The Labour of Love: Seasonal Migration from Jharkhand to the Brick Kilns of Other States in India

Seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry six months to subsist or merely survive. This article draws on fieldwork in a village in Jharkhand and a brick kiln in West Bengal to argue that migrants do not understand their movement in economic terms alone. Many see the brick kilns as a temporary space of freedom to escape problems back home, explore a new country, gain independence from parents or live out prohibited amorous relationships. It is suggested that Jharkhandi activists and policy-makers’ construction of such migration as a ‘problem’ is as much about their vision of how the new tribal state ought to be as about exploitation. Migration to the kilns is seen by them as a threat to the purity and regulation of the social and sexual tribal citizen. This moralising perspective creates a climate that paradoxically encourages many young people to flee to the brick kilns where they can live ‘freely’. In this way, the new puritanism at home helps to reproduce the conditions for capitalist exploitation and the extraction of surplus value

Kelvin and Rossby-gravity wave packets in the lower stratosphere of some high-top CMIP5 models

International audienceWe analyze the stratospheric Kelvin and Rossby-gravity wave packets with periods of a few days in nine high-top (i.e., with stratosphere) models of the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). These models simulate realistic aspects of these waves and represent them better than the tropospheric convectively coupled waves analyzed in previous studies. There is nevertheless a large spread among the models, and those with a quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) produce larger amplitude waves than the models without a QBO. For the Rossby-gravity waves this is explained by the fact that models without a QBO never have positive zonal mean zonal winds in the lower stratosphere, a situation that is favorable to the propagation of Rossby-gravity waves. For the Kelvin waves, larger amplitudes in the presence of a QBO is counter intuitive because Kelvin waves are expected to have larger amplitude when the zonal mean zonal wind is negative, and this is always satisfied in models without a QBO. We attribute the larger amplitude to the fact that models tuned to have a QBO require finer vertical resolution in the stratosphere. We also find that models with large precipitation variability tend to produce larger amplitude waves. However, the effect is not as pronounced as was found in previous studies. In fact, even models with weak precipitation variability still have quite realistic stratospheric waves, indicating either that (i) other sources can be significant or that (ii) the dynamical filtering mitigates the differences in the sources between models. © 2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved

Keeping the state away: democracy, politics and imaginations of the State in India's Jharkhand

This article explores why in India's Jharkhand, Mundas, often depicted as poor tribals, participate in elections to keep the state away, seeing it as foreign, dangerous, and juxtaposing its self-interested and divisive politics with a sacral polity, the parha. Munda disengagement with the state results from a complex combination of their contrasting the state with the sacral polity, historical experience of exploitation by state officers, and social relations with rural elites who, seeking to maintain dominance, reproduce Munda imaginings. The article thus draws attention to multiple co-existing notions of politics and the importance of a local political economy in the social production of cultural imaginings of the state

Multi-model assessment of stratospheric ozone return dates and ozone recovery in CCMVal-2 models

International audienceProjections of stratospheric ozone from a suite of chemistry-climate models (CCMs) have been analyzed. In addition to a reference simulation where anthropogenic halogenated ozone depleting substances (ODSs) and greenhouse gases (GHGs) vary with time, sensitivity simulations with either ODSs or GHGs concentrations fixed at 1960 levels were performed to disaggregate the drivers of projected ozone changes. These simulations were also used to assess the two distinct milestones of ozone returning to historical values (ozone return dates) and ozone no longer being influenced by ODSs (full ozone recovery). These two milestones are different. The date of ozone returning to historical values does not indicate complete recovery from ODSs in most cases, because GHG induced changes accelerate or decelerate ozone changes in many regions. In the upper stratosphere where GHG induced stratospheric cooling increases ozone, full ozone recovery has not likely occurred by 2100 while ozone returns to its 1980 or even 1960 levels well before (~2025 and 2040, respectively). In contrast, in the tropical lower stratosphere ozone decreases continuously from 1960 to 2100 due to projected increases in tropical upwelling, while by around 2040 it is already very likely that full recovery from the effects of ODSs has occurred, although ODS concentrations are still elevated by this date. In the lower midlatitude stratosphere the evolution differs from that in the tropics, and rather than a steady decrease of ozone, first a decrease of ozone is simulated between 1960 and 2000, which is then followed by a steady increase throughout the 21st century

The HadGEM2-ES implementation of CMIP5 centennial simulations

The scientific understanding of the Earth's climate system, including thecentral question of how the climate system is likely to respond tohuman-induced perturbations, is comprehensively captured in GCMs and EarthSystem Models (ESM). Diagnosing the simulated climate response, andcomparing responses across different models, is crucially dependent ontransparent assumptions of how the GCM/ESM has been driven - especiallybecause the implementation can involve subjective decisions and may differbetween modelling groups performing the same experiment. This paper outlinesthe climate forcings and setup of the Met Office Hadley Centre ESM, HadGEM2-ES for the CMIP5 set of centennial experiments. We document theprescribed greenhouse gas concentrations, aerosol precursors, stratosphericand tropospheric ozone assumptions, as well as implementation of land-usechange and natural forcings for the HadGEM2-ES historical and futureexperiments following the Representative Concentration Pathways. Inaddition, we provide details of how HadGEM2-ES ensemble members wereinitialised from the control run and how the palaeoclimate and AMIPexperiments, as well as the "emission-driven" RCP experiments wereperformed