On Nov. 16, am9:55, "Michael Tobis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The name "global change" includes climate change but is not limited to
> that topic. Demographics, resource issues (food, water, energy),
> biodiversity and ecological sustainability, and other global pollution
> issues (ozone depletion, anthropogenic radioactivity, global
> distribution of trace chemicals) are on topic here.
I think that we need a forum of this scope, not just climate change.
> Francis Bretherton, at the time the director of NCAR, (personal
> communication) claimed to have coined the phrase "global change",
Really? It's interesting. I knew it was an American invention, though.
Actually I do not want to actively use the term "global change" myself.
It sounds something hollow. What is the entity which changes?
I also remember that in 1991 someone (perhaps a social scientist) said
that the breakdown of the Soviet regime is a typical thing that should
be called global change.
I prefer "global environmental change". But use of this term requires
a warning. Not only the environment changes. The human society also
changes and the interaction is mutual. In this sense "global change"
may be better.
In Japan the theme is usually called "chikyu kankyo mondai", literally
"earth environment problem", but more freely translated as "global
environmental issue".
I am afraid that the attention of Japanese government (escpecially
Ministry of Environment) and mass media on the global environmental
issue is too much focused on the issue of global warming, probably
since the Kyoto Conference on Climate Change (COP3, 1997).
As I mentioned on 23 Sep. 2006 in the thread "Global problems other
than climate change", I think that climate change is a serious issue
because it is compounded with (anthropogenic) land use change --
deforestation and reforestation, urbanization and de-urbanization,
building of roads, dams, fences, etc.
I do not want to emphasize the impact of land use change on climate. If
projected onto the axes of global climatic variables, impact of land
use change may be tiny (though I do not think it negligible in regional
climatic variables). But the direct impact of land use change to
ecosystems is huge. Habitats of species are fragmented. And therefore
the capacity of ecosystems to adapt to climate change by migration is
strongly reduced.
It can be said that land use change is never global but regional and
that its global total is just product of arithmetic. And its impact is
also chiefly regional. But I do not think that it can be dismissed as
not global if we want to discuss "global change" or "global
environmental issue".
Ko-1 M. (Kooiti Masuda)
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