Students redesign neighborhood for climate resilience - Yale Climate Connections. Students from Old Dominion and Hampton Universities in Norfolk, Virginia were asked to create a design to help one local neighborhood adapt to sea level rise. They searched for an off-the-shelf design that they could modify for the specific needs of Chesterfield Heights, but came up empty. Skip Stiles of the nonprofit Wetlands Watch, who organized the effort, says that’s because most designs are more reactive than proactive. STILES: “In many ways it’s easier to do adaptation design after a neighborhood’s been flattened – because there’s the political will, there’s the funding, and unfortunately there are fewer structures on the landscape to get in the way of the adaptation design.”
So the students started from scratch, analyzing ideas like living shorelines and rainwater cisterns to create a package of low-cost, high-impact techniques to control flooding. Their work might result in more than just a grade. Reporting credit: ChavoBart Digital Media. Extinction and Climate « ClimateSight. Life on Earth does not enjoy change, and climate change is something it likes least of all. Every aspect of an organism’s life depends on climate, so if that variable changes, everything else changes too – the availability of food and water, the timing of migration or hibernation, even the ability of bodily systems to keep running.
Species can adapt to gradual changes in their environment through evolution, but climate change often moves too quickly for them to do so. It’s not the absolute temperature, then, but the rate of change that matters. Woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers thrived during the Ice Ages, but if the world were to shift back to that climate overnight, we would be in trouble. Put simply, if climate change is large enough, quick enough, and on a global scale, it can be the perfect ingredient for a mass extinction. There have been five major extinction events in the Earth’s history, which biologists refer to as “The Big Five”. How bad will it get? References: ClimateSight. Climate change challenge for computer gamers | Environment. Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
Photograph: Red Redemption They've previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change. Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. "My wife was working on Allen's Climateprediction.net project [a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data], when he took me out for dinner. Welcome - climateeducation.net. Millennium Institute : Projects : Climate Change Studies. The goal of the Climate Change Studies program is to contextualize energy and climate change issues through the creation of a set of integrated simulation models able to test the effectiveness of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies under different scenarios. Understanding that energy issues are global, connected to (and influenced by) climate change and national security issues, MI has adopted a comprehensive approach to support policy analysis and evaluation of these issues.
This approach uses integrated (global, regional and national) models that incorporate the links between energy and society, economy, and environment in a single framework to investigate energy issues. Policy decisions are dependent on the social, economic, environmental and political contexts and require modelers to establish a trust relationship with policy makers and stakeholders in order to create a valuable tool and be successful at developing effective policies. Mitigation Studies. Professor Mandia - Meteorology, Weather Forecasting, Climate, Hurricanes and Earth Science Information.