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How do countries cover climate change? Depends how rich they are.

by RowenaGisborne9 Posted on August 15, 2019

Deadly heat waves, violent downpours, wildfires that seem to get more intense every year — the climate crisis leaves no part of the globe untouched. But around the world, the media spins warming and its effects differently. The No. 1 sign of how the press in a given country talks about it? Wealth.

Richer nations tend to politicize the issue, while poorer nations more often present it as a problem of international concern, according to a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change. Researchers in Kansas and Vietnam analyzed more than 37,000 news articles from 45 countries and territories using computer algorithms and found that the strongest predictor of how a given country’s press will cover climate change is Gross Domestic Product per capita. In short: The way a country’s media reports on global warming is based on the resources available to combat it.

Richer countries: ‘Is there even a problem?’

Coverage in affluent countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and Spain, focuses on the political debate over how to use ample national resources to address global warming — or whether to do so at all.

Rich countries also tend to frame global warming as a scientific issue — which makes sense, considering that they can devote more dollars to science research. But the study also found that science wasn’t always portrayed accurately. Outlets in richer nations often highlight the voices of people who deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by humans. (That consensus among scientists, for the record, has now likely passed 99 percent). It’s a recurring problem: A new study in the journal Nature Communications found that between 2000 and 2016, prominent climate deniers were featured in a whopping 50 percent more articles than hundreds of scientists.

The media in rich nations “really like the conflict” and tend to “portray climate change as an issue that has not been settled,” said Hong T. Vu, lead author of the study looking at rich vs poor nations and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Kansas.

Poorer countries: ‘We’re all in this together’

In contrast, poorer countries, such as Gambia, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka, simply can’t afford to deny climate change — or adapt to it as easily as wealthier countries do. They rely on aid from richer nations to help fund their efforts to stave off warming’s effects, a trend that shows up in the news. An editorial in the Fiji Times earlier this year, for instance, says that curbing the effects of climate change demands a “global effort.” It also points to the influx of climate adaption money coming into the Pacific region from international agencies.

Asking richer nations to contribute more to climate action efforts may sound like charity, but well-to-do nations contribute way more than poorer nations to carbon dioxide emissions to begin with, and that they generally stand to fare better under warming conditions. A study from Stanford University earlier this year found that climate change is widening the economic gap between countries, simultaneously making rich ones richer and poor ones poorer.

Everyone: Too few solutions

Researchers did find some across-the-board trends when they analyzed coverage in both rich and poor nations. After looking at thousands of articles, Vu’s team determined that the most common frame in climate change coverage was international relations, followed by its effects on the economy. The least popular frame for coverage? Social progress. Only 4 percent of stories covered new lifestyle changes or societal developments related to our overheating planet.

“If we look back, climate change has been in the public discussion for 30 years, and we are not doing very well in communicating it,” Vu said. He hopes that the media can figure out how to communicate the issue as an urgent problem that requires meaningful policy action while simultaneously encouraging people to see the role they can play in remedying our planetary predicament.

He probably wouldn’t mind if it would stop sowing confusion about the science, either.

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How do countries cover climate change? Depends how rich they are.

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Study: Climate change makes rich countries richer and poor ones poorer

by MakaylaAsher Posted on April 23, 2019

It’s not just capitalism that’s making the rich richer and the poor poorer: Climate change is exacerbating the trend worldwide. The economic gap between the richest and poorest nations, in terms of per capita income, is now about 25 percent larger than it would have been without human-caused climate change, according to a new study from Stanford University.

“Our results show that most of the poorest countries on Earth are considerably poorer than they would have been without global warming,” climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, lead author of the study, said in a statement. Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, some rich countries have actually benefited economically from global warming.

Between 1961 and 2010, warming temperatures have significantly slowed economic growth in tropical countries like India and Nigeria, while aiding economic growth in cooler countries like Canada and the U.K., according to the study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

“The historical data clearly show that crops are more productive, people are healthier, and we are more productive at work when temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold,” said study co-author Marshall Burke, a Stanford assistant professor of Earth system science, in a press release. “This means that in cold countries, a little bit of warming can help. The opposite is true in places that are already hot.”

While it’s been well-documented that low-income communities bear the brunt of flooding, famine, and other climate change-related horrors, this study endeavors to show the big picture of which countries win and which lose out as a result of global warming.

The researchers drew on several previous studies, analyzing annual temperature changes over 50 years and 165 countries’ economic growth data to estimate how the shifting climate has affected growth. The U.S. was middle of the road: Climate change dragged down its GDP by just 0.2 percent from 1961 to 2010.

Sudan was the biggest loser, so to speak. The researchers estimated that the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is 36 percent smaller today because of global warming. India closely followed, with a 31 percent loss, and Nigeria, with a 29 percent blow.

Norway was the big winner: Researchers estimated that its current GDP is 34 percent higher because of climate change. Canada’s is 32 percent higher, and in recent years, Russia’s has also seen a boost due to warming.

The numbers the study produced are stark, shocking even (India’s GDP could have grown by almost third more over the past half-century, if not for climate change!?). And they don’t represent outliers in the data. The Stanford researchers drew these estimates of climate change’s economic effects from a wide range of projections — 20,000 versions per country, to be precise.

“For most countries, whether global warming has helped or hurt economic growth is pretty certain,” Burke said.

Tropical countries truly got the short end of the stick. They tend to contribute far less to greenhouse gas emissions than more economically well-off nations. And, according to Burke, “There’s essentially no uncertainty that they’ve been harmed.”

The economic loss some countries faced “is on par with the decline in economic output seen in the U.S. during the Great Depression,” Burke said. “It’s a huge loss compared to where these countries would have been otherwise.”

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Study: Climate change makes rich countries richer and poor ones poorer

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Are the US Dietary Guidelines on Milk Racist?

by RollandCockerill Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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The federal government’s dietary guidelines urge adults to consume at least three cups of milk a day to guard against osteoporosis, a disease in which bones become brittle and weak. People who are lactose intolerant—a group that includes 75 percent of African Americans—”can choose low-lactose and lactose-free dairy products,” the guidelines say. But a new study has called into question this one-size-fits-all approach. It suggests that most African American adults might not need milk at all.

Read: The Scary New Science That Shows Milk Is Bad for You

Scientists have known for some time that people who live in Africa have some of the world’s lowest rates of osteoporosis. Researchers long assumed that the difference was due to Africans’ lower life expectancy (since the condition usually shows up later in life), more active lifestyles, and a lack of doctors to diagnose and treat the condition. Yet a study published in June in BoneKEy, an offshoot of the journal Nature, offers a compelling alternative explanation: Many Africans are genetically adapted to low-calcium diets.

Study author Constance Hilliard, an evolutionary historian at the University of North Texas, examined osteoporosis rates in Nigeria and Cameroon, two African countries that fall within an area known as the tsetse belt. Dairy farming is impossible in this equatorial region because of the presence of the tsetse fly, a tropical pest that transmits parasites that kill cattle. Despite a nearly complete lack of dairy consumption in the two countries, their osteoporosis rates are among the lowest in the world—just two to three cases out of every 100,000 people.

In an effort to figure out why, Hilliard looked at Kenya, a country outside the tsetse belt where milk consumption is common yet life expectancies and socioeconomic conditions remain essentially the same. Kenya’s rate of osteoporosis is dramatically higher—245 cases out of 100,000 people. That’s also much closer to levels in the United States, where the rate is 595 per 100,000 people.

So what’s going on here? One possibility is that milk consumption actually increases the risk for osteoporosis. As I mentioned in a magazine piece last year, a 2014 Swedish study found women who drank more than two and a half glasses of milk a day had a higher fracture risk than their counterparts who drank less than one glass a day. Though other studies have come to the opposite conclusion, researchers have found, on balance, that calcium intake does not significantly reduce the risk of hip fracture in women or men.

Hilliard finds a more compelling explanation in genetics. The tsetse belt is largely inhabited by the Niger-Kordofanian ethnicity (also the predominant ethnicity among African Americans), which is known to be lactose intolerant. Niger-Kordofanians make up for the lack of milk in their diets by better absorbing calcium. In the United States, studies have shown that black children and adults excrete less calcium than whites on essentially the same diets, thereby retaining more calcium in their bones. “This is why certain populations can maintain strong bones and are at low risk of osteoporosis even though they consume 200 mg of calcium day”—a fifth of what the federal government recommends, Hilliard says. It could also be why the rate of osteoporosis and related fractures in African American women is half that of Caucasian women.

“This is a very interesting paper,” says Connie Weaver, the director of the Women’s Global Health Institute at Purdue University and an expert on osteoporosis. “We know that genetics determine 60 to 80 percent of bone mass and lifestyle choices the rest. This paper offers one genetic difference that is likely more controlling of bone mass than diet or other lifestyle choices.”

Still, Weaver doesn’t think African Americans should consume less dairy. Though they may have less of a genetic disposition for osteoporosis, she argues that “there still would be a range of risk within that genotype that would be improved by adequate dairy or the nutrients provided by dairy.”

Hilliard makes no dietary recommendations—after all, she is a historian, not a nutritionist. Still, she points out that African Americans may be uniquely susceptible to some of milk’s side effects. Multiple studies have correlated high levels of dairy consumption to prostate cancer; African Americans are 2.4 times as likely to die from the disease as the population at large. Though other genetic and socioeconomic factors may explain their higher risk, some studies have pointed to dairy. The California Collaborative Prostate Cancer Study, published in 2012, found that calcium consumption was closely related to an increased risk of prostate cancer, particularly in black men who carry a genotype common in populations of African origin.

Yet the federal government’s dietary recommendations don’t account for such distinctions. And that omission, she says, amounts to something like discrimination. “What has happened is the medical community has universalized the particular biology of Caucasians,” Hilliard says. “And the medical community has yet to frame its questions in ways that investigate whether foods that have been culturally labeled as ‘good for you’ have deleterious consequences for minorities.”

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Are the US Dietary Guidelines on Milk Racist?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged african-americans, california, count, Everyone, kenya, nature, nigeria, swedish, though, united | Comments Off

Here’s the Next Big Story on Climate Change

by LaraKiek280 Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last December, the climate summit in Paris offered journalists an unprecedented opportunity to reframe the global warming story. Climate reporting used to rest on the tacit understanding that the problem is overwhelming and intractable. That no longer rings true. While we have a better understanding than ever of the potential calamity in store, we finally have a clear vision of a path forward—and momentum for actually getting there.

To that end, Paris was a turning point for me personally, too: It was the end of the beginning of my career as an environmental journalist. This week I’m leaving Mother Jones after five years covering climate and other green stories. Paris underscored that it’s past time for me to look beyond the borders of the United States. That’s why, this fall, I’m going to undertake a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. For at least nine months, I’ll move between Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria to document how climate change is affecting food security.

I see agriculture in Africa as one of the most important yet underreported stories about climate change today. It’s a fascinating intersection of science, politics, technology, culture, and all the other things that make climate such a rich vein of reporting. At that intersection, the scale of the challenge posed by global warming is matched only by the scale of opportunity to innovate and adapt. There are countless stories waiting to be told, featuring a brilliant and diverse cast of scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians, farmers, families, and more.

East Africa is already the hungriest place on Earth: One in every three people live without sufficient access to nutritious food, according to the United Nations. Crop yields in the region are the lowest on the planet. African farms have one-tenth the productivity of Western farms on average, and sub-Saharan Africa is the only place on the planet where per capita food production is actually falling.

Now, climate change threatens to compound those problems by raising temperatures and disrupting the seasonal rains on which many farmers depend. An index produced by the University of Notre Dame ranks 180 of the world’s countries based on their vulnerability to climate change impacts (No. 1, New Zealand, is the least vulnerable; the United State is ranked No. 11). The best-ranked mainland African country is South Africa, down at No. 84; Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda rank at No. 147, No. 154, and No. 160, respectively. In other words, these are among the places that will be hit hardest by climate change. More often than not, the agricultural sector will experience some of the worst impacts. Emerging research indicates that climate change could drive down yields of staples such as rice, wheat, and maize 20 percent by 2050. Worsening and widespread drought could shorten the growing season in some places by up to 40 percent.

This isn’t just a matter of putting food on the table. Agricultural productivity also lies at the root of broader economic development, since farming is Africa’s No. 1 form of employment. So, even when hunger isn’t an issue, per se, lost agricultural productivity can stymie rural communities’ efforts to get the money they need for roads, schools, clinics, and other necessities. “We only produce enough to eat,” lamented Amelia Tonito, a farmer I met recently in Mozambique. “We’d like to produce enough to eat and to sell.” More food means more money in more pockets; the process of alleviating poverty starts on farms.

The story goes beyond money. Hunger, increased water scarcity, and mass migrations sparked by natural-resource depletion can amplify the risk of conflict. Al-Shabaab in Kenya and Boko Haram in Nigeria have both drawn strength from drought-related hunger.

This is also a story about new applications for technology at the dawn of Africa’s digital age. It’s a story about gender—most African farmers are women—and the struggle to empower marginalized sectors of society. It’s about globalization and the growth of corporate power, as large-scale land investors from Wall Street to Dubai to Shanghai see a potential windfall in turning East and West Africa into a global breadbasket. Such interventions could boost rural economies—or disenfranchise small-scale farmers and further degrade the landscape.

Of course, all the data points I’ve just mentioned are only that: cold, lifeless data. They work as an entry point for those of us who are thousands of miles away from Africa. But they don’t tell a story, and they won’t lead to action. They won’t help Amelia Tonito improve her income. My hope is my coverage of this story will help provide the depth of understanding that is a prerequisite for holding public and corporate officials accountable, so that the aspirations of the Paris Agreement can start to come to fruition.

I’ve loved my time at Mother Jones and I’m truly at a loss to express my gratitude to my editors for the experiences they have afforded me. I’ve seen the devastating impacts of global warming, from the vanishing Louisiana coastline to the smoldering wreckage of Breezy Point, Queens, after Hurricane Sandy. And I’ve seen the cost of our fossil fuel addiction, from the dystopian fracking fields of North Dakota to Germany’s yawning open-pit coal mines. But I’ve also seen the fortitude of the young Arizonans who spent weeks sweating in the woods to protect their community from wildfires. And I’ve seen the compassion of a caretaker who, in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, stayed with her elderly patient on the top floor of a Lower East Side high-rise with no electricity or running water.

Encounters like these are what draw me to climate change as a beat. The story is just getting started.

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Here’s the Next Big Story on Climate Change

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These tiles harness electricity from your footsteps

by CleoO76107 Posted on June 20, 2016

Something’s afoot

These tiles harness electricity from your footsteps

By Emma Grey Ellison Jun 20, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Fitbit users like to point out, walking burns a lot of calories. But the energy you expend doing it ceases to be useful after your sneakers hit pavement. That’s where Pavegen CEO and founder Laurence Kemball-Cook saw room to create a new kind of sustainable energy technology. His company’s Pavegen floor tiles generate electricity by harnessing the power of footsteps.

The tiles are a kind of kinetic energy recovery system. We’ve seen these before in race cars and buses — but where recovery systems in automobiles convert the kinetic energy normally lost in braking to electrical energy, Pavegen tiles are all about capturing the spring in your step. Tread on a tile and the surface depresses up to one centimeter (Kemball-Cook compares the sensation to walking in a children’s play-area). The downward force drives an energy-storing flywheel inside the tile, which spins to convert kinetic energy into electrical energy through electromagnetic induction. It’s like a generator — only instead of spinning a turbine with wind, water, or coal, it’s spinning a flywheel with footsteps.

The beauty of these tiles is that they can conceivably go anywhere there’s floorspace and foot traffic — think airport terminals, sidewalks, and playing fields. That idea has attracted support from companies as big as Shell and celebrities as diverse as Al Gore and Akon (yes, that Akon) — but backers were hard to come by when Kemball-Cook started out. He began developing the technology while studying design at Loughborough University, and developed the first prototype in all of 15 hours. “I just hacked it together. There was wood in it, and it was held together by duct tape. I went to 150 venture capitalists, and they all said no. The government said, ‘It would never work, we can’t help you.’”

That was seven years ago. Pavegen tiles have since been used to help light soccer pitches in Brazil and Nigeria, a hallway in Heathrow Airport, and offices and shopping centers in London. And that was all with less-efficient technology. Earlier versions of tiles were rectangular, and only produced power when someone’s foot fell in the center of a tile. The latest generation of Pavegen tile, V3, is triangular, which allows them to include a generator in each corner. That means the whole tile pivots toward a generator no matter where you step. The V3 generates 5 continuous watts of power as you walk across it — that’s more than 200 times more efficient than Kemball-Cook’s first prototype.

The new tile design accommodates three separate generators to maximize the power of your steps. Pavegen

Granted, five watts isn’t a ton, and not everyone is convinced that the world will ever run on Pavegen. For the 2013 Paris Marathon, Pavegen laid down a 25-meter strip of the last generation of tiles, and they ended up generating 4.7 kilowatt hours of energy — enough to keep an LED bulb burning for over a month, but nowhere near enough to power your home. “The very basic physics of it is pressure times the deformation of the material,” says David Horsley, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at UC Davis. “You’re not going to get very much for a step, considering you can get 100 watts from a square meter of solar paneling. But for small wearable electronics like watches, or maybe even your phone, this kind of energy harvesting makes sense.”

So it’s not going to put big oil out of business, and you may need to take a lot of steps to make them worth it. Good thing they’re durable as hell. “The floor is one of the harshest environments known to man,” Kemball-Cook says. “You have to be able to withstand environment challenges, water, vandalism. You need good test equipment. We have a footfall rig with four pneumatic drivers that’s being going nonstop for four years, running analytics and just trying to destroy the product.”

With the V3, Kemball-Cook thinks he’s finally reached the point where lower costs and higher efficiency will allow him to scale. Other people think so, too, with installations slated for locations like Oxford Street, London’s bustling shopping thoroughfare, and walkways outside the White House. Tribal Planet, a mobile analytics and activism company, thinks the V3’s new data-tracking abilities could help people forge more personal conceptual models of energy production and consumption. “Energy hasn’t really been a consumer product. Even utilities are a very abstract idea,” says Tribal Planet CEO Jeff Martin, a former Apple executive. “Is my utility getting this energy from nuclear power plant or a wind farm or a coal mine? I have no idea. It’s probably a combination of all that.”

If Pavegen tiles were constantly underfoot — and connected to your phone — you could track how much energy you produced personally. Kemball-Cook likes to think you could even be rewarded for it. “Imagine if you go to get sneakers and you get money off, because you’ve been generating energy for the store,” he says. There’s altruistic potential as well: Kemball-Cook envisions users donating the energy produced by their footsteps to any Pavegen-powered community in the world.

This notion of person-to-person energy accountability excites Pavegen and Tribal’s leadership. They want users to think of their steps almost like “a vote” in favor of a location, an organization, or a policy. “Not wasting your footsteps, or anyone else’s, really starts a conversation around energy that I think is more constructive than abstract concepts, like carbon-offset, that consumers are typically engaged in,” Martin says. “My vision is that this becomes a civic duty, because sustainability and wellness are inextricably connected.”

That’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s highly unlikely that Pavegen’s technology will outshine the promise of solar or wind power. But its unique ability to make the road toward greener energy tangible is what makes it exciting. With Pavegen, whether you can wrap your head around the nuances of wind turbines or carbon accounting or not, doing your part for sustainable energy can literally be your next step.

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These tiles harness electricity from your footsteps

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, solar power, sustainable energy, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged cities, kemball, king, london, nigeria, paris, planet, there | Comments Off

Check out these photos of bad-ass climate activists around the world

by EveSchirmeister Posted on May 16, 2016

Check out these photos of bad-ass climate activists around the world

By Katie Herzogon May 16, 2016Share

Over the weekend, tens of thousands of activists in 13 countries on six continents protested against climate change and the burning of fossil fuels.

Part of the Break Free campaign, activists from the coal fields of Germany to the oil wells of Nigeria to the rail lines of Washington state showed up with the same message: keep fossil fuels in the ground and transition to renewable energy.

In Proschim, Lusatia, Germany

Tag Archives: nigeria

Richer countries: ‘Is there even a problem?’

Poorer countries: ‘We’re all in this together’

Everyone: Too few solutions

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