to curb future climate change, says Patricia Cochran in this week's Green Room, native communities within the Arctic Circle are having to draw on their own ancestral strengths to adapt to a rapidly changing world. A day after Christmas, the Anchorage Daily News ran an article about flooding and erosion in small native villages on the west coast of Alaska with names familiar to no one else except Alaskans.

But this is a very familiar story to us. With thinner sea ice arriving later and leaving earlier in the year, coastal communities are experiencing more intensified storms with larger waves than they have ever experienced. This threat is being compounded by the loss of permafrost which has kept river banks from eroding too quickly.

http://tinyurl.com/y8pz6q

Ancient global warming was jarring, not subtle, study finds By Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer January 5, 2007 Foreshadowing potential climate chaos to come, early global warming caused unexpectedly severe and erratic temperature swings as rising levels of greenhouse gases helped transform Earth, a team led by researchers at UC Davis said Thursday. The global transition from ice age to greenhouse 300 million years ago was marked by repeated dips and rises in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and wild swings in temperature, with drastic effects on forests and vegetation, the researchers reported in the journal Science.  "It was a real yo-yo," said UC Davis geochemist Isabel Montanez, who led researchers from five universities and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. "Should we expect similar but faster climate behavior in the future? One has to question whether that is where we are headed." The provocative insight into planetary climate change counters the traditional view that global warming could be gradual and its regional effects easily anticipated. 

http://tinyurl.com/ybslbc

Mexican Office Tower without Air Conditioning by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 01. 5.07 DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE If one ever needed proof of the importance of design in dealing with our current crises, one might compare these two stories: In the village of Kuujjuaq on the Arctic Circle, 10 air conditioners were installed for 25 office workers. "These are the times when the far north has to have air conditioners now to function," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a leading campaigner for the rights of 155,000 Inuit in Canada, Alaska, Russia and Greenland."Our Arctic homes are made to be airtight for the cold and do not 'breathe' well in the heat with this warming trend," she said. (Independent) Meanwhile, in Guadalajara Mexico, which is a bit warmer than the Arctic, Catalan architect Carme Pinos has designed an office building that is supposed to keep cool without AC through careful shading, natural ventilation, fans and convection.

http://tinyurl.com/y6q8xb