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Was Hurricane Irene Caused By Climate Change?
Every major weather event raises the same debate over the same unanswerable question: was it caused by climate change?And every time, some prominent name or public figure, fed up with media coverage or with the persistence of skepticism about...
Canada's Sham Of A Climate Policy
Editor: I mashed these two posts together because they are so similar, but I still wanted to post them both. In the Globe and Mail, Marc Jaccard wisely pointed out the gaping flaws in the Canadian pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by...
The Complexity of Climate Change Policy
Buried in a couple recent news stories, which themselves were buried by the news of the debt standoff in the U.S., were a couple fascinating nuggets that reveal a lot about how climate change mitigation policy does, and does not happen. One...
The Climate Impacts Of Different Foods
Earlier this week, the Environmental Working Group, a research and lobby group in DC, released a report on the “environment” and "health" impact of different foods. It found that lamb is the worst offender, followed by grain-fed beef, pork, cheese...
Honesty Needed in Canadian Emissions Reporting
For five years, Canadian government represnetatives have claimed they are meeting all the obligations under the Kyoto Protocol... except the emissions target. In other words, Canada has met the reporting deadlines but achieved little else. The claim...
An Argument For A Gas Tax
Last Thursday I gave a talk at the annual American Association of Geographers meeting in Seattle. The AAG attracts throngs and throngs of academic geographers from around the world. Frankly, the meeting is so big you need to be a geographer to...
Food Prices + The Biofuel Debate
People worldwide are being affected by a rise in the price of food. The causes are complex and interacting: last summer's drought in Russia, the price of oil, speculative trading in commodities, economic instability, political unrest on the Middle...
Climate communication: Be aggressive or be humble?
There's continuing disagreement inside and outside the scientific community about not only what scientists should say about climate change, but how they should be saying it. The communications literature states there is not one right approach, but a...
Open Waters Around Normally Frozen Baffin Island this New Year
At a casual meal on the weekend, I met a couple in town from Iqualit. The capital of Canada's northern Inuit territory of Nunavut is located on Frobisher Bay in southern Baffin Island. They told me that when they left home in mid-December, the ice...
If a hurricane dies at sea, does anybody count it?
This post from the Capital Weather Gang is a reminder that the lack of Atlantic hurricanes which made landfall this year does not mean it was a tepid hurricane season. The year's tracks are shown at right. The number of named Atlantic storms (19)...
The forecast for climate blogs
The previous post drawing analogies between the state of climate blogging and cable news drew a wide variety of responses, some here, some over at the Energy Collective, and some in private e-mails (if such a thing exists). There's no right answer...
Climate blogs, cable news and some inconvenient truths
There is a storm brewing in the climate change world. Climate policy efforts are in disarray. There’s a chance that the Congress, energized by new leadership that questions the scientific evidence for climate change, will hold hearings to...
