Six on Geography and Science: The curious map that survived 700 years; Indonesia to move capital city; Tree rings show human
panaritisp
"The city sits on the coast on swampy land, criss-crossed by 13 rivers.
Half of Jakarta is below sea level. One of the main causes of this is the extraction of groundwater which is used as drinking water and for bathing.
A powerful political message
By Rebecca Henschke, former editor, BBC Indonesian
Indonesians are sceptical about their capital ever moving. They have heard this before and none of Indonesia's six presidents have been able to pull it off.
But President Joko Widodo has achieved ambitious infrastructure building in his five years in office, so he may well be the man that finally does it.
Indonesia is an incredibly diverse nation made up of hundreds of ethnic groups living on thousands of islands. But economic development, national cultural identity and political power have always been dominated by the Javanese.
Indonesians have never elected a non-Javanese president and most of Indonesia's wealth is concentrated in Jakarta.
Indonesians living outside Java, particularly in the east, have long complained about being forgotten and neglected by the country's leaders sitting in the sprawling capital.
Moving the capital out of Java would send a powerful political message that this is changing, if it happens.
What are the options?
In a closed cabinet meeting, three options were reportedly discussed and presented to the president.
One involved making a special zone for government offices inside the current capital; another was to move it to just outside Jakarta and the third, the one the president preferred, was to build a brand new capital on another island."
|
"In 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius made a prescient calculation that showed the vast quantities of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning coal and other fossil fuels would eventually cause the planet to get warmer.
Little did he realize that the effect he described was already under way and being dutifully recorded by a ready-made monitoring system distributed around the globe in the form of trees.
Now, scientists have tapped into that record and demonstrated that the human effect on Earth’s climate can be traced back to the turn of the last century, when it began leaving its indelible mark on the growth patterns of tree rings. What the tree rings reveal matches what climate models predict should have happened given the basic properties of greenhouse gases and the amount of energy the sun supplies to the atmosphere.
“The models are saying that we should see the fingerprint of human-forced climate change in the early 20th century, and the tree rings confirm that,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and lead author on the analysis, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The result is significant for two reasons, Dr. Marvel and her colleagues say. First, because it provides an alternative way to gauge how greenhouse gases and other industrial pollutants have influenced drought patterns over time. And second, because it raises confidence levels in what models are projecting for the future as climate change becomes more pronounced, including extremes of temperature and precipitation that translate into more severe droughts and floods than would otherwise have occurred."
"Trouble in Paradise
There’s no longer any denying that our oceans are in a dire state. Overfishing has decimated global fish populations; climate change and ocean acidity are pushing coral reefs to the brink of extinction; and the loss of those reefs and other ecosystems has left coastal communities more vulnerable to the impacts of storms and rising sea levels.
Indeed, for many island and coastal nations, these are matters of life and death. Leaders of these nations want to protect the ocean—but too often they are struggling to manage their countries’ debt and unable to invest in the conservation efforts that would make their environments and economies more resilient.
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has an audacious plan that can help these countries address their debt challenges, benefit more than 40 million people and conserve 15 percent more of the world’s oceans than are currently protected—in just the next five years.
We’re calling it: Blue Bonds for Conservation."
|
