Most years, there are one or two people who are perplexed that a programme on climate adaptation includes sessions on behavioural change - exploring our own responses to change, how change can be effected at a local community level, and at the state level, as well as global changes.
The etymology of words is something that has always intrigued me, as I find it easier to spell something if I know where its roots come from. What also interests me is how words get appropriated from one discipline to another. The climate change field seems rife with these. Mitigation, Adaptation, and more recently Resilience, are obvious examples. (Mitigation, for example, stems from legal Latin of the 14th Century!)
The seventh annual Oxford Adaptation Academy is scheduled for August 13-25th, 2017. That may seem a long way off but, each year, there are sadly a few people who try to book at the last minute and discover that they have left it too late. It can take longer than you realise to organise flights, visas, sponsorship, leave from work, and so on.
One of the difficulties encountered by many projects involved in responses to climate change, is the lack of reliable long-term data that can form a baseline for improvement. We can usually only capture static information for a relatively recent 'time slice', which makes prediction of trends almost impossible. We can see that, for example, something is getting more or less, higher or lower, longer or shorter, richer or poorer, larger or smaller, but we can't say what that represents in a long-term trend. Where we do, the mathematics and especially, statistics, of regression analysis and the analysis of variance, are (sadly) often beyond the ken of many scientists let alone the average person in the street, and the mass media that is supposedly informing them.