Recent local events give me hope at a time when climate change news is becoming more and more dire.
Climate change
July 22, 2021
Kate Warner
As a heat dome persists over the American West, an untamable wildfire rages over southern Oregon and record hot temperatures and water shortages make life in the West difficult, floods in much of Europe — Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, parts of England and now China — have also had a devastating effect.
July 22, 2021
Noah Asimow
Eversource has canceled a long-awaited battery energy storage project planned for Martha’s Vineyard, complicating a plan to achieve ambitious green energy goals on the Vineyard.
August 12, 2021
Brendan O'Neill
The Martha’s Vineyard Commission is taking an important step to address the Island’s growth crisis through a new carrying capacity study.
2011
April 21, 2011
That well-worn phrase — climate change. We know it’s out there, hovering over our lives like a heavy cloud. But what does it mean exactly — to you and the Island of Martha’s Vineyard?
It means striking changes in the three most critical components of Island life:
• The natural environment — the air, land and water;
• Our physical well being — our human health;
• The local economy.
2010
September 30, 2010
Of all the various experts gathered to speak about global warming and sea level rise at last Friday’s Living on the Edge conference on Nantucket, Franklin W. Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, delivered perhaps the most disturbing message.
His insight was not related to the phenomenon itself so much as to the chances of a meaningful and concerted response. It was about politics and psychology more than environmental science.
February 4, 2010
There’s been a great deal of focus lately on the local effects of the rush by federal and state authorities to build big wind farms near the Vineyard to ameliorate climate change, but very little focus on the local effects of climate change itself.
Except in Oak Bluffs, where there is quiet work underway to prepare for the worst, including sea level rise that is expected to erase beachfront property as it is now known, and the potentially ruinous effects of extreme storms caused by climate change. And it’s all backed by a state grant.
2009
December 17, 2009
The Copenhagen climate summit has been much in the news for two weeks and the media is full of stories about rising carbon dioxide (C02) levels, increasing acidity of the oceans, drastic changes in weather patterns, the warmest decade on record, melting glaciers, rising sea water levels and coastal communities in imminent danger of inundation. And that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg!
June 15, 2009
The extraordinary beauty, rich geological history and challenges for preservation of the Vineyard landscape were all topics for discussion last Wednesday evening in paleoecologist David Foster’s guest lecture at the Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury.
2008
June 23, 2008
The Future of Fisheries: Marine Protected Areas, Ecosystem Management, Climate Change and All That is the title of a free talk slated for Thursday, June 26, at 5 p.m. at the Chilmark Public Library.
Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, professor of natural resources policy and management and professor of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire, is the guest speaker.
