Climate Change Management: Cleaner Fleets

Fleets of vehicles – buses, trucks, vans – are essential parts of providing  government as well as private sector services and that means they have a role in  promoting development. Buses provide mass transit, usually at comparatively low  cost, which help people in remote areas improve their quality of life and  connect people with their places of work if they cannot find work nearby or  cannot afford to live near to their place of work – this is a situation that is  increasingly common in the cities of the developed world,  which rely on low cost labour from service workers but force them to live long  distances away and this greatly reduces their standard of living.

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Climate Change Management: Production Forests

Forests are particularly important in the management of climate change because of their role in exchanging oxygen and  carbon gases and because of their vulnerability to the effects of changes in the  climate.

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Climate Change Management: Exotic Pests

There has always been migration of plants and animals around the world: it is  after all how small islands became habitable. Animals have been known to catch  lifts on driftwood or other floating items, rats have travelled around the world as unwanted guests in  the holds of ships and many plants are actually designed to  propagate by  spreading their seeds to the winds.

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Climate Change Management: Post-Apocalyptic Populism

The weather is important to the world now more than ever – it has always been  important, of course, since it is directly related to agricultural production in  addition to lifestyle and security issues.

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Climate Change Management: Developing Human Competencies

We have all, I am sure, seen films of  television programmes depicting the future after some terrible disaster – it  might be a nuclear war, it might be a terrible plague or it might be the  inexplicable outbreak of flesh-eating zombies (brains!).

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Climate Change Management: Risk Assessment

Risk is a curious phenomenon that most people fail to assess properly. We each  of us have some particular events of which we are disproportionately scared,  whether it might be house invasion, aeroplane accident or being bitten by a wild  or dangerous animal that is far out of proportion to its likelihood (that does  not mean that it cannot happen, just that it is much less likely than we might  believe).

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Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change

The second edition of the Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change has just arrived in, as can be seen above, a handsome three volume set. It is published by Sage and edited by George S. Philander. My articles in the encylopedia are:

Walsh, John, “Atmospheric General Circulation Models,” Vol.1, pp.96-8, “Climate Models,” Vol.1, pp.291-4, “Climatic Data, Nature of the Data,” Vol.1, pp.319-22, “Cyclones,” Vol.1, pp.411-3, “Department of the Interior, U.S.,” Vol.1, pp.435-7, “Global Ocean Observing System,” Vol.2, pp.638-40, “Ice Component of Models,” Vol.2, pp.745-7, “Intensity Targets,” Vol.2, pp.774-6, “Land Component of Models,” Vol.2, 847-8, “Marrakesh Accords,” Vol.2, pp.886-8, “Oil, Consumption of,” Vol.2, pp.1055-8, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,” Vol.2, pp.1072-4, “Rain,” Vol.3, pp.1166-8, “Resources,” Vol.3, pp.1199-1201, “Technology,” Vol.3, pp.1323-8,   in George S. Philander, ed., Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change, second edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 2012).

Water Management: Glass Flood Barriers

Given that global climate change is causing an increasing risk of floods over extended areas, more attention is required by governments, organizations and individuals concerning how to protect themselves and their loved ones and property from the waters.

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Water Management: Floating Houses

One way of dealing with increasing flood problems is to build houses (and even  one day entire communities) that float. This is a concept that has already  started to come into practice in, for example, Canada, where the terrain and climate can be unfriendly and  so living on one of the numerous lakes can be an attractive option.

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Fighting Climate Change: Beetle Invasion

Global climate change seems to be almost entirely random and unpredictable:  perhaps that is because there are so many variables involved, all interacting  with each other in ways that have never been properly mapped, that it appears  even to scientists to be difficult to know what will happen.

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