climate

World CO2 Chart via Wikipedia -- Look to the top of right sidebar for the current month's CO2 level Via Climate Himalaya, The Guardian reports on the record greenhouse gas emissions, melting Arctic sea ice, natural disasters and extreme weather – and the world’s second worst nuclear disaster. The year 2011 was another ecologically...[read more]

After going into sudden-death overtime, the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa wrapped up this weekend with an agreement that only a climate diplomat could love. Constituting in effect an agreement to agree to some future agreement, the outcome is open to interpretation. Is this the failure that was widely predicted, the...[read more]

Two weeks of international climate negotiations began last week in Durban, South Africa.  These are the Seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP-17) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  The key challenge at this point is to maintain the process of building a sound foundation for meaningful,...[read more]

Thank you so much for a terrific webinar! In a few days, we'll have an audio recording of this amazing presentiation up in this post's slot. We kept a fast pace to get to all the speakers in the 3 hour time slot, and we know we didn't get a chance to get to everyone's questions. Please post your unanswered or unasked questions in the...[read more]

Through the clamour from business and political leaders, it's the voices of the world's poor to which we should now listen. They are coming from Burundi, from Rwanda, from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, from Zimbabwe and South Africa. They are coming from all over Africa, and everyone whom they pass cheers them on and wishes them good luck, their hearts full of hope.[read more]

Hansen has an interesting discussion of extreme weather and attribution to human emissions: Global warming is expected to intensify climate extremes: (1) Warmer air holds more water vapor, and precipitation occurs in more extreme events. ’100-year floods’ and even ’500- year floods’ will become more likely. Storms fueled by water vapor (...[read more]

Jeff Sachs recommends an informal international mostly academic collaboration to come up with actual options and get around the noise-making. He points out that expectations of leadership from the US government are unrealistic in the near future.Long (over an hour). Intro lasts about four minutes.h/t Rust Never SleepsJEFF SACHS from HUCE...[read more]

Image source: Author's blog

Over recent weeks, one of the major Australian newspapers has asked readers to submit questions on climate change and, at the same time, opened a poll so that all readers could vote on the questions they most wanted to see answered. The newspaper pledged to investigate and attempt to answer the top ten questions. The poll closed last weekend and the questions are now in. Without getting too lengthy, and also drawing on many previous postings, here are some my thoughts on the ten questions.[read more]

We are less than two days out from President Barack Obama’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress and to the nation to outline proposals to help put Americans back to work. This speech could be a strident call for all-out measures to reinvigorate American employment, a more limited set of programs constructed and conceived within a...[read more]

Plenty of studies show how we can save the planet and save money all at once. Many of them happen to be produced by McKinsey. Economists tend to deride them. If you could really save money by being green, why wouldn’t everyone be green all the time?[read more]

Betting against the herd turned out to be the smarter strategy in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. But being right about the housing bubble was not enough. The first economists called the bubble in 2002. Putting your money on that bet in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007 would have cost you. Timing was everything. Some...[read more]

Cattle deaths have been mounting in the central U.S. as the recent heat wave has pushed heat indices above 120 degrees in a number of states. Faced with dry pastures, rapidly depleting hay supplies and drought stressed surface water sources, ranchers in Texas are engaging in a significant  livestock sell-off, referred to in one...[read more]

I’ve long been a proponent of the carbon budget way of viewing our climate change predicament. By focusing on the total amount of CO2 (or CO2 equivalent other greenhouse gases) we can emit from this point forward, I think it greatly simplifies the “feeds and speeds” without introducing any inaccuracies or openings for misunderstanding...[read more]

We have only ten years to act on climate! Four years ago we only had ten years to act! Ten years ago we only had ten years to act! Twenty years ago, the same!This is very poor messaging, even though in a sense it is true.Let me try to explain how this could be true in some sense. Then maybe we can consider how to say this better....[read more]

It was reported this month that almost half of wind farms onshore were refused planning in the last year.While some of the applications are likely to have been unsuitable and most likely skewed the figures, NIMBYism remains one of the biggest threats to the UK’s onshore wind turbine development. As R3 editor, Gill Anderson,...[read more]