Tag Archives: Talk

Kyoto Climate Talks

 KICC

Kyoto International Conference Centre

Talks on climate and climate change have a long history in Kyoto, not as long as the 1200 year history of the city but in terms of climate talks, Kyoto is historic.

There were very few biogeography talks at the conference, roughly 6 sessions could fit into what is classically called biogeography.  Though they also would have fallen out under remote sensing, nature society, livelihoods and landscape planning. Due to this limitation of biogeography talks at the meeting I went to talks of the dominant physical geography group “climatology”.  While they were the dominant physical discipline, over all physical geography is grossly under represented at the conference.

An example of how under represented physical geography is can be seen from the 65(8) US based geographers at the conference 3 would be considered physical.  GIS is also poorly represented.  The dominant group is Human Geography. I don’t even know how well Nature Society was represented for in almost all of the biogeography talks one to two talks were about livelihoods in relation to nature, so maybe they too are underrepresented.

Back to the climate.  There were three main climate themes: Historical, Urban and Monsoons.  I primarily attended the historical climatology sessions.  These talks were primarily about Japan showing reconstructions of precipitation, temperatures and ENSO from historical documents.  I was extra interested in these topics considering my research and that I shall be working on reconstructions from the tree rings in central Japan.

Historical Climate

I learned about some more good resources to look at for historical climate data as well as I had some insights on how to merge unusual data sources for my research. Such as the Japan Climate Data Project which is compiling these old documents into useable data.

The mountains huts have been running for roughly 50-100 years.  I am going to ask if they have daily climate data for any span of time that I might be able to use to validate or debunk the laps rates and radiosounde data.

One of the interesting things that came up in many presentations was that in the 1850-1860’s it was especially warm in Japan.  This period of time corresponds with the end of the little ice age here in Japan and throughout East Asia. It will be interesting to examine my tree establishment data to see if there is a trend of greater establishment around this same period.

While I was hoping for a good variety of biogeography talks at IGU, I felt honored that I could attend so many talks on climate at the historic grounds of the Kyoto Protocol.