The monsoon is so important to the whole area that in the past it could literally mean life or death depending on how it hit the harvest.
From Dialogue Eartht, January 22, 2025:
Episode two of The Third Pole Podcast explores the challenges of AI-based weather forecasting
In the face of increasingly erratic weather patterns and growing incidences of extreme weather, precise and timely forecasting can protect lives, property and infrastructure. While traditional forecasting methods continue to be used, scientists are exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) could improve their speed and accuracy.
Globally, there’s a great deal of financial excitement around these technologies, but India finds itself at a more nascent stage. In 2023, the country announced a new virtual centre to develop AI/ML techniques for weather predictions. But a massive challenge awaits: the lack of credible data.
Robust and voluminous data is at the core of AI/ML models. India lacks this, despite being no stranger to frequent weather-related disasters like heatwaves, floods and cyclones. Data paucity is even more critical for the Himalayan region, which is also particularly vulnerable to climate-related disasters.
Having worked with environmental data for more than 20 years – and knowing the challenges involved – journalist Nidhi Jamwal was keen to gain a deeper understanding of India’s AI weather forecasting journey. Writing for Dialogue Earth last year, she consulted various experts to explore the complexities of this topic and how the country’s data gap might be bridged.
In this second episode of The Third Pole Podcast, Jamwal reveals that a lack of data is not the only problem. The availability of existing data, which is often very hard to obtain from the various agencies that gather it, is also a central issue....
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The third pole is the birthplace of all those giant rivers that flow out of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. It is the third largest part of the cryosphere (places where water is solid)
Our most recent mention of the cryosphere was May 7's:
Cryosphere: "U.S. Coast Guard Icebreaking Update"
Cryosphere = those parts of the earth where water is in solid form....
But my favorite post on same has to be:
Glaciers, gender, and science
A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research
- Mark Carey, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. Email: carey@uoregon.edu
Abstract
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.
- feminist glaciology
- feminist political ecology
- feminist postcolonial science studies
- folk glaciology
- glacier impacts
- glaciers and society
I Introduction
Glaciers are icons of global climate change, with common representations stripping them of social and cultural contexts to portray ice as simplified climate change yardsticks and thermometers. In geophysicist Henry Pollack’s articulation, ‘Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts’ (Pollack, 2009: 114). This perspective appears consistently in public discourse, from media to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the ‘ice is just ice’ conceptualization contrasts sharply with conclusions by researchers such as Cruikshank (2005), who asks if glaciers listen, Orlove et al. (2008b), who analyze the cultural framing of glaciers, Carey (2007), who sees an endangered species narrative applied to glaciers, Jackson (2015), who exposes how glaciers are depicted as ruins, and Sörlin (2015), who refers to the present as a cryo-historical moment because ‘ice has become historical, i.e. that ice is an element of change and thus something that can be considered as part of society and of societal concern’ (Sörlin, 2015: 327).....
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On a much more serious note, the December 2000 book Late Victorian holocausts : El Niño famines and the making of the third world examines how the crop failures combined with British administrative mismanagement resulted in the deaths of some 60 million people.
The fact is that since the 1866 -1869 famines in Sweden and Finland famine is a political decision or lack of decision. The technology exists to move food to where it is needed.
Actually, in many respects the Irish famine years of the 1840's, two decades earlier, were the first of the political famines.
