From Inderscience Publishers and United Nations University:
Loss and damage from climate change
Despite attempts at adaption losses and damage from climate change are significant
An open access special issue of the International Journal of Global Warming brings together, for the first time, empirical evidence of loss and damage from the perspective of affected people in nine vulnerable countries. The articles in this special issue show how climatic stressors affect communities, what measures households take to prevent loss and damage, and what the consequences are when they are unable to adjust sufficiently. The guest-editors, Kees van der Geest and Koko Warner of the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, Germany, introduce the special issue with an overview of key findings from the nine research papers, all of which are available online free of charge.
‘Loss and damage’ refers to adverse effects of climate variability and climate change that occur despite mitigation and adaptation efforts. Warner and van der Geest discuss the loss and damage incurred by people at the local-level based on evidence from research teams working in nine vulnerable countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kenya, Micronesia, Mozambique and Nepal. The research papers pool data from 3269 household surveys and more than 200 focus groups and expert interviews.
The research reveals four loss and damage pathways. Residual impacts of climate stressors occur when:
- existing coping/adaptation to biophysical impact is not enough;
- measures have costs (including non-economic) that cannot be regained;
- despite short-term merits, measures have negative effects in the longer term; or
- no measures are adopted – or possible – at all.
The articles in this special issue provide evidence that loss and damage happens simultaneously with efforts by people to adjust to climatic stressors. The evidence illustrates loss and damage around barriers and limits to adaptation: growing food and livelihood insecurity, unreliable water supplies, deteriorating human welfare and increasing manifestation of erosive coping measures (e.g. eating less, distress sale of productive assets to buy food, reducing the years of schooling for children, etc.). These negative impacts touch upon people’s welfare and health, social cohesion, culture and identity – values that contribute to the functioning of society but which elude monetary valuation.
The publication of this set of research papers is very timely as loss and damage will be a key topic during the climate negotiations in Warsaw next month (11-22 November 2013), and empirical evidence is still scarce. The findings also contribute to the emerging body of literature on adaptation limits and constraints, a topic that – for the first time – is discussed in a separate chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group 2 (IPCC AR5 WG2).
The issues that have arisen through this research point to an even greater urgency for ambitious mitigation and adaptation that are sufficient to manage climate stressors. If this goal is missed, loss and damage will undermine society´s ability to pursue sustainable development.
“The special issue of the International Journal of Global Warming focuses on a crucial topic: ‘Loss and damage’ which refers to adverse effects of climate variability and climate change that occur despite mitigation and adaptation efforts,” Editor-in-Chief Ibrahim Dincer of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology says. The issue reports on the first ever multi-country study on this emerging topic from the perspective of vulnerable communities in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The research papers included show that current mitigation and adaptation efforts are not enough. People across the study sites were not passive victims of climate change. A large majority implemented a wide variety of adaptation and coping measures to avoid impacts of climate stressors, but these measures were often insufficient or came at a cost. The negative effects were not simply monetary, there were cultural losses and non-economic costs, in terms of time investment, social-cohesion and livelihood security, were also widespread. “IJGW positions itself uniquely by addressing the issue and offering solutions,” Dincer adds.
“Loss and damage from climate change: local-level evidence from nine vulnerable countries” in Int. J. Global Warming, 2013, 5, 367-386
In the interests of enhancing global discussions of critical and urgent issues arising from climate change now, the research papers are being made available by Inderscience Publishers free of charge to all readers at the following link:
http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticletoc.php?jcode=ijgw&year=2013&vol=5&issue=4
Loss and damage from climate change: local-level evidence from nine vulnerable countries
Koko Warner; Kees Van der Geest
DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2013.057289
Abstract: Loss and damage is already a significant consequence of inadequate
ability to adapt to changes in climate patterns. This paper reports on the first
ever multi-country, evidence-based study on loss and damage from the
perspective of affected people in least developed and other vulnerable
countries. Researchers in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, the
Gambia, Kenya, Micronesia, Mozambique and Nepal conducted household
surveys (n=3,269) and more than a hundred focus group discussions and open
interviews about loss and damage. The research reveals four loss and damage
pathways. Residual impacts of climate stressors occur when: 1) existing
coping/adaptation to biophysical impact is not enough; 2) measures have costs
(including non-economic) that cannot be regained; 3) despite short-term merits,
measures have negative effects in the longer term; or 4) no measures are
adopted – or possible – at all.
Another BS report.
Completerly OT-
You have to do a post on the UK hiding the comparison of nuclear to renewables!
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/10/uk-government-hides-its-own-graphic-comparing-nuclear-to-wind-and-solar/
Adapting to energy poverty caused by carbon strangulation doesn’t seem to appear among their ‘stressors’.
Translation: “Gimme, gimme.”
Wow – more junk. Perhaps those “brilliant” researchers might want to mention all the wars, the insurgencies, over population, Sharia laws, poor to thuggish governments, lack of to no education, rural moving into city life, or any of a host of problems associated with each of these countries. These people are desperate to prove the craziest junk – that is sick.
This is a step towards mandating climate change insurance. It echoes the steps made by Obama and other countries that have mandated health insurance. Create the data that says damage and loss is out of control and leads to unfair harm to some but not to others. Therefore the world powers need to mandate climate change insurance to control and distribute the costs associated with said damage and loss.
Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kenya, Micronesia, Mozambique and Nepal. Most of these nations are basketcases. Several barely meet the definition of a state in the modern European sense. How can one sift out the effect of climate from the usual bedlam and calamity which befalls them?
It’s getting harder and harder to convince myself that higher academic institutions provide a net benefit to the planet. Of course, this is the UN, so they provide a leading indicator for lowering standards.
OMG. Now we’ve descended from climate models to social models. All completely unencumbered by any messy data and totally untainted by reality.
Further study is emphatically not required or desired!
Is this also available in English? I did not understand a thing.
GlynnMhor says:
October 25, 2013 at 12:04 pm
Adapting to energy poverty caused by carbon strangulation doesn’t seem to appear among their ‘stressors’.
_________________________________________________________________________
What stressors? Sudden and abrupt climate change such as the next ice age coming in 4 weeks? The evidence is that these folks seem to have survived climate changing over many centuries, which implies that they will very likely survive the climate changing over the next few centuries. They would do much better if they didn’t have to cope with things like artificial energy poverty brought about first world do-gooders.
Fortunately, this really isn’t science so when I’m skeptical I can’t be anti-science. Focus groups, household survey’s and experts being interviewed. This is science worthy of peer-reviews publication? BS
I wonder if their inability is affected by their lack of food which some of us are burning for food and their lack of affordable electrical power?
Makes one go “Hmmm…”.
This is not science, it is policy advocacy.
”The central research question was as follows:
So, they might as well say: we’re not looking at this as objective scientists, we’re looking to use this to advocate for carbon dioxide mitigation.
Suspicion confirmed in “conclusion”:
”Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions (strong influence on all pathways to loss and damage). Success in avoiding situations in which society faces loss and damage –particularly under pathway 4b – depends on appropriately ambitious mitigation decisions today.”
How about that; if we don’t act now it’ll be super bad. Sounds worse than a used car salesman.
Of course, you can use “science” to build a case for almost anything (like banning water), that’s not persuasive in the least and actually has the opposite effect of you losing all credibility as an objective evaluator of evidence.
http://www.dhmo.org/
http://blogs.plos.org/models/climate-scientists-must-not-advocate-particular-policies/
Recently back from Manila, again, which isn’t to bad on the main roads, has some lovely buildings and an American Memorial cemetery that is hauntingly wistful about the sacrifice the US made in the Pacific War. In its way as lovely as Changi in Singapore
But go down an alley, and it is Third World; mothers in their mid-twenties with five – perhaps more – children; drainage trying to do the job of ten drains; electric wires on poles; derelict buildings next to sky-scrapers; litter almost everywhere.
Manila is crowded.
How crowded? It’s the size of Singapore, which is home to about seven million people. Add the population of London – 10-13 million, depending on who’s counting (illegal immigrants – barely a dozen . . . .); plus sundry Valladolid, Beziers, Karlsruhe, and Sfax. Manila is 21-23 million.
The people – that I met – were lovely.
But the systems of governance [I got that word from Harold Wilson] are barely functional on a good day.
So –
The guest-editors, Kees van der Geest and Koko Warner, could get out more – looking at the quoted Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kenya, Micronesia, Mozambique and Nepal – not one of which approaches the Philippines in general development in my [limited] experience: –
Kenya a couple of times.
Mozambique – a friend worked there four or more years ago.
A friend of the wife is from Nepal.
– plus I read the press and the Internet.
In the quoted countries anything could happen, and you can attribute it to, well, more or less any proximal cause – and a shed-load of indirect causes.
‘Climate change’ – but – the climate always changes!
Auto
Oh, my bad assumptions makes bad research:
and all the analysis was:
Loss and damage are all from climate change = extreme weather events
The above table quote was for country local climate-event loss-type
“The publication of this set of research papers is very timely as loss and damage will be a key topic during the climate negotiations in Warsaw next month..”
Very timely as usual for these politically targeted papers. Tropical temperatures haven’t changed. Globally, the temps since 1890 (?) have increased 0.7C (assisted with ~ half of this in the form of step increments in adjustment) – all due to rises in temperate and polar zones, the latter the most.
This is a cynical paper. The damage being done to 3rd World countries lies in food costs not insignificantly contributed to by green/UN policies of burning of food grain for fuel, by withholding funds (World Bank, EU, etc.) for building of cheap fossil fueled power to these countries, and other ways denying this vulnerable sector the potential to industrialize.
Shame, shame
Wealth and liberty, which go together and liberty goes first, are the keys to adapting to just about anything the environment throws. As other commenters noted, the “vulnerable” countries are all poor and all oligarchies, dictatorships, or close enough you can’t tell the difference. With or without climate and weather issues, they are desperately in need of Vitamin L, followed by Vitamin D(evelopment).
Lack of low cost, abundant energy sources would seem to be the largest ‘stressor’ for most populations that find themselves struggling to adapt to changes in the short and long term weather effects. Abundant, low cost energy makes acquisition of clean water, clothing, shelter, food, and sanitation much easier. The vagaries of Life et.al. are sooooo much easier to adapt to, when energy is readily available and easily affordable.
The article is an overt political setup piece for the wealth redistribution and sustainable development agendas embedded in the UN. They selected anecdotal incidents that they construed to be caused by AGW (without evidence-based support) and drew the conclusions they desired to support their bifurcated agenda.
This
Loss and damage from climate change: local-level evidence from nine vulnerable countries
Koko Warner; Kees Van der Geest DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2013.057289
is a political document, not a scientific document.
MtK
Wut. So let’s assume all the worst apocalyptica of AGW. Then, by the current trends that we counterfactually extend to infinity and beyond. This paper is predicated on the ‘inadequacy’ of people to adjust to annual temperature trend identical to one between, just about 2 and 3 in the afternoon. And 3 and 4. And another pair at night.
That despite this, they are inadequately prepared, because, after a heap o’ centuries of infinite progression, they will be inable to cope with a temperature difference between the now when they’re alive and the then when they are so far dead that we’re into carbon dating their corpses. The same temperature variation that occurs…. twice per day.
Nevermind, any notion of the correctness of anything regarding climate. The inadequacy of people in dealing with these issues is not because they’re unprepared. It’s because they’re inadequately immortal.
“The guest-editors, Kees van der Geest and Koko Warner of the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, Germany”
After the departure of the BRD government to Berlin following the reunification, Bonn became host city for all UN and globalist organisations including those that want to create the worldwide caliphate.
The town has really descended full scale into madness.
How many of these people are the victims of weather as opposed to climate? How can you tell the difference?
What if you held the same surveys and interviews in 1949, people would still have more or less the same problems – the weather?
These problems have been with us for donkey’s years, yet the world has never been better off. People in developing countries today are better off than they were 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Look at the Asian Tigers, India, China. Six of the fastest growing economies in the world in the past decade are in sub-Saharan Africa (though starting from a low base). Look at Mexico and Brazil. Indur Golkany has over the years tackled many of these life and development issues excellently.
It seems to me they are trying to lump EVERYTHING into global warming. This is dishonest and does not really help. People need better access to abundant, cheap energy, education, health, decent shelter, and good governance. Better adaptation flows from these things.
This, to me, is further proof that the UN is pushing what was called the Bariloche World Model when it was developed in the 70s. It came out of South America with financing from the Canadian Government and was seen as a means of extracting money from the developed North on behalf of the South. It is also consistent with what the New School was pushing in the early 80s.
The presumption of Climate Change puts a panache on the explicit redistribution to the poor from the Bariloche model. Makes it seem necessary and for “damages” instead of you owe us because we are all “one humanity.”
But make no mistake about it Bariloche is consistent with where both the UN and the OECD have been wanting to go for decades as they act as the tax free salaried administrators of a world “in which human needs and human rights, rather than the desires to consume and accumulate wealth, would become the basis for resource allocation.”
Damages gets the desired cash flow without having that kind of graphic sales pitch that might disillusion the people in the countries being told to do with less and shift to a higher quality of life based on relationships instead of consumption.
My word this is all happening so fast and at the same time right now. But the models and intentions have been around for decades. Just a more politically palatable explanation for the attempt at a wealth grab to supposedly close the income and wealth gap among countries and within countries.
Perhaps because the temps are showing what a Statist farce CAGW always was.
DirkH-
if you have never looked at the UN’s Alliance of Civilzations group and the nature of its goals and conferences you should take a look. It came on my radar after the head of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, said that UNESCO was pursuing Marxist Humanism as its vision and would be working with AoC. It began about 2006, just after the UN expanded its definition of Sustainability to include the social, cultural, and economic.
It should be labeled “Loss and Damage from Living”. The Climate always changes. It is a part of life.
If there were an empirical study of the effects of warming (or climate change) on human populations–just as with plant and animal populations–it would have to span the years from 1970 to 1997 approximately, since there hasn’t been appreciable global warming since that time.
What “climate change” or “changes in climate patterns” are they talking about?
I thought that David Suzuki was selling travel tours in Bhutan where people who die earlier and are poorer are supposedly the happiest in the world… Must be Suzuki’s carbon footprint LOL
“…growing food and livelihood insecurity, unreliable water supplies, deteriorating human welfare and increasing manifestation of erosive coping measures (e.g. eating less, distress sale of productive assets to buy food, reducing the years of schooling for children, etc.). These negative impacts touch upon people’s welfare and health, social cohesion, culture and identity – values that contribute to the functioning of society but which elude monetary valuation.”
Sustainable policies in water and agriculture have precisely the same effects!
What little purchasing power they have is easily destroyed by rising food prices.
Here’s the authors’ bios”
In other words, successful parasitic rent-seekers working at something called the “United Nations University”. I note that one of them is trying to sell “Climate Insurance” on the side …
I file this under the heading “Never ask your barber if you need a haircut” …
w.
Tom-the UN calls it the World Happiness Report and it commenced in 2012. Richard Layard from UK is involved. The OECD calls this push that trumpets Bhutan so as “subjective well being” and it is yet another area that the bureaucrats wish to use as an excuse to administer all of us. With respect to every aspect of our existence.
Grrrrrrr. Mitigation and adaptation against what? Rising sea levels? Sea levels have been rising for thousands of years and aren’t accelerating. Heat? There’s been no surface warming for over 15 years and slight cooling over the last decade. Worse tornadoes and hurricanes? Where’s the data they have been getting more extreme over the last 40 years or more? Economic damage? There are more people alive with more property in areas such as flood plains, tornado alley and fire prone areas.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. What a load of bollocks.
The study itself is hilarious. They went around, and found whatever “climate-related stressors” people were experiencing. Things like say floods. Or droughts.
Then they asked the people what they were doing about those “climate-related stressors”.
Brilliant.
Here’s the countries, and the stressors:
Bangladesh , Salinity intrusion
Bhutan , Changing monsoon
Burkina Faso , Drought
Ethiopia , Flooding
Gambia , Drought
Kenya , Flooding
Micronesia , Coastal erosion
Mozambique , Drought and flood
Nepal , Flooding
Gosh … people in Ethiopia get stressed by droughts, and people in Bhutan worry about the monsoon? Who would have guessed?
My first guess for “salinity intrusion” in Bangladesh would be overpumping of a thin layer of fresh water over salt … and my first guess for “coastal erosion” in Micronesia (Kosrae) would be reef modification/destruction.
Other than that, the study determined that droughts and floods stress societies and countries.
w.
Above I said
A bit of research shows (emphasis mine):
I’ve been doing this too long …
w.
How awful for those people….
…imagine how bad it would be it the temperature actually changed
either that, or they are saying these people are so stupid they haven’t been able to adjust to a 1/2 degree
Think of the good that might be done were the funds squandered on such foolish studies diverted to most anything that might actually assist third-world people directly. A nice load of dry socks would be preferable to this shipment of scientific garbage.
‘International Journal of Global Warming ‘ a journal whose entire reason to exist disappears in ‘smoke ‘ if ‘the cause’ falls
And the chances of them not producing research that support AGW are?
[…] International Journal of Global Warming […”]
Kind’a says it all.
Idle musing; I wonder how long that journal will last?
“Empirical evidence is still scarce”.
I’ll bet it is!
The problems in the target countries are not caused by climate but by bad governance, population / resources stresses, conflicts, etc. You have to wonder why the researchers decided to pick these countries? Is it because they were looking for a particular result?
Energy and clean water are many of these people’s immediate problem. Save them from a typhoon and their major headaches are still there.
This report is your typical NGO speak con job. You could replace every mention of the word ‘climate’ with ‘weather’. Weather problems have always been with us, floods, droughts etc. It’s just BAD WEATHER.
Yet one can link a climate stressor. What crap. It’s a con job, grab your wallets.
I found this article much easier to believe when I added the word ‘regulation’ after every time the word ‘climate’ appeared.
Why is it that people nowadays never think to move to higher ground? If they were in the middle of their country and the ground was sinking below the water table creating a lake, would they stay? Coastal peoples have lived with storms and floods since time began, Why do some people now think we have the power to stop it??????
INSANITY!!!!
THE CLIMATE DOES NOT NEED SOLUTIONS BECAUSE IT HAS NO PROBLEMS.LEAVE IT ALONE.
Third world could adapt if they were allowed to develop their economies, instead of being trapped by progressives and preventing them from exploiting their resources. Burning dung in a thatched hut is not “progress”.
@ Auto
I was stationed in the Philippines for almost two years back in the Viet Nam era. I’m certain it’s worse now, after all the jobs lost when the US pulled it’s bases out at their request – cutting off their noses to spite their face. People have no idea how bad it is in Third World countries, even those much better of than the Philippines. Climate change arguments are the least of those people’s concerns. They need more of what carbon based energy can provide, not less.
Here is the solution!!! Dang the USA for becoming “cowards”…
%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.eaglespeak.us%252F2007%252F04%252Ffloating-nuclear-power-plant-for-russia.html%3B360%3B239
*The MH-1A Sturgis floating nuclear power plant, a 45-MW pressurized water reactor, was the first floating nuclear plant to be built (and the last nuclear power plant built and operated by the U.S. Army). It provided power at Panama Canal during Vietnam war years, allowing more boats to pass through the canal (2,500 a year more is the # we’ve seen) than otherwise would have been possible.
[Historical photo: The MH-1A Sturgis (from U.S. Army magazine, Army Logistician, Sept-Oct 2001]
* The Army awarded a contract to design, build, and test a 10,000-kW floating nuclear plant on August 3, 1961. The plant is to be installed in the hull of a reconditioned and modified surplus Liberty Ship. The $17-million contract was awarded to The Martin Company, located in Baltimore. The construction, fabrication, and test operation phases were subject to the exercise of options by the government after 15-month maximum design was completed. Three years were to be allowed for subsequent construction and test phases. [Source: Nuclear News, “Army awards contract for floating nuclear power plant”, September 1961]
Picture here:
Regarding Bangladesh, a bit of research reveals:
As you might imagine for a river delta, there’s salt water interpenetrating it at depth in many areas. These are overlain with fresh water, which is recharged by rain and from the rivers. As a result, many wells in Bangladesh put out much fresher water in the winter, and saltier, sometimes unusable water in the summer when it’s dry. As you might imagine, there is a balance between inflow (rain and river water) and outflow (pumping for agriculture and human consumption) … and when that balance is upset, the wells give saltier water.
What does it have to do with “climate”? Well … nothing, really. There’s a Bangladeshi analysis here that says:
I suppose this kind of research is beyond your abilities when you work for the United Nations University (surely the “UNU” is a rare beast, a palindromic oxymoron).
w.
They forgot to dial in the added cost of transportation and storage of the much bigger crops and food supply from increasing CO2 (from its indisputable benefits in the role it plays in the law of photosynthesis as an atmospheric fertilizer).
Also, the additional work and cost involved with feeding and raising more livestock and other animals that can be supported with this increase in food supply.
“United Nations University”
No need to read further…
Speaking of Bangladesh, I posted this before. Looks like so called “Climate Change” and Bangladesh is not a recent phenomena. 17 of the worst 35 Cyclone disasters involved Bangladesh:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/deadlyworld.asp
Martin: “I found this article much easier to believe when I added the word ‘regulation’ after every time the word ‘climate’ appeared.”
I got a lol and fetched up this for the folks here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
And then it occurred to me that I keep seeing 3.2 tossed around as a climate senstivity value. Don’t remember the context or if it’s still current. But one could have great fun with the anthropic value of Indiana Pi and amateur mathematicians.
‘The evidence presented here tells household stories of ‘just getting by”. Sadly, most households have only ever ‘just got by’ in the countries featured in this ‘research’. It’s called subsistence.
Questionaires and interviews of such households will generate anecdotal evidence at best, probably biased towards agreeing with the presumed interest of the researcher (eg ‘We are looking into how climate change is affecting your life’).
Mostly rubbish, but it will go down a storm in the Guardian.
About all that was missing was the elements of investigation for the global socio-economic adaptations required for the climatic impacts vis-à-vis Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus.
“In each case study area, open interviews were conducted with five to ten questionnaire respondents to hear their personal stories of impacts, responses and residual loss and damage. “
And of COURSE we can be certain they were not prompted in any way… They should have videotaped it, a resurrection of “Queen for a Day”.
These nitwits want any excuse they can find to turn the entire third world into one big welfare state instead of helping them establish honest governments and allowing them to develop their own energy resources to get out of poverty via a free market .
This reminds me of a story my father told quite some years ago about his expierince in the OSS during WW II. He helped prepare papers and other essentials for agents operating behind German lines, coordinated their assignments and debriefed them after extraction. He said they discovered that whatever kind of intelligence you tell your agents to look for, that is what they will find. It’s not that they were being dishonest, but telling people to look for specific things can bias their perceptions. So if you were concerned about mechanized units traveling at night over secondary roads and asked agents to look for evidence if same, it was practically guaranteed they would frequent movements of vechicle columns at night over secondary roads. So a perfectly reasonable effort to get specific targeted intelligence sometimes had the effect of manufacturing “intelligence” confirming a suspected activity. And since intelligence units are supposed to develop and report useful intelligence, there is internal resistence to reporting “we really don’t believe what our sources are telling us”. My father said you really had to work hard to figure out how much of what was reported was really credible.
The survey questions only covered “climate risks”. Nobody asked how stressed people were about corrupt or incompetent public officials, gangs of drug thugs, warlords, etc. If you did a similar survey to determine which potential risks of an alien invasion worried people the most (abduction & probing [X-files], having your life energy sucked out [Stargate Atlantis], etc.), you would get similar results and conclude we urgently need to mitigate the risks of an alien invasion.
Surely climate has always changed in the past, is currenlty changing and will alwasy change. So the need for adaptaion is ever pressnt with us. But, this has abosultely nothing to do with the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s air. And, the amount of money wasted on wind frams, pointless Kyoto accords, carbon taxes and what hve you has served only to divert money that should have been spent on frackning in the short term and on getting atomic energy underway in the long term underway, and planning for sensible adpataion.
Even, just reading the article is a time and energy waster.
Well, electricity consumption per capita in states studied is as follows: Bangladesh (28 W), Bhutan (28 W), Burkina Faso (5 W), Ethiopia (4 W), The Gambia (13 W), Kenya (25 W), Federated States of Micronesia (192 W), Mozambique (48 W), Nepal (21 W). Of course they have a problem. On the other hand, Singapore (884 W), which is located in the same general region, can manage, somehow. Source: List of countries by electricity consumption.
The whole world is in a terrible state. Somebody needs to underwrite this. Despite man’s best efforts 7 billion people will die in the next 100 years. It is a tragedy beyond description. Who is going to pay for this ? We must begin taxing the wealthy. Why stop at just the carbon molecule, why not methane and the inert gases as well ? How about a small tax for use of oxygen and definitely one for using nitrogen as well ? Radio waves, cosmic rays, sun light, the mind boggles at these opportunities.
When I read the list of countries supposedly impacted Ethiopia stood out as to how things can change in 30 years.
But how has anything changed in the understanding of Ethiopian climate since the 2001 paper by Mike Hulme, Ruth Doherty, Todd Ngara, Mark New, David Lister called ‘African climate change: 1900–2100’?
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/cr/v17/n2/p145-168/
which contains the following, absolute gem of a description of the real problem with trying to predict what the regional affect of AGW will by and corollary how would one recognise climate change due to AGW?
fine to this point but then goes on to say
One can make guesses but you can’t know they are sensible they just may not sound stupid.
30 years ago Ethiopia was in a terrible drought (remember Live Aid), now the problem is flooding.
No way one can reasonably say that this transistion is down to AGW. It is halfway through a 60 year cycle which might be a reasonable hypothesis given how often 60 year cycles crop up..
Robin says:
October 25, 2013 at 1:08 pm
“DirkH-
if you have never looked at the UN’s Alliance of Civilzations group ”
Thanks, will take a look.
Here are my observations from the newly industrializing / developing world:
1) Deforestation is still a problem.
2) Flood control tends to be a joke.
3) Respect for property lines and other demarcations is weak.
4) Appropriate regulation of issues affecting the commons is disfunctional to non existent.
5) As as result of 3 and 4, issues such as subsidence from ground water extraction, salt water intrusion, water hole and other surface water drying, wild fires, debris flows, etc, etc are rampant.
6) There are many other issues with similar themes.
All of this results in much death and destruction. Almost none of this is due to any sort of “global climate change.”
From the paper …
The climate related stressors included: Salinity Intrusion, Changing Monsoon, Drought, Flooding, Coastal Erosion, and Drought and Flood.
With the caveat …
The limitations of the research objective and methods include:
1 attribution of local climatic changes and extreme events to global warming is beyond the scope of this research
[ … ]
So, the title of the paper, “Loss and damage from climate change: local-level evidence from nine vulnerable countries” has nothing to do with human caused, carbon induced climate change but rather with … change. Change that is not quantitatively defined in the paper. How much does the monsoon have to change before it becomes a stressor? Is one dry year a stressor? Two? Three or more?
Due to the general lack of leadership and a
10,000 year old mind set please post the next whiner Mr. Watts.
Should the United Nations set-up a fund to help these people?
Sure why not.
The best thing the UN could do for them is build some power plants and some power lines. The people of these nations (as all people before them have done who have had this opportunity) will then find ways to make everything work well enough and raise their standard of living 50 fold.
Climate has little to do with it in the end. People have made it work in the most inhospitable climates as well as the most hospitable ones.
The greatest invention in human history – deploying the energy of fossil fuels.
1 large coal-fired power plant does the work of 2 million people doing manual labor.
I think this article should be the Friday Funny.
Since this climate change is a new and catastrophic phenomena,I suppose that the 14th century Norse on Greenland were not affected by climate change.
This would also suggest that the researchers who have suggested that the great civilizations of South America, Egypt and many other places are completely out of bounds to suggest that drought of other climate changes affected them.
Despite the proud title “Loss and damage from climate change”, there is nothing there related to a climate change. Just weather. They are earning their UN money.
AW You should be aware off this now google “news” is putting realclimate.org stories as news to a “global warming” search see for yourselves.
https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=global+warming&oq=global&gs_l=news-cc.1.1.43j0l10j43i53.17765.19827.0.21773.6.5.0.1.1.1.483.1684.1j3-2j2.5.0…0.0…1ac.1.HundkY3tJkQ of 100% stories are now heavily biased to AGW meme. Nearly all
“vulnerable countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kenya, Micronesia, Mozambique and Nepal.”
So places with lovely governments. But they missed N Korea and Cuba.
Where are the vanishing shorelines?
3,000+ household surveys and a 100 focus group surveys. Sounds like lots of baseline climate change data to me (sarcasm!).
Eliza says:
October 25, 2013 at 5:43 pm
“AW You should be aware off this now google “news” is putting realclimate.org stories as news to a “global warming” search see for yourselves.”
Google news is 90% liberal anyway. You don’t use Google News to read the truth; you use it to read the lies.
Back in 2009 before COP15 I used Google news to find the daily scare from the warmists. Good times, Good times. Today you have to wait for weeks until a warmist scare pops up in the front page.
Go to google and type in “biggest problem of mankind” or so and watch the autocompletion. No warmism there these days. It’s a nice trend check. Warmism the mighty has fallen.
International Journal of Global Warming?? My my, aren’t they behind the times. Perhaps it’s a carryover from the Norse journal of the same name from 1000 years ago.
I want to let everyone know that the company I work for (one in the S&P 100) is doing its part to help these climate-ravaged countries. Our food service vendor is reducing its purchases of beef by 20% in favor or other alternatives to reduce its carbon emissions/footprint by a calculated total of 1025 metric tonnes over the course of the next 12 months. Knowing that there is 3,160,000,000,000 metric tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere, we are reducing worldwide CO2 by 0.0000000324%. It is likely the company will pat itself on the back by including it in the sustainability metrics section in the next annual report.
It is truly astounding that this massive study of the empirical evidence of damage produced by climate change does not include any evidence at all that there has been any climate change! No evidence of climate change…just reports of damage from climate change.
These people are delusional!
I think the accused witches of 1692 Salem got a fairer trial than CO2 is getting today.
Were told that the average global temperature has hardly changed in the last 20 years or so.
There must be some places among the study areas of Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Kenya, Micronesia, Mozambique and Nepal where the climate has hardly got hotter in the last 20 years. If this is so, how can we expect reliable verbals from focus groups, some of whom have not had a significant exposure to temperature change trends in their adult lifetime?
Besides, anecdotes are usually avoided because they are so unreliable. It is so easy to lead an interviewee by carefully phrased questions.
How did these brilliant researchers leave out the heat stroke victims in scandanavia
Late 20th century and early 21st century Sahel droughts are given as an example :
All from Wikipedia (Yeah, I know, but the references are all there, numbered in the text. I’m just too busy to look them all up right now, and I presume this is largely correct. I will be suitably contrite if proven wrong, but please provide referenced links rather than an anti-wikipedia rant)
I would bet my Beatles collection that the reason most of the species that have ever lived are no longer around because of climate change. I also think that is normal. Nature has no soul – use yours at your own peril.
Nature confounds – the Australian continent created a niche for a prime marsupial predator and the thylacine was created. Grasses evolved to kill trees and meadows result. Trees are created to kill every other kind of thing and eucalyptus thrive. Nature heats up and pastoral pansies head up hill to seek lofty opportunity. Continental glaciers melt and the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas are reborn, creating flooded villages and new opportunities. A land bridge to England disappears under the waves and all manner of genetic adaption takes place on the new island. A river gets blocked by glacial ice and 50 years later glacial lake Missoula breaks out and the Scablands of Washington State are created. Thousands of square miles of formerly living things are floated away to the Pacific Ocean and giant Canadian Rocky erratic boulders are rafted to the southern Willamette Valley of Oregon where they become evidence that nature doesn’t care for stagnation. Hydraulic dams squeezing through narrow valleys down river force the water level higher than the tallest buildings to be built in what becomes Portland, Oregon. It’s all over in a month and what ever was to be didn’t happen. Something else happened and that is how nature works.
Nature continually changes. It cannot be stopped so try to stay out of the way. And don’t tell me a silly tale that the current conditions are anything but weather variability. Climate change is a lot of things but it is not subtle.
I wondered about the journal, so I browsed it a bit. Apparently solar is practical in Mauritius based on a 5 year payback and a feed in tariff of just 70 cents per kwh. Yup, just 70. Then there is the paper on neural networks being used to model the energy input/output of dairy cattle in Iran. Apparently the authors obtained data from face to face interviews, after which they pronounced their models accurate despite them calculating that the cows produce more energy than they take in.
http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=55818
It isn’t clear from the abstract if the researchers interviewed the cows or the farmers. I perused a few more of their journals with similar results. Lotsa dreck, not much knowledge. Someone must be making money of this thing, no one with an ounce of pride in their work would want to be associated with it.
The marked shift in perception started when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans http://climal.com/resistance-climate-justice.php
DirkH says:
October 25, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Back in 2009 before COP15 I used Google news to find the daily scare from the warmists. Good times, Good times.
>>>>>>>>>>
If you want a laugh, type “uninstall” and see what the first suggestion is. Then type “install” and see what the first suggestion is.
Any “distress sale of productive assets to buy food” in these countries may be due to diverting the raising of food grains to ethanol.
The authors are showing signs of the “El niño se orina en sí mismo” infection. This infection is prevalent amongst alarmist personalities that must feel the warmth.
They should seek medical help immediately.
Petrol in the USA is roughly USD 4 per gallon, reflecting just about its total global costs and a very small profit for the retailer. Imagine if that price went to USD 29. Thats the current situation with electricity. It costs about USD cents 4 per Kw hour but people in Denmark pay cents 29, Germany 25 and Cambodia 25. Thats real stress, thats real theft and thats the real effect of Fraud.
What on earth are they talking about?
Back in 1998 I had the misfortune of being dragged to New York City by a family member on vacation. Then, I had the misfortune of misfortunes, whilst in NY City, by being dragged, kicking and screaming, to a tour of the UN headquarters. Trapped inside, the group I was in was informed by the guide about the UN efforts against colonialism. The guide pointed to a map on the wall showing all the colonized areas of the world before the advent of the UN. Then the guide pointed to an adjacent map showing all those former colonies now being free, having shed the yoke of colonization, all thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the UN. Wow, from this I discovered that my geography lessons had led me astray all these years. I discovered, to my surprise, that Alaska had been a former colony of the United States. And now, as the color coded indications on the maps showed, Alaska, following the creation of the UN, was no longer a colony of the US but a state of the US. Bravo, UN!
And I think, just like it must’ve been hard for some doctors to give up the idea of bleeding people with leeches, it’s just as hard, and possibly impossible, for the UN to give up the idea that all the problems of the developing world relate to colonization. Since the colonial empires have long since scooted from the scene the UN just has to come up with something, somewhere, somehow, that points, however wobbly, to some form of continuing exploitation by those currently nonexistent empires. Voila, global warming. Voila, climate justice.
There’s a problem, I think, with all of this. Wasn’t the United States, um, uh, well, a #%}[xiGxj)%# colony at one time?! Ok, thirteen colonies. That’s even bleeping more! So, if the UN is right, and the West owes the developing world for its exploitation of its former colonies doesn’t the rest of the West owe us good ‘ol Americans a heapa’ change? C’mon, you Dutch, British, French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Russians (remember Alaska?), lets fork it over. You owe us for our lack of development here in the USA. And, while you’re at it, cut your carbon too, and fork over some more cash and technology for what you still do to your former colony. I want justice.
And furthermore, just as we were able to thrust off that yoke of colonization (almost impossibly without the UN to help us) you had to poison us with your hi falutin’ ideas about something called an Enlightenment that stripped us of our simple culture and acceptance of an all encompassing religiously operated society. We could’ve been that one true religion of peace nirvana and truly shown progress like we jealously see so commonly elsewhere. You wronged us and we need some money.
And the researchers never, for a moment, considered the land tenure
and government taxation systems could be the cause.
Reform of land tenure with reform of the tax system usually fixes many
of the problems.
There’s an “International Journal of Global Warming”??? What?… created just to publish stuff like this??? Why yes, there is! My oh my. How to convert an un-sensible change into Non-sensical change. This is the journal that accepts the manuscripts that “Nature Climate Change” rejects?
I feel ill.
Auto says:
October 25, 2013 at 12:36 pm:
“But go down an alley, and it is Third World; mothers in their mid-twenties with five – perhaps more – children; drainage trying to do the job of ten drains; electric wires on poles; derelict buildings next to sky-scrapers; litter almost everywhere.”
It is sad to read that conditions in Manila have changed so little from the time
I was there over sixty years ago. The description by Auto , above, is close to how
I saw it then. Stationed at a US Army radio transmitter site in Caloocan on the
northern edge of Manila , we saw some of the scenes every day, as having no
mess hall (a small unit), we had to drive 3 or 4 miles for chow. And yes, I agree
the people were very nice, despite the conditions. I enjoyed the time there.
Blessed with many natural assets, and a hard-working adaptable people it
could only be political interference that holds the country down .
RSB.
dp says:
October 25, 2013 at 8:44 pm
Nature has no soul.
dp, that is as profound a three-paragraph refutation of the whole climate boondoggle as can be mustered. Thank you.
I hate to think of the financial, health and social damage and costs suffered by the UK during the past five worst winters for years – brought on by global warming.
davidmhoffer says:
October 25, 2013 at 8:58 pm
“If you want a laugh, type “uninstall” and see what the first suggestion is. Then type “install” and see what the first suggestion is.”
I see “uninstall … mactype” “install… Java”…
rather bland.
DirkH;
I see “uninstall … mactype” “install… Java”…
rather bland
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Huh. I get uninstall Internet Explorer and install Google Chrome. I’ve suggested it to several friends who all got the same thing.Just tried it again now, install Google Chrome has now moved to 5th.
United Nations University, just another educational disaster area. Don’t send you kids there unless you want them back as certified morons.
Except for no “abrupt changes” in climate, and considering that the source of the study is as credible as tobacco industry funded smoking studies, it is a great report.
Cant win with empirical evidence…Their answer.. Lie like a rug..
Cant win with fear-mongering.. Make things up that allow them to redistribute wealth by force..
I am so tired of this CAGW crowd just making things up and trying to force feed us this junk. Do Socialists/Marxist/Communist ever tire of trying to force their control on other people?
Evolution would demand that any organisim or group of organisms, when faced with a changing environment, either adapt, relocate or die. Have the basic laws of survival changed? Are people who constantly live under grossly incompetent goverments excluded from basic natural laws?
They can make a lot of money renting out huts to the refugees of global cooling-
gbaikie says: “So places with lovely governments. But they missed N Korea and Cuba.”
Maybe they went in but never came back out because they were instantly hired for better paying positions as propaganda ministers?
Step two will be figuring how many $billions we owe for the “damages” and “losses” these “climate victims” have sustained due to “climate change”.
Lets take the farce to its next level,, national elections of UN functionaries.
No more shall Canada appoint the useless and braindead, like a certain Prime Ministers nephew.
We shall vote to appoint a representative fitting the national faith in the UN.
A rabid squirrel gets my vote, or better yet man eating bears will no longer be culled but instead captured and sent as the Canadian rep to the UN.
When are we going to shut this nest of useless parasites down?
Isn’t there some more landfill needed in the East River?
It is worth bringing a couple of points together.
timothy sorenson (October 25, 2013 at 12:40 pm) quotes from the summary
They whole study fails to demonstrate the cause of the anomalous events studied are due climate change. Most are due to infrequent extreme weather events.
Mac the Knife says
The way reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events (or other natural disasters, such as earthquakes) is long-term and sustained economic growth. That growth for many countries (including India and China) is being fuelled by coal.
This collection of studies fails to make the case for any sort of problem with global warming, whilst ignoring that the policies they advocate will deprive the poorest on the earth the chance of a better future.