Author Archives: zizroc

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/15/im-standing-here-in-the-middle-of-climate-change-how-usda-fails-farmers-043615 It upsets me that this is where we are now. We had time to prepare. But now we’re running out of road, fast. Image: Record-setting rainfall caused widespread agricultural disaster. Record-breaking rainfalls across the country overwhelmed farmers at the height of planting season, causing widespread agricultural disaster and preventing nearly 20 million acres ofContinue reading “‘I’m standing here in the middle of climate change’: How USDA is failing farmers”

The Scenathon’s main implementation tool, the FABLE Calculator, is now online and open-source*. Find the documentation here and Calculator here. This tool uses data from public sources (e.g., FAO, ESA, WorldBank) and computes, from the ground up, land-use and land-use change by crop production type (e.g., cropland, pasture, forest), daily kilocalories produced (as well asContinue reading “FABLE Calculator is online”

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-49844490/parisians-fight-climate-change-with-a-surprising-weapon What they’re not saying is that this helps put bioavailable nitrogen and carbon back into the soil, reducing dependence on chemical fertilizers, which come from fossil fuels. Compost is a valuable resource, particularly with more people deciding to source their food closer to home (it’s bulkier than chemical fertilizers to transport). And at scale,Continue reading “Parisians converting food waste into compost”

The Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) has just released its own report, Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Our Food and Land Use. FOLU is the big bird under whose wing FABLE (my current project) lives. I had a small contribution to this, but little compared to my colleagues at IIASA, Andre Deppermann,Continue reading “Food and Land Use Coalition 2019 Global Report”

For a Canadian, this is kind of a big deal. Congratulations, félicitations, & meala-naidheachd, Glen! Glen is a distinguished professor in the departments of geography and ecology & evolutionary biology (EEB) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the John Muir Memorial Chair in Geography. He has done a lot of work reconstructing HoloceneContinue reading “Glen MacDonald elected to the Royal Society of Canada”

This is just ludicrous. I am visiting the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) for a workshop, and some of the other attendees brought this story up last night. The Sharpie edit to the hurricane path looks like a meme, or a cartoon of a meme. But that NOAA staff would contravene a statementContinue reading “New York Magazine: How Trump’s False Dorian Forecast Sparked a Crisis at NOAA”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending This story in the New Yorker made quite a splash the other day. Many climate scientists were angry, but I’m not. They took particular issue with the author’s use of “model”, in the sense of a purely subjective flight-of-fancy. I deal with all sorts of models that attempt to predict the future, even ifContinue reading “What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?”

How the Trump administration limited the scope of the USDA’s 2020 dietary guidelines “The Trump administration is limiting scientific input to the 2020 dietary guidelines, raising concerns among nutrition advocates and independent experts about industry influence over healthy eating recommendations for all Americans.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/30/how-trump-administration-limited-scope-usdas-dietary-guidelines/ This is Soviet level stuff.