Archinect - News

Can Cleveland combat climate change with compact communities?

2016-10-18T12:54:00-04:00

Although Cleveland often serves more as a punchline than a solution (the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 due to pollution), a climate change conference convened by the United Nations and currently being held in Quito, Ecuador sees new potential in the city. As StreetsBlog reports, if Cleveland can transform its current suburbia into denser neighborhoods, the metropolis could serve as a model for numerous water and climate-challenged cities in how to adapt to the demands of an increasingly populated globe. As a paper entitled "Where to put the next billion people" states:

"Cleveland could play a significant role in the fight against climate change by developing a strategy for more compact communities and with a more open and encouraging immigration policy, the report concludes.

The influx of immigrants should probably be planned better.

Cleveland’s outer suburbs and nearby rural towns hold the key. If the suburbs can figure out strategies to retrofit themselves as dense, walkable com...

Cold War-era spy photography finds second life as climate change record

2016-06-23T13:24:00-04:00

It was revealed earlier this month that declassified U.S. spy satellite photographs taken above the Antarctic have inadvertently also documented how that continent has been affected by climate change. In this case, deep in the archives of national intelligence agencies are satellite photos half a century old in which scientifically useful data has been hiding in plain sight. These now-outdated spy photographs have thus found an unexpected second life as important tools of planetary science...

For more on the often unexpected sources of climate data, check out these links:

The 700-year old climate data recorded by Japanese monks

2016-04-28T13:05:00-04:00

When [Lake Suwa] freezes over, daily temperature changes cause the ice to expand and contract, cracking the surface and forcing it upward into a ridge [...] Every year since at least 1443, the priests who live at the shrine on the edge of Lake Suwa have carefully recorded the date the ridge appears. In 1693, on the other side of the world, a Finnish merchant named Olof Ahlbom started recording the date and time of the spring ice breakup on the Torne River [...]

"When scientists want to glimpse the climate of the ancient past, they almost always have to use indirect evidence—changes in tree rings, ice-core layers, or pollen deposits. But the ice records from Japan and Finland, which are the longest of their kind, give us a more direct look at the climate our distant ancestors experienced."

Climate science is a much more interdisciplinary project than one might imagine. Henry David Thoreau's notes from Walden document changes in annual blooming times. Pieter Breugel the Elder's paintings record climatological events, in particular the "Little Ice Age."

For more on the complex business of studying our planetary abode:

Global warming may be much more catastrophic (and happen much quicker) than we imagined

2016-03-22T13:50:00-04:00

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.

James Hansen, an indisputably important climate scientist and activist, alongside a group of other influential experts, has released a new, 52-page paper that revises much of mainstream expectations for global warming. Hansen has called it the most important work he's done.

A synthesis of paleoclimatology, climate models, and modern observations, the document suggests that global warming will have a more violent and catastrophic impact than previously expected.

The scientists involved believe that Greenland and Antarctica could experience ice melt at much faster rates than imagined (up to several meters in a century), and that the melt could create a feedback loop further intensifying the effects of global warming.

In short, the cold, fresh water from the melted ice sheets would trap a layer of warm seawater beneath it, leading to a process known as "stratification." Such "blobs" of cold water – which could perhaps already be forming off the coast of Greenland (see image above) – would...