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. Word Cloud Generator How the Word Cloud Generator Works The layout algorithm for positioning words without overlap is available on GitHub under an open source license as d3-cloud. Note that this is the only the layout algorithm and any code for converting text into words and rendering the final output requires additional development. As word placement can be quite slow for more than a few hundred words, the layout algorithm can be run asynchronously, with a configurable time step size. This makes it possible to animate words as they are placed without stuttering. It is recommended to always use a time step even without animations as it prevents the browser’s event loop from blocking while placing the words.
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 Coffee-flux was launched in December 2009 in Costa Rica by Cirad, CATIE , Agroforestery systems with perennial crops PCP and the Aquiares farm.
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.
The End of the World As We Know It? The rise of the post-carbon era In an exclusive new essay, political scientist Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed presents a dramatic picture of the world we're about to leave behind, and the new possibilities ahead. He argues that the age of Carbon is coming to a close, and only a concerted effort can prevent an impending crisis on a global scale. By Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common." The independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists.
The global Transition tipping point has arrived - vive la révolution Last Friday, I posted an exclusive report about a new NASA-backed scientific research project at the US National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (Sesync) to model the risks of civilisational collapse, based on analysis of the key factors involved in the rise and fall of past civilisations. The story went viral and was quickly picked up by other news outlets around the world which, however, often offered rather misleading headlines. 'Nasa-backed study says humanity is pretty much screwed', said Gizmodo.