Optimistic Climate Research Articles

Large-scale impact of climate change vs. land-use change on future biome shifts in Latin America.

Climate change and land-use change are two major drivers of biome shifts causing habitat and biodiversity loss. What is missing is a continental-scale future projection of the estimated relative impacts of both drivers on biome shifts over the course of this century. Here, we provide such a projection for the biodiverse region of Latin America under four socio-economic development scenarios. We find that across all scenarios 5-6% of the total area will undergo biome shifts that can be attributed to climate change until 2099. The relative impact of climate change on biome shifts may overtake land-use change even under an optimistic climate scenario, if land-use expansion is halted by the mid-century. We suggest that constraining land-use change and preserving the remaining natural vegetation early during this century creates opportunities to mitigate climate-change impacts during the second half of this century. Our results may guide the evaluation of socio-economic scenarios in terms of their potential for biome conservation under global change.

Response of deciduous trees spring phenology to recent and projected climate change in Central Lithuania

The analysis of long-term time series of spring phenology for different deciduous trees species has shown that leaf unfolding for all the investigated species is the most sensitive to temperatures in March and April and illustrates that forcing temperature is the main driver of the advancement of leaf unfolding. Available chilling amount has increased by 22.5% over the last 90years, indicating that in the investigated geographical region there is no threat of chilling shortage. The projection of climatic parameters for Central Lithuania on the basis of three global circulation models has shown that under the optimistic climate change scenario (RCP 2.6) the mean temperature tends to increase by 1.28°C and under the pessimistic scenario (RCP 8.5) by 5.03°C until the end of the current century. Recently, different statistical models are used not only to analyze but also to project the changes in spring phenology. Our study has shown that when the data of long-term phenological observations are available, multiple regression models are suitable for the projection of the advancement of leaf unfolding under the changing climate. According to the RCP 8.5 scenario, the projected advancement in leaf unfolding for early-season species birch consists of almost 15days as an average of all three used GSMs. Markedly less response to the projected far future (2071-2100), climate change is foreseen for other investigated climax species: -9days for lime, 10days for oak, and 11days for maple.

Teaching to be American: the quest for integrating the Italian-American child

In the early years of the twentieth century, the great structural, social and cultural changes in American society included a growing number of immigrants arriving from the poorest regions of Europe. For the first time, the issues of immigration, assimilation and social integration became the most important problems facing American society. In the optimistic climate of the so-called progressive era, social reformers thought that these problems could be solved by the science of pedagogy, as applied to the educational needs of foreign immigrants. This essay centres on the pedagogical efforts of Italian-American educator Angelo Patri, who attempted to integrate Italian-American children into the fabric of American society through education. It starts by assessing Patri’s early writings, such as A Schoolmaster of the Great City, and his private and professional papers. In doing so, his work is situated in the debate on progressive education alongside pedagogue Maria Montessori, demonstrating his central role in the debate on integration through education. Within this analysis, particular attention is paid to the notion of learning by doing, and it is argued that both educators were influenced by this particular aspect of progressive education.

Thinking Diverse Futures from a Carbon Present

Thinking Diverse Futures from a Carbon Present Karen Pinkus (bio) Our collective human ability to know what we mean by “the present” and “the future” has never been more vexed. To cite design critic Tony Fry, because of “defuturing,” that is, our unsustainable practices, “we are now at a point when it can no longer be assumed that we, en masse, have a future” (2009, 1). Many important thinkers have shown that our age is breaking the speed barrier. Under our current “dictatorship of speed,” as Paul Virilio might put it, we are “too dazed by the speed and the shock of the collapse to reflect properly upon the crisis and develop adequate political responses to it” (Hassan 2011, 399-400). Or, following Bernard Stiegler, we are unable to grasp that speed is prior to time and space and indeed, determines them. The implications of the “originariness” of speed are enormous: Recognizing the priority of speed allows us to move away from the conception of time as an overarching, stable, homogenous framework in which things happen and to acknowledge the complex heterogeneous forces of mobility, velocity and acceleration out of which it is composed. (Gere 2004, 54) Critical theory around speed and time has tended to focus on various forms of technology (Heidegger: atomic warfare; Blanchot: “disaster” as disorientation; Stiegler: biotechnology and real-time computing), but little has been written yet on how anthropogenic climate change in particular has radically altered perceptions of time, and indeed, the flow of time itself. Optimistic climate scientists and policy-makers in the present—let us say a carbon present—continue to develop decadal schemes for carbon reduction and mitigation as they refer to a diversified energy portfolio for the future, a future that they seem relatively confident in identifying and linking with market cycles.1 Yet in the most brutal sense, it is already too late to speak of, [End Page 195] or better, to write of a present as if this were distinct from something that is going to happen in the future, however far or near this might be. Climate change has already happened—indeed, strictly speaking it has never not happened—and the earth has already been radically changed from the way it was, in relatively stable terms for a long past, a past of at least ten thousand years.2 Our need to conceive of a present whose limits we can define—that is, perhaps, as a carbon present—is hard-wired into our neurons. Surely, then, we must interrogate what is meant by “the present” as well as what modalities of potential hybridity are to be thought in the future. This essay is a speculative attempt to open up this problem without a resolution. When does this carbon present begin and at what point might we say it has ended? Since the current “carbon economy” is, as Allan Stoekl, among others, has so eloquently explored, intrinsically tied to human energy, production and life itself—it is something like a total system. When energy is biopolitical, power is biopower, put otherwise. The gradual or abrupt replacement of this political economy with another one—whether singular as in the (failed) promise of a “hydrogen economy” or, more practically some would say, with a hybrid model (“no single silver bullet”)—must necessarily have profound causes and effects beyond the “inputs.” This seems a crucial area for critical thought, not because humanists should or could become futurologists (developing a predictive-technological discourse), but in a more basic sense: the very sense of how we think climate change. Here, then, are three possible presents that I will link with corresponding futures:3 Hypothesis One The present—let us say an anthropological present that will lead, perhaps inevitably, to the age that has been called the Anthropocene—begins around 992,000 years ago as Homo erectus rises in Olorgesailie in the African Rift Valley. This is a rough estimate, since very obviously we cannot point [End Page 196] to a single originary moment if we want to follow this hypothesis.4 Yet the temptation to represent origins is irresistible. Recall, here, the strange temporality of the opening sequence in the film 2001: A Space...

Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (review)

Reviewed by: Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke Lawrence W. Rosenfield Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Gregory Clark . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 181. $34.95, hardcover. Once again we are indebted to the University of South Carolina Press for a fine contribution from its Studies in Rhetoric/Communication series. Gregory Clark sets parallel aims: to apply Kenneth Burke's critical vocabulary to cultural history, and to read American tourist sites and literature in the frame of Burke's notion of "identity" (147). Clark sees the American public landscape as "constituting in individual citizens a shared sense of common identity as members of a national public" (148). He claims that such shared experiences are as rhetorical as are more typical instances of public discourse. Thus American tourism has contributed to developing us into a national community. Clark supports his theme of rhetorical influence with six case studies: New York City, Shaker villages, Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, the Lincoln Highway, and the 1915 San Francisco Panama Exposition. While Burke's vocabulary offers a handy point of departure, the real news is in [End Page 172] Clark's discussion of the meaning and prominence of each of his six exemplars as cultural icons. This may be most evident (and endearing) as Clark recalls his own boyhood visits to Yellowstone, where he stood in the parking lot and was as captivated by the variety of license plates from across the country as by the hot springs and mudpots (69). This too was a celebration of nationhood. Equally fascinating is his consideration of the efforts of Stephan Mather, Mary Colter, and the Fred Harvey Company both to preserve national parklands and to develop a befitting "National Park Service Rustic" architectural style to enhance the natural landscape (this long before Disney's theme parks). Such typical excerpts almost cry out for Ken Burns or the History Channel to recreate the optimistic climate of a Romantic Post-Bellum civic culture depicted by Clark. The book becomes more tedious when its repeated invocation of Burkian terms tilts toward veneration. In his lifetime, Burke was unnerved by uncritical academic worship. He sought understanding, not deification. As he remarked, "They are an evangelical brood, bejeez. So . . . I [became] an observer at my own funeral."1 His wariness of academic enthusiasm is well taken. It does no disservice to Burke, for example, to recognize that his "identification" is a reworking of Vico's "ingenium" outfitted in creaky 1920s literary machinery.2 Shorn of some of the cumbersome Burkian baggage, the book's exemplars emerge as epideictic celebrations of the American tourist phenomenon and its part in shaping a national Romantic consciousness: And as rhetoric they traffic not in actions but in attitudes. People can encounter them without ever thinking of themselves as anything but spectators. Even in that role they are being educated . . . in matters of individual and collective identity. (148) Seen thus as reminders of our forebears' vision in pioneering the development of a national landscape trust, Clark's work edifies and opens us to the quiet excitement of meditative discovery. Clark guides us to monuments of cultural memory; his project is remarkably readable and a uniquely American enterprise. Lawrence W. Rosenfield University of New Hampshire Notes 1. Letter to Malcolm Cowley, dated 11 August, 1955. Newberry Library Collection, Chicago. 2. Cf. M. Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), 151. [End Page 173] Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University

Locating the Centre: Confining and Defining the Power of Paris

In the historiography of French nation-building, the centre-periphery model has proved seductive as much for its failures as for its successes. Following the post-war era, modernization theory promised a golden age to any nation which could overcome the challenges of economic and cultural diversity and move as a whole towards a modem homogeneous economy and political system. In this optimistic climate, historical examples abounded, best represented in France by Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen in which the transition from traditional to modem society took place through the domination of modem urban centres over a tradition-bound periphery. I In the 1980s and 90s, however, modernization theory was increasingly under fire in a global climate where regionalism and once local identities became justifications for separatist movements and put the structure ofthe modem nation to test. Amidst these conflicts, revisionists like Caroline Ford and Peter Sahlins stepped in to reconsider the relationship between the centre and the periphery by suggesting that in France the nation was not imposed on the centre by the periphery but developed through a dialogue between them. But while these revisionist works provided a more subtle understanding ofthe making ofthe modem nation by giving more agency to the periphery, they did not reconsider the centre as such.3 The aim ofthis article is precisely to bring this national centre under the historian's gaze in order to rethink the relationship between the centre and the periphery.

Forest Sector Impacts from Changes in Forest Productivity Under Climate Change

The consequences of elevated carbon dioxide and climate change on forest systems and the role that economics could play in timber harvest and vegetation change have not been addressed together. A framework was developed to link climate change scenarios, an ecosystem model, a forest sector model and a carbon accounting model. Four climate scenarios were used to estimate net primary productivity (NPP) for forests in the United States. Changes in NPP were estimated using TEM, the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model which uses spatially referenced information on climate, soils and vegetation to estimate important carbon and nitrogen fluxes and pool sizes within ecosystems at the continental scale. Changes in NPP under climate change were used to modify timber growth within the Aggregate Timberland Assessment Model (ATLAS), which is a part of the forest sector model (TAMMATLAS) used by the Forest Service to examine timber policy questions. The changes in timber inventories were then translated into changes in the amount of carbon stored on private timberlands using a national carbon model (FORCARB). Regional changes in productivity filter through the forest sector and result in changes in land use and timber consumption. Long-term changes in carbon storage indicate that these private timberlands will be a source of carbon dioxide for all but the most optimistic climate change scenario.

Child health promotion, screening and surveillance.

After the Second World War, as the incidence of infectious and nutritional disorders declined, professionals and parents began to seek more precise diagnosis and more effective therapy for children with cerebral palsy, mental handicap and related disorders. Although a handful of exceptional men and women had shown what could be accomplished (Shonkoff & Meisels, 1990), the prevailing view was that little could be done and indeed parents of these children were not infrequently advised to "put them in an institution". In the 1950s and 60s, new ideas began to create a more optimistic climate of opinion. It was thought that much, perhaps most, disability was caused by perinatal complications and was therefore potentially preventable; and that early intervention (e.g. physiotherapy for cerebral palsy) might lead to cure or at least substantial improvement. Research in child psychology offered a more scientific basis for the assessment and management of developmental disorders. A sense of urgency was created by the prevalent belief that the child's developing nervous system and psychological functioning were far more amenable to intervention in the first few months or years of life than subsequently (Anastasiow, 1990), and that if suitable therapy was not provided then, the opportunity would be lost for ever. This notion of a "critical period" in development, together with optimism regarding the possibility of intervention, led to a sense of urgency which was responsible for a gradual change in the provision of child health services. Previously, the paediatric health professional had simply waited for the parent to seek advice--the "passive" or "reactive" approach.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Acceptance and Morality

As a moral ideal, accepting the circumstances of one's life and its attendant miseries is, if not positively repugnant to modern ears, at least utterly puzzling.Historians might attempt to trace this aversion to the French Rationalists and English Utilitarians who believed that once the laws of human behaviour were discovered all social problems would be solved and who even tried to establish communities in which unhappiness would simply be eradicated. In this optimistic climate of social engineering, when it began to appear as self-evident that each individual had a natural ‘right’ to happiness, accepting misery and social evil must have seemed perverse in contrast with striving to improve one's own and others’ condition in life.