organization:university of east anglia

  • Heatwaves can ’wipe out’ male insect fertility
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/13/heatwaves-wipe-out-male-insect-fertility-beetles-study

    The research, published in the Nature Communications journal, found that exposing beetles to a five-day heatwave in the laboratory reduced sperm production by three-quarters; females were unaffected.

    “Beetles are thought to constitute a quarter of biodiversity, so these results are very important for understanding how species react to climate change,” said Kris Sales, at the University of East Anglia, who led the work.

    [...] After being exposed to a heatwave, the number of offspring produced by males fell by half. Even more worryingly, harmful effects were inherited by the males they produced – their lives were 20% shorter and they in turn produced fewer offspring.

    #insectes #biodiversité #climat

  • De la crise climatique aux guerres

    http://orientxxi.info/magazine/de-la-crise-climatique-aux-guerres,1553

    Super dossier d’Orient XXI sur le #climat et les #monde_arabe

    Des études de chercheurs établissent le changement climatique et les accaparement de ressources comme facteurs du développement de conflits armés ou de groupes terroristes. Un sujet relativement peu exploré, qui concerne pourtant nombre de régions du monde, de la Syrie à l’Irak en passant par plusieurs pays d’Afrique et la Birmanie.

    • Qui peut apporter des solutions ? Ni les entreprises sponsors des COP, ni les États qui tirent profit et alimentent ces situations, dénoncent ONG et associations à travers le monde. Pour Hamza Hamouchene, c’est « le modèle civilisationnel » basé sur le capitalisme et l’extractivisme qui est à revoir.

      Le facteur religieux, simple prétexte ?

      Pourtant, de Barack Obama à François Hollande, les dirigeants s’accordent à dire que la crise climatique est un grave danger « pour la sécurité ». Mais le chercheur Mathieu Rigouste nuance. « À partir de la fin des années 80, la "crise climatique" émerge comme une thématique des "nouvelles menaces" dans les archives de l’Institut des hautes études de défense nationale (IHEDN). Les "études de défense et de sécurité" vont alors focaliser de plus en plus sur la figure de ce qu’ils nomment "l’écoterrorisme" et la "menace de réfugiés climatique". » Pour lui, « ce discours tend à effacer la responsabilité du système économique et établir les mouvements sociaux et militants qui luttent contre la dévastation capitaliste de la planète comme les causes ». Lors de la COP21, la France a pretexté l’état d’urgence pour ne pas attribuer de visas à des représentants des sociétés civiles « des Suds » et a multiplié les perquisitions et assignations à résidence contre ceux que des médias ont qualifié de... « djihadistes verts ». En réponse, des militants qualifient les politiques étatiques de « terrorisme environnemental », indique Hamza Hamouchene.

      La crise climatique, les ressources et les stratégies opportunistes auraient finalement plus de poids dans les guerres que les religions ? « Derrière ce qui est appelé "guerres de religions" on trouve généralement des régimes de violence d’État programmés pour l’accumulation des pouvoirs, des profits et des privilèges et qui emploient les thématiques religieuses comme justification, mystification et mobilisation », conclut Mathieu Rigouste. Au Congo, où se déroule un « génocide » dixit l’ONU, qui avait déjà fait plus de 6 millions de morts en 2014, « des milices de l’Est et d’autres régions du pays ont acquis une partie du territoire en vue d’en faire un moyen de négociation économique et financière grâce à leurs ressources. Ce sont devenus des groupes politiques et certains occupent des territoires avec le soutien de groupes djihadistes », commente Amzat Boukari-Yabara. « Dans les conflits en Centrafrique ou dans les zones pétrolières du Soudan, des communautés chrétiennes sont directement impliquées […] ». Ces cas de figure se retrouvent ailleurs.

    • L’autre jour, en écoutant France Culture, j’ai eu la bonne surprise d’entendre quelqu’un qui disait qu’on ne pouvait comprendre la #crise syrienne sans remonter effectivement à la crise climatique qui ravage la région, la privant par endroit de près de 80% de ses #ressources hydriques.
      Il expliquait qu’en fait la Syrie avait dû absorber d’immenses déplacements de population directement causés par la #sécheresse qui sévit dans la région et que cela était équivalent à ce que la France aurait gérer si, en quelques années, 7 à 8 millions de personnes avaient quitté les campagnes et pays limitrophes pour venir se masser dans les faubourgs de nos métropoles : « aucune démocratie ne peut survivre à ça ».
      À comparer avec les quelques dizaines de milliers de #migrants qui arrivent à grand peine chez nous et qui ont déjà causé tant de crises politiques…

    • Pentagon Fears Confirmed: Climate Change Leads to More Wars and Refugees

      The most comprehensive study done to assess the link between climate change, war and migration has confirmed that the warming planet is fueling conflicts that lead to more refugees.

      The conclusions published Wednesday in a scientific journal underscore the rising levels of anxiety that global warming has among leaders. Attendees at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said the inability to adapt to higher temperatures is the biggest global risk. A Pentagon report published on Tuesday in Washington warned that rising seas and more frequent wild fires threaten U.S. security.

      The peer-reviewed study, “Climate, conflict and forced migration,” published in Elsevier Ltd.’s Global Environmental Change, analyzed sprawling data sets covering drought, battle deaths, ethnicity and political systems. Those were then combined with geographic information about refugee flows. The researchers discovered that deteriorating climate conditions played a “a statistically significant role” in the recent waves of migrants fleeing Middle East conflict.

      The research bolsters previous warnings from defense and intelligence agencies that climate change could trigger more conflicts severe enough to uproot populations.

      While a changing climate won’t always lead to armed conflict, the regional conditions in the Middle East in 2010 were just right to feed a spiral of violence. Migration resulting from those rifts stretched from Syria to Sudan, according to Raya Muttarak, one of the study’s co-authors from the U.K.’s University of East Anglia.

      “It takes a perfect storm,” Muttarak said, pointing out that political conditions play an outsize role. “If it’s too authoritarian or too democratic the results are different.”

      The study’s other authors, who work at institutions in Austria and China, provided tangible advice to world leaders looking to stem the flow of refugees fleeing conflict.

      Policies to “improve the adaptive capacity to deal with the effects of climate change in developing economies may have additional returns by reducing the likelihood of conflict and forced migration,” they wrote.

      https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/pentagon-fears-confirmed-climate-change-leads-to-war-refugees
      #migrations #réfugiés_environnementaux #réfugiés_climatiques

    • Climate,conflict and forced migration

      Despite the lack of robust empirical evidence, a growing number of media reports attempt to link climate change to the ongoing violent conflicts in Syria and other parts of the world, as well as to the migration crisis in Europe. Exploiting bilateral data on asylum seeking applications for 157 countries over the period 2006–2015, we assess the determinants of refugee flows using a gravity model which accounts for endogenous selection in order to examine the causal link between climate, conflict and forced migration. Our results indicate that climatic conditions, by affecting drought severity and the likelihood of armed conflict, played a significant role as an explanatory factor for asylum seeking in the period 2011–2015. The effect of climate on conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period 2010–2012 during when many countries were undergoing political transformation. This finding suggests that the impact of climate on conflict and asylum seeking flows is limited to specific time period and contexts.

      https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/15684/1/1-s2.0-S0959378018301596-main.pdf

  • “French civil liberties and the ’spirit of sacrifice’ - With a state of emergency in place and surveillance increasing, how much will the French accept in the name of security ?”
    http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/11/french-civil-liberties-spirit-sacrifice-151130074036371.html #terrorisme #sécurité #état_d'urgence #autoritarisme

    "The experience of repressive regimes such as [Nicolae] Ceausescu’s Romania is that increasing surveillance decreases the level of #trust that people have for their #government and makes them less cooperative and less supportive of the government" Paul Bernal, a law professor at Britain’s University of East Anglia and the author of Internet Privacy Rights: Rights to Protect Autonomy, explains.

    “Emergency’ powers need to be maintained only for emergencies: the longer these kinds of powers are kept after an obvious emergency, the easier it is for trust to be damaged”. He adds that powers introduced for one reason could be used for others - a “prime danger usually known as ’function creep’ or ’mission creep’”.

    "Right now, in Paris, some of the powers brought in to combat terrorism seem to be being used to control protesters and others at the climate change conference, for example. Powers might be used to stifle dissent, to clamp down on people like environmental campaigners, students and so forth. It needs a huge amount of care to avoid this problem - in practice it seems to happen all the time"

  • Google Earth: how much has global warming raised temperatures near you? | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | theguardian.com
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/04/global-warming-google-earth-uea

    If you’ve ever wondered how much global warming has raised local temperatures in your area or elsewhere on the globe, the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (UEA CRU) has just released a new interactive Google Earth layer that will let you answer this question with ease. UEA CRU is one of the scientific organizations that compile temperature data from around the world. Their temperature dataset over land is called CRUTEM4, and is one of the most widely used records of the climate system.

    The new Google Earth format allows users to scroll around the world, zoom in on 6,000 weather stations, and view monthly, seasonal and annual temperature data more easily than ever before. Users can drill down to see some 20,000 graphs – some of which show temperature records dating back to 1850.

    (...)

    The Google Earth interface shows how the globe has been split into 5° latitude and longitude grid boxes. The boxes are about 550 kilometers wide along the Equator, narrowing towards the North and South poles. The red and green checkerboard covers most of the Earth and indicates areas of land where station data are available. Clicking on a grid box reveals the area’s annual temperatures, as well as links to more detailed downloadable station data.