Climate commons was intended always to be a short term experiment with two primary goals. First to bring together researchers/thinkers/producers from a wide range of fields to contribute information/ideas to a multidisciplinary pool. Henry Jenkin’s writes about this in his blog: “In a networked society, people are increasingly forming Knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.”

The second was to create on the internet in a blog form a space for conversation, questions, and contributions from anyone–a participatory network. As I contemplate what happened in the more than one hundred posts and three hundred comments with the site visited by an average of 3000 people a day, a number of new questions have formed:

what is the nature of participation on the internet?

Not promoting, just found this interesting.

In the wake of the most significant scientific report to date on the potentially dire consequences of global warming, a ray of hope has emerged. Ironically, it emanates from the convergence of forces that have often been at odds. One force, the world of science, has long been on the forefront of the issue of climate change. Another equally powerful force, religion, has often remained on the sidelines — until recently.
The Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC), a body of more than 2,000 of the world’s top scientists from more than 100 nations, stated in a Feb. 2 report that global warming is “unequivocal,” that it is rapidly changing the nature of our planet and its ecosystems, and that it is “very likely” being caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.
In the course of the last decade, a significant movement within the faith community has been mobilizing around the call to care for God’s creation, the web of life that sustains us all. This calling is the essence of religious life, and people of faith are beginning to hear it, even as scientists sound the alarm that we may be nearing a climactic tipping point.

We would like to tell you about a project we completed last year.
27 kilos is the amount of CO2 emitted by each person in the UK ever day.

“We wanted to make a personal connection between global warming and our daily lives.”

The installation consists of 27 columns formed from blankets, placed in the gallery space. Each column represents the volume of 1 kg CO2, the gas responsible for global warming. 20% of each column is in a slightly darker colour. This area represents the sustainable level of CO2 emissions averaged out worldwide. The disparity between current emissions and the sustainable level reinforces the urgency to reduce individual emissions.

Artists-Birgit Muller and Mike Moran

More information can be found at www.27kilos.com

27kilos is currently on show at Hotbath gallery, in Bath, UK.

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan *

President’s address to Pakistan Ecology Council

Avari Hotel, Lahore, Pakistan
3rd February, 07

In the current debate on environmental and climate changes many perspectives have been examined by concerned scholars and activists. I have already articulated at length the need for meeting the challenges that lie ahead from Islamic perspectives. This analysis is thus fundamentally an evaluation of the extent of this monumental problem facing mankind. Consequently, in view of the nature and extent of problems in this area, it is submitted that to obtain real progress ahead it seems necessary to work for a true and genuine international cooperation. This is particularly necessary at this juncture as the Kyoto Protocols are expected to expire in 2012 *2. Appropriate thinking and its concomitant remedial steps, if any, have to be devised as such without delay. With these thoughts in mind this presentation anlyses the latest major international efforts that are in evidence on this subject.

This is a collaborative project between Zach Smith, Program Coordinator of the Wright Center for Innovative science education at Tufts University, Medford, MA, and Scott Battaion, Media Coordinator of the Wright Center for science Education
( www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/), and myself, Nathalie Miebach, as the artist. Together we are building data collecting devices that are being used to collect science data from a coastal environment on Cape Cod (Provincetown, MA), which are then used to examine larger environmental changes. These data is being collected using 3-D quadrats, which are essentially 1 m3 cubes, made of PVC pipes, containing scientific instruments for data collection. Functioning as mini-environments, these 3-D quadrats collect real life science data, from which certain variables are selected and examined in the context of larger environmental changes (e.g.: ice on/off dates, faunal migration patterns, floral changes, temperature anomalies, CO2 concentration, and others). These data are then translated into woven sculptures that examine linkages between these locally recorded environmental changes and broader regional and global climate change.

many people have asked me what art and science have in common? I am more interested in what they don’t have in common I think. Of course there are shared subjects (climate change, the Arctic, glaciers, etc.) and shared investment in a process of inquiry, research, and analysis. But even each of those things can be broken down and found to share only the most gross of efforts. But that seems less useful than contemplating where their differences lie, or more aptly, how they might come together to create a greater whole? I am interested in focusing on the role of research that both artists and scientists share an active engagement with.

I have been working at the Alaska Native science Commission for the past five years, and in the last two as its Deputy Director. In this position, I have the privilege of traveling to many Native and rural communities throughout most regions of Alaska. In these communities, the stories about climate change are the same. The list of observed changes can fill several pages, and many of them are alarming. There is no debate in any of these villages that climate change and global warming is here and intensifying in its effects. The State of Alaska has created a climate change Commission that will conduct hearings throughout Alaska. Many Native groups have already held several meetings and conferences where climate change was discussed. I also chaired the science Working Group of Snowchange, an international gathering of indigenous peoples from 8 arctic countries and no one disputes that climate change is upon us and describe many adverse consequences in graphic detail (see www.snowchange.org).

‘In dreams begins responsibilities’ W B Yeats
Recently when I was talking about the International Polar Year, and how they only happen every fifty years, someone joked that it might be last one. Like all good jokes, it provokes some serious questions. Will the polar regions exist as identifiable and distinct regional geography in fifty years time? What will have happened to the landscape and people of the Arctic? Given the changes that have already happened in the last 5-10 years, it is hard to imagine what the arctic might be like in fifty years. The latest climate models tells us the news is not good, no summer sea ice by 2050. As changes in the biophysical world accelerate, culturally we try to make sense of this change. One impetuous that I am interested in has been the impetuous to “archive” as a way of trying to confront a sense of loss at the extinction and disappearance of much flora and fauna. Much of these archiving impulses attempt to categorise, capture and represent that which is disappearing. But archives can be as much about the future as the past, as we see in the valuable ice core archives of climatic histories, that allow us a generative look at the future. We can imagine that if we changed the demands of the archive and the achievable we might get some very different artefacts and objects of knowledge. In my project on the “Ice Archives: Curating Climate Change” I have been interested in thinking about what kind of other archives might expand our creative imaginings of different climate futures. To that end, I have been thinking about the imaginative and physical work of ‘making sense’ and ‘thinking with’ such an array of political, media, everyday perceptual phenomena is a process of Knowledge formation in its own right: that is, it is a messy form of ‘together-work’ of thinking about climate change and building Knowledge around this flow of images, information, exhibits, data and events. Collaboration is at the centre of this. One of the ways I have been trying to work this out in practice is with my collaborator Jennifer Gabrys, on a joint project “Weather Permitting” (www.weatherpermitting.org) where we are proposing to build a number of weather gardens based on understanding of future and past climate change.

I’ve been putting word out in a few different places about this upcoming “teach-in” for design students to learn about their responsibility, as they move into professional careers, to consider the planet and climate change unconditionally in their work. Hopefully some of the Climate commons readers will find this useful.

Ed Mazria is a committed pioneer on the frontier of climate-conscious building. His Architecture 2030 agenda has gained recognition this year as an exemplary model for pushing a rapid and radical shift towards better building strategies. Now, like many people who understand the immediacy of this problem, Mazria is aiming at the target with the greatest potential to turn this misguided ship around: students. Specifically, design students.

The 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-In is a free one-day event scheduled to be webcast on February 20, 2007, from noon to 3:30pm EST. The session aims to reach at least half a million students, faculty, deans and practicing professionals in North and South America, hopefully making one simultaneous splash that will send ripples of reconsideration and activism through the design community.

Here is a relevant & timely news item from ABC. Note it mentions grass
pellets & Middlebury College in the second paragrpah.

[Students Use Civil Rights Tactics to Combat Global Warming]
College students Lead the Way in Global Warming Movement

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
Jan. 19, 2007

At Middlebury College in eco-friendly Vermont,
forward-thinking students convinced an austere board of trustees that
one of the biggest threats to the college — and to the world — is
global warming.

Armed with research and a portfolio of options, the students were a
powerful voice in the college’s decision to invest $11 million in a
biomass plant — one that is fueled by wood chips, grass pellets and a
self-sustaining willow forest.

By 2012, the college will be “carbon neutral” — producing all of its
own clean energy locally. Long known for its progressive outlook,
Middlebury is now at the forefront of the student “climate change”
movement.

That friend is the Arctic, or so it seem to residents of the Arctic. The third point of focus for this project, this forum on the radiating effects of climate change, is the Arctic. The arctic is the very cold canary that tell us what is happening with our climate before we feel it in more temperate zones. The changes, as we have heard here from Larry Merculieff, are more drastic and hit home not just to the large community of people who live above the imaginary line that describes the arctic Circle, but also the the rest of the world’s land and people. Changes include the much reported: spring thaws are earlier. Fall freeze-ups are later. Sea ice is shrinking. Unfamiliar species of plants and animals are appearing. Intense storms are more frequent.

I gave five talks about my exhibit up at the ICA in Boston last night–8 minutes five times in a row.  After the blinding headache that ensued no doubt from the effects of my own droning repetition, I started thinking about the most significant part of what I was saying about the project.  Basically the images I was talking about, as you see here, take DEMs from glaciologists studying the dynamic response of the mass balance of glaciers around the world to environmental factors and I render them in a 3D program with temperature, light, cloud, snow covers that are relatively accurate to the sites (the picture you see here is the edge of the Austfonna glacier in the northernmost tip of Norway, an area known to be a common jumping off point for early north pole expeditions).  I then insert these tableaux of vaudevillian performers (here Mike Waters, the project manager for the ICA building construction supervises Naomi Greenfield, a local balloon artist, making an umiak, a common boat form in the arctic, out of pin balloons).

We had a discussion at work yesterday about what it would mean if sea levels rise, possibly up to 20 feet, in our children’s lifetime if not ours. What would Boston look like, or the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts? One person insinuated that a lot of rich people in our area would be in trouble - think Cape Cod, Back Bay - to which my boss responded, “No, those people have cars. They’re fine.” So what will this do to other parts of the world where people are often way more crowded along the coasts than we are?

It is hard not to get “gitty” over the new political scene in our Government, but we must stay cool. Barbara Boxer who is the chair of the environment and Public works committee has climate change as a priority issue. And she is not the only one. We will hopefully see great strides in discussion about climate and ultimately regulation. I am proud to come from a state that is setting an example for others.

Now, if we can impress on the population that each one of us has a personal responsibility to do our part, we may just turn this problem around. We might also have a list of things ready to say when someone asks, “but what can I do as an individual”? As climate change enters the mainstream, those of us who got here first must be ready to answer that question. It is a new and uncharted place for us for us to be. If people want to help, we need to be able to help them help us (and themselves). Up until now, global warming has been something “out there, in the future” to most Americans, but we will have a chance now to be advocates for change, so lets use this opportunity to its fullest.