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Building Resilience in the Face of Climate Change: The Limitations of Adaptation

Climate change is an undeniable reality, and its impacts are already being felt across the globe. However, many parts of the world, particularly developing regions like sub-Saharan Africa, are ill-prepared to adapt to these changes. This lack of preparedness stems from several interconnected factors: Limited access to climate predictions: Many regions in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to reliable and accurate climate predictions, making it difficult for communities to anticipate and plan for future climate-related events. Inadequate adaptation technologies: Even when climate predictions are available, communities may not have access to the necessary technologies and resources to implement effective adaptation measures. This can be particularly challenging in regions with limited infrastructure and economic resources. Dependency on external aid: Many developing countries rely heavily on international aid to support climate adaptation efforts. However, this can create a dependency on...
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The meaning of urban climate research

  Urban climate research is an interdisciplinary field that studies the interactions between cities and the environment, with a focus on how cities affect, and are affected by, climate and weather patterns. Cities have unique characteristics that can create a microclimate with distinctive features such as higher temperatures, reduced air quality, and more extreme weather events compared to their surrounding rural areas. This difference is often referred to as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Urban climate research aims to provide insights into the mechanisms that lead to UHIs and its potential impacts on human life, the environment and the economy. Urban climate research methods typically involve field experiments, observational studies, and computer models. Researchers use a variety of instruments such as high-resolution weather stations, UAVs, lidars, temperature sensors, air quality monitors, and satellite data to measure the variables that affect urban climate, including wea...

Geoengineering using cloud seeding

  Geoengineering refers to the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the Earth's climate system to counteract the effects of global warming. One technique used in geoengineering is cloud seeding, a type of weather modification that aims to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds by dispersing substances into them. Cloud seeding works by introducing condensation nuclei , or tiny particles, into clouds. The particles attract water droplets which then grow larger and heavier, eventually falling as precipitation. The specific type of particles used in cloud seeding can vary depending on the desired outcome. For example, silver iodide is commonly used to increase snowfall, while sodium chloride is used to stimulate the growth of rain droplets. The process of cloud seeding involves deploying the particles into the clouds using various methods such as airplanes or ground-based generators. The particles then mix with the existing moisture in the clouds and p...

Corporate social responsibility to reduce urban emissions

I was sitting in an urban comfort university complex in Montreal, Canada, while drinking coffee from a recycled cup  wrapped by recycled sleeve (Figure 1). I thought, if most of the materials that we use are recycled, there will be more reductions in carbon emissions. This would reduce the impacts of the extremes of climate change such as heatwaves, floods and other air and water related storms. So, I appreciated the business model, which gives attention to recycling.  More than 50% emissions reductions are expected by mid- 21st century. Therefore, there should be continuous recycling as can be seen from Figure 1 where the sleeve is made from 100% recycled material and then near the bottom it redirects the consumer to put it in a recycling trash box so that it will be reused. This continuous reusing reduces the new materials  (e.g., forest products, chemicals, etc) required to make the sleeves and the coffee cups and the environmental benefit cannot be underestimated....

Are we creating our own weather and climate reality?

Let us explore alternative ideas about the causes of the extremes of weather and climate. Are we creating our own weather reality? According to Quantum Mechanics, "the action of measurement changes the state of a physical system". This is derived from the superposition principle and "the Schrodinger's cat paradox", i.e., a cat put in a box with a radioactive element is both dead and alive until someone opens the box. This is to mean that the state of the cat is the superposition of the two states "death" and "life". Whether the superposition is linear or non-linear doesn't matter here. The presence of a radioactive material may favor more of death state than alive, so that the superposition sways towards the other end. Then the question is, what is the action of opening? The action of opening collapses the state into one, either death or life and not the superposition of the two. Does the action of opeing the box result in the happenned ...

Notes on spectral nudging urban climate models - Nudging is wrong, do not do it

Debate erupted about spectrally nudging regional climate models during summer 2016 training on regional climate modeling at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The debate was whether nudging is valid for regional climate models. Because of the interest of many participants who were PhDs and postdocs from all over the world, special session was assigned for extended discussion. I was new to the nudging concepts at the time, but thought that it is interesting, especially whether nudging is useful for downscaling reanalysis and GCMs incorporating urban canopy models. I dropped my ear and followed the discussion. Based on the ideas raised from the organizers and participants, I also forwarded some questions of relevance for the urban climate modeling. As an extended discussion during the afternoon, many questions were raised: If a regional climate model is spectrally nudged, doesn't it lose its added value as a regional climate model because nudging forces the model t...

How to cool during heatwaves

Under a warming climate intense heatwaves are expected that would stay for hours, days, weeks and months.  It becomes even worse under urbanization - the more cities grow , the  more natural land covers such as vegetation and soil are replaced by impervious surfaces such as concrete, asphalt roads and buildings. These impervious  urban surfaces can't retain water much longer like soil and vegetation and this would exacerbate the heating further.  Urban heat islands add more than 3 deg. C (Fig. 1) to the heatwaves. The combined effects of heatwaves and urban heat islands are heat-related illnesses and death - specifically affecting young toddlers and old people because their body regulation mechanism is lower. Figure 1. Urban heat island adds more than 3 deg. C to the heatwaves and increases the frequency or duration of the heat. Under a warming climate, it is only a matter of time before we start to seek for cooling mechanisms both for short term and long t...