Berkeley - Biometeorology Lab Welcome to the Berkeley Biometeorology Lab Web site. Biometeorology is a field that explores the interactions between life and its surrounding environment. Biometeorology is instrumental in providing information that is of use to biogeoscientists, atmospheric scientists, remote sensing scientists, hydrologists and ecologists who are working on problems associated with: 1) the carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles; 2) the prediction of weather and climate; 3) the chemical state of the atmosphere and 4) the structure, function and dynamics of ecosystems. Most of these problems rely on quantifying and predicting fluxes of trace gases and energy between vegetated canopies and the atmosphere or assess the state conditions of the air, leaves and soil. Stated otherwise, predictions stemming from biogeoscience models are most accurate when they consider biometeorological theory and translate governing weather information of the region to the state or condition of the leaf and soil.
Fighting the growing deserts, with livestock: Allan Savory at TED2013 Photos: James Duncan Davidson The growing desert Allan Savory has dedicated his life to studying management of grasslands. Changement climatique en images On June 28, 2016, a 4,000-foot-high mountainside in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve collapsed, dropping rocky debris equivalent to 60 million mid-size SUVs onto nearby Lamplugh Glacier. Seismologists estimated that the material tumbled down the mountain for nearly one minute and then continued to slide along the glacier for another 6 miles. The southeast corner of Alaska, where this event took place, is geologically active and considered a hotspot for such landslides. Images taken by the Operational Land Imager onboard Landsat 8. Source: U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat Missions Gallery; U.S.
WikiLeaks - fr Updated TPP Treaty: Intellectual Property Rights Chapter Today, 9 October, 2015 WikiLeaks releases the final negotiated text for the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. The TPP encompasses 12 nations representing more than 40 per cent of global GDP. Despite a final agreement, the text is still being withheld from the public, notably until after the Canadian election on October 19. Target Tokyo Today, Friday 31 July 2015, 9am CEST, WikiLeaks publishes "Target Tokyo", 35 Top Secret NSA targets in Japan including the Japanese cabinet and Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi, together with intercepts relating to US-Japan relations, trade negotiations and sensitive climate change strategy.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? Anthropology professor and best selling author David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully… On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right.
40 years “LIMITS TO GROWTH” Limits to Growth is a study about the future of our planet. On behalf of the Club of Rome, Donnella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and their team worked on systems analysis at Jay W. Forrester’s institute at MIT. They created a computing model which took into account the relations between various global developments and produced computer simulations for alternative scenarios. Part of the modelling were different amounts of possibly available resources, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control or environmental protection. 12 million copies were distributed in 37 languages. Most scenarios resulted in an ongoing growth of population and of the economy until to a turning point around 2030.
Live from TED2013 Art Can limitations make you more creative? A Q&A with artist Phil Hansen Phil Hansen has tattooed bananas, drawn a portrait on stacked Starbucks cups and created a Jimi Hendrix portrait out of matches, which he then burned. In other words, he isn’t the kind of artist who feels bound to paint on canvas. So how did Hansen happen upon such fascinating methods?
Unité mixte de recherche Ecologie de Biogéochimie des Sols et Agro-systèmes - CoffeeFlux Measuring and modelling water, sediment and carbon Ecosystem Services in an agroforestry coffee watershed (Costa Rica) Aims and "Philosophy" of the CAFNET/Coffee-Flux Project "Coffee-flux” is a platform where collaborative research on coffee agroforestry is promoted: data are being shared between collaborators and positive interactions are enhanced. The philosophy is to concentrate several investigations on one specific site and for several years, to share a useful common experimental database, to develop modelling and to publish results in highly-ranked scientific journals. Partners, sponsors and networks