10. What Do You Think About Global Climate Change? Non-chronological links: Climate Change Solutions Simulator - EN-ROADS (developed by Climate Interactive, Ventana Systems, and MIT Sloan) Climate
Change Education.org Articles from 2012–present See also articles from: 2021-07-23. [https://eos.org/articles/climate-litigation-has-a-big-evidence-gap] - Climate Litigation Has a Big Evidence Gap. Source: By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU Excerpt: Climate change has found its way into courtrooms around the world more and more often in recent years: Plaintiffs have brought more than 1,500 cases of climate litigation since 1986, and an increasing number of cases are filed each year. ... However, climate litigation has failed more often than not to hold greenhouse gas emitters accountable for climate-related impacts like flooding and damage from drought or wildfires. ...The researchers examined 73 cases across 14 jurisdictions worldwide that made a claim that a defendant’s emissions negatively impacted the plaintiffs. In those cases, courts did not dispute the general idea that greenhouse gases cause climate change. “What was more of a challenge,” Stuart-Smith said, “was establishing a causal relationship between greenhouse gas emissions of an individual entity…and specific impacts on a specific location.” Making that causal connection is key for the success of climate litigation, he said, and is the goal of climate attribution science, or science that quantifies the extent to which climate change alters an event. ...However, 73% of the cases the team examined did not bring forward peer-reviewed climate attribution science as evidence.... 2021-07-16. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/16/true-cost-of-american-food-system/] - The health and climate consequences of the American food system cost three times as much as the food itself. Source: By Laura Reiley, The Washington Post. Excerpt: ...The true cost of food is even higher than you think, a new report out Thursday says. The U.S. spends $1.1 trillion a year on food. But when the impacts of the food system on different parts of our society — including rising health care costs, climate change and biodiversity loss — are factored in, the bill is around three times that, according to a report by the Rockefeller Foundation, a private charity that funds medical and agricultural research. Using government statistics, scientific literature and insights from experts across the food system, the researchers quantified things like the share of direct medical costs attributable to diet and food, as well as the productivity loss associated with those health problems. They also looked at how crop cultivation and ranching, and other aspects of U.S. food production impacted the environment.... 2021-07-02. [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/climate/trees-cities-heat-waves.html] - What Technology Could Reduce Heat Deaths? Trees. Source: By Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times. Excerpt: At a time when climate change is making heat waves more frequent and more severe, trees are stationary superheroes: They can lower urban temperatures 10 lifesaving degrees, scientists say.... 2021-05-12. [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/science/space-junk-climate-change.html] - What if Space Junk and Climate Change Become the Same Problem? Source: By Jonathan O’Callaghan, The New York Times. Excerpt: Our planet’s atmosphere naturally pulls orbiting debris downward and incinerates it in the thicker lower atmosphere, but increasing carbon dioxide levels are lowering the density of the upper atmosphere, which may diminish this effect. A study presented last month at the European Conference on Space Debris says that the problem has been underestimated, and that the amount of space junk in orbit could, in a worst-case scenario, increase 50 times by 2100.... 2021-04-30. [https://www.savetheredwoods.org/press-releases/research-confirms-significant-role-of-redwood-forests-in-californias-climate-fight/] - Research from Save the Redwoods League and Humboldt State University Confirms Significant Role of Redwood Forests in California’s Climate Fight. Source: Save the Redwoods League and Humboldt State University. Excerpt: Newly published research from Save the Redwoods League and Humboldt State University (HSU) confirms the exceptionally large role that redwood forests can play in California’s strategy to address climate change. The research demonstrates that old-growth coast redwood forests store more carbon per acre than any other forest type. ...The findings cap 11 years of research through the League’s Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative (RCCI), which has also revealed that younger second-growth coast redwood forests grow quickly enough to result in substantial carbon storage in a relatively short period. This makes a strong case for investing in the restoration of previously logged redwood forests. ...Prior to industrial logging, California had more than 2 million acres of ancient redwoods, but now only about 113,000 acres of old-growth redwood forests remain, largely protected in parks and preserves. According to Sillett’s team, there can be up to 890 metric tons of carbon (1 metric ton = 2,205 pounds) stored per acre of old-growth redwood forest, which is the estimated equivalent of taking about 700 passenger vehicles off the road for a year. In place of all that lost old-growth forest now stand about 1.5 million acres of younger second-growth redwood forests. ...While these regrowing forests don’t match old-growth forests in terms of total biomass or carbon storage per acre, they grow extremely quickly and recover fire- and decay-resistant carbon storage capacity fast. In a study published last year, the RCCI team found that in 150 years, fast-growing second-growth redwood forests can accumulate 40 percent as much biomass and store 30 percent as much carbon as the original old-growth in their decay-resistant heartwood. Further, some redwood forests that were logged in the mid-1800s have already accumulated as much as 339 metric tons of carbon per acre—the equivalent of taking about 270 passenger vehicles off the road for one year. This level of carbon storage has profound implications when extended across 1.5 million acres of second-growth redwood forests.... 2021-04-22. There’s a Booming Business in America’s Forests. Some Aren’t Happy About It. By Gabriel Popkin, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...a huge factory that dries and presses wood into roughly cigarette-filter-sized pellets roared to life.... The slumberless factory’s output is trucked to a port in Chesapeake, Va., and loaded on ships bound for Europe, where it will be burned to produce electricity and heat for millions of people. It’s part of a fast-growing industry that, depending on whom you ask, is an unwelcome source of pollution or a much-needed creator of rural jobs; a forest protector, or a destroyer. In barely a decade, the Southeast’s wood pellet industry has grown from almost nothing to 23 mills with capacity to produce more than 10 million metric tons annually for export. It employs more than 1,000 people directly, and has boosted local logging and trucking businesses. ...The open question is whether a world increasingly desperate to avert climate disaster will continue to embrace, or turn away from, humanity’s original fuel: wood. Most divisive is the industry’s claim to battle climate change by replacing dirty fossil fuels with clean bioenergy. ...Many foresters, economists and environmental policy experts endorse that idea. But a legion of ecologists, conservationists and others strongly disagree. ...In 2009, European officials decided to declare biomass energy — basically, the burning of wood or other plants, rather than fossil fuels — to be carbon neutral. The idea is that regrowing plants, over time, would ultimately reabsorb the carbon dioxide released by the burning. ...Many scientists have long been skeptical of biomass’s climate benefits. Wood releases more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced than coal or gas, and a newly planted tree can take decades to reabsorb the carbon dioxide emitted by burning. ...In 2009, a group ...wrote in the journal Science protesting what they called a “critical climate accounting error.” They argued that certain major international climate policies and legislation designed to reduce countries’ greenhouse gas emissions allow nations to burn biomass and discount their smokestack emissions but fail to account for the carbon losses caused by cutting down trees to burn them.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/climate/wood-pellet-industry-climate.html] 2021-04-22. 17 Young People on the Moment the Climate Crisis Became Real for Them. By Mary Retta, Mother Jones. Excerpt: ...originally ... in Teen Vogue…. Watching An Inconvenient Truth in your middle-school science class. Hearing Greta Thunberg’s calls to join weekly school strikes. Driving away from smoldering wildfires engulfing dry California hillsides. These are some of the moments that made young people realize the climate crisis will define their lives—and the future of human life on Earth. We’ve heard the facts so many times that it’s easy to become numb to them: The world is steadily growing warmer, certain parts of the world are facing extreme droughts or floods, many wildlife populations are shrinking—and things are only projected to grow worse, with carbon emissions rising and countries contributing to mass deforestation. Despite these emergencies, many politicians, including Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, deny the reality of climate change. And the Western world, particularly the United States, is currently the biggest contributor to the climate crisis. ...younger generations have risen up, calling on global leaders to treat our rapidly changing climate like the emergency it is. Teen Vogue heard from more than 80 young people about how they imagine the climate crisis might define their future. A selection of their responses is below, condensed and lightly edited for clarity.... [https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/04/young-people-moment-climate-crisis-became-real/] 2021-04-19. The Climate Clock Now Ticks With a Tinge of Optimism. By Colin Moynihan, The New York Times. Excerpt: The display in New York’s Union Square, which reports the window to address global warming, now also measures the rising use of renewable energy.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/arts/design/climate-change-clock-new-york.html] 2021-04-12. ‘Sink into your grief.’ How one scientist confronts the emotional toll of climate change. By David Malakoff, Science Magazine. Excerpt: “I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts,” sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas recalls in her new book, Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World. But as research has increasingly revealed how climate change will forever alter the ecosystems and communities she loves, she has struggled to address her feelings of sadness. “My dispassionate training,” the Lund University researcher writes, has “not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change,” or how to respond to students who come to her to share their own grief. It’s a situation many scientists and professors are facing these days, Nicholas writes. “Being witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description.” But Nicholas says the untimely death of a close friend helped persuade her that the only way forward was to acknowledge that “we are not going to be able to save all the things we love.” Instead, she says, we have to “swim through that ocean of grief … and recognize that we still have time to act, and salvage many of the things we care about.” ...In 2017, she and climate scientist Seth Wynes, now at Concordia University, published a high-profile paper showing the most effective actions to reduce an individual’s carbon footprint—such as flying less or shifting to a vegetarian diet—are rarely emphasized by governments or educators. But it was the study’s finding that going childless could dramatically reduce a person’s contribution to global warming that generated headlines—and controversy—around the world.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/sink-your-grief-how-one-scientist-confronts-emotional-toll-climate-change] 2021-04-05. Chasing Carbon Unicorns. By Rishika Pardikar, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: According to a new report, net zero targets many governments are pursuing are distractions from the urgent need to drastically reduce carbon emissions In the past few months, many governments have announced net zero carbon emission targets. These targets update the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) at the heart of the Paris Agreement. ...Net zero describes the goal of removing as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as is emitted. ...The net zero targets outlined by NDCs and corporations ...include nature-based solutions like planting more trees to sequester carbon, developing carbon capture and storage technologies, and investing in carbon offsets (largely defined as a reduction in carbon emissions made by one party to compensate for emissions made by another). But net zero targets described by NDCs and businesses are “deceptions” and “distractions,” according to a new report by Friends of the Earth International (FoEI). ...Sometimes the [net zero] targets do not aim to reduce emissions, but compensate for them with offsets. ...A foundational fallacy in net zero targets, the FoEI report claims, rests in a misrepresentation of the carbon cycle ...divided into two parts based on timescale. One is the biogenic cycle, in which carbon circulates between the atmosphere, land, and oceans. The other is the slower, nonbiogenic cycle in which carbon circulates between fossil fuels stored underground and the atmosphere. The biogenic cycle can occur within hours, days, and years. The nonbiogenic cycle takes hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. Net zero targets conflate the two cycles, the FoEI report claims. Targets assume all the carbon that’s already circulating in the atmosphere as well as all the carbon that will be emitted by fossil fuels can be safely and effectively sequestered. ...We are putting significant stress on all these pools by pushing them to take up additional fossil CO2.…We cannot just stuff the geosphere (i.e., CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels) into the biosphere,” the report says.... [https://eos.org/articles/chasing-carbon-unicorns] 2021-03-24. New generation of carbon dioxide traps could make carbon capture practical. By Robert F. Service. Excerpt: Windmills and solar panels are proliferating fast, but not fast enough to stave off the worst of climate change. Doing so, U.N. climate experts say, will also require capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the tens of thousands of fossil fuel power plants and industrial smokestacks likely to keep belching for years to come. Today’s most popular approach for capturing CO2 is too expensive for widespread use. But researchers are now developing a new generation of chemical CO2 traps, including one shown this month to reduce the cost by nearly 20%. When existing U.S. tax credits are added to the mix, carbon capture is nearing commercial viability, says Joan Brennecke, a carbon capture expert at the University of Texas, Austin. ... in the March issue of International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, the PNNL team, together with researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute and the engineering giant Fluor, have published a detailed analysis showing that a full-scale coal-fired power plant using 2-EEMPA would require 17% less energy than today’s state of the art carbon-capture systems.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/new-generation-carbon-dioxide-traps-could-make-carbon-capture-practical] 2021-03-05. More than 50 companies have vowed to be carbon-neutral by 2040. By Desmond Butler and Steven Mufson, The Washington Post. Excerpt: Amazon, Walmart, General Motors, and now FedEx. There is a quickening rhythm of corporations with big carbon footprints pledging action to combat climate change. ...Yet even the prodigious voluntary steps by a portion of the corporate world lack the speed, scale or scientific know-how needed to move the thermometer of the warming planet very far in the right direction without government support or broader behavioral changes in the private sector. Just Wednesday, FedEx promised to be carbon-neutral by 2040, 10 years faster than the timeline laid out by the Paris climate accord. The company pledged an initial investment of $2 billion to start electrifying its massive fleet of more than 180,000 vehicles and $100 million for a new Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture. The giant delivery company joins more than 50 other major corporations that also aim to be carbon-neutral by 2040 in an effort to curb climate change by tackling their own contributions to it. Executives point to a gathering cultural change, with companies responding not only to shareholders activists but to the growing urgency of climate change and the concerns of their own employees and customers.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/05/more-than-50-companies-have-vowed-be-carbon-neutral-by-2040] 2021-03-02. Top oil and gas lobbying group close to backing a carbon tax. By Steven Mufson, The Washington Post. Excerpt: The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying arm, is edging closer to endorsing a carbon tax, a tool that would make fossil fuels more expensive, boost prospects for renewable and nuclear energy, and curb pollution that is driving climate change.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/02/api-climate-carbon-tax/] 2021-02-25. A third of all food in the U.S. gets wasted. Fixing that could help fight climate change. By Sarah Kaplan. The Washington Post. Excerpt: The carbon footprint of U.S. food waste is greater than that of the airline industry. Globally, wasted food accounts for about 8 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental consequences of producing food that no one eats are massive. ...Meanwhile, a staggering 26 million American adults told the Census Bureau last fall that they hadn’t had enough to eat in the previous week. The problem was even worse in households with children.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/02/25/climate-curious-food-waste/] 2021-02-05. Geological Surveys Unite to Improve Critical Mineral Security. By Poul Emsbo, Christopher Lawley, and Karol Czarnota, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: A three-nation consortium is pooling geological expertise and resources to address vulnerabilities in supplies of these crucial natural resources. The global economy is unprepared to meet the exploding demand for critical minerals. These materials, many of which were of little economic interest until recently, are required to fuel a proliferation of technologies and industries that have become vital for social and economic well-being the world over. But supplies of critical minerals are at risk because of their natural scarcity and because of geopolitical issues and trade policies that complicate their distribution, among other factors. Critical minerals such as gallium, indium, and the rare earth elements (REEs) are indispensable in the operation of the electronics that run our computers and the devices that display our data. Others containing phosphorus and potassium fertilize fields that feed the growing global population and are even active ingredients in pharmaceuticals. New metal alloys made with critical minerals are used to produce lighter, stronger materials that increase vehicle fuel efficiency. Lighter vehicles, many of which use new battery materials derived from critical minerals (e.g., lithium, cobalt, nickel), are transforming our transportation systems. Critical minerals essential for the development of new energy-related technologies that support the shift to noncarbon-based energy sources are becoming especially important. ...In December 2019, the Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative (CMMI), a research collaboration among scientists from three nations, convened its inaugural meeting in Ottawa, Canada. This initiative, which includes representatives from the Geological Survey of Canada, Geoscience Australia, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), aims to harness the combined geological expertise of these organizations to address global natural resource vulnerabilities.... [https://eos.org/science-updates/geological-surveys-unite-to-improve-critical-mineral-security] 2021-02-03. Finding “Glocal” Solutions to Flooding Problems. By Alka Tripathy-Lang, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Scientists call for joint efforts to combine real-time global rainfall data with high-resolution local hydrology to better forecast floods. Type “flooding today” into your search engine. You will likely find at least one place battling rising waters somewhere in the world—Mozambique today, Yorkshire yesterday, Hawaii tomorrow. Floods occur when water encroaches on dry land, which can happen during hurricane-induced storm surges or when heavy precipitation (or snowmelt) has nowhere to go. ...“Weather patterns, which cause flooding, are happening at the global scale,” said Guy Schumann, a flood hydrologist with the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, “but impacts of floods are very localized.” Local effects include costs to the economy, displacement of populations, and loss of life. Schumann and a team of scientists led by Huan Wu, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, China, developed an innovative flood model linking global precipitation patterns with localized hydrology—where water goes once it finds land. Their work provided useful information to the Chinese Ministry for Emergency Management when record rainfall in 2020 posed an immediate threat—an event that eventually affected 40 million people, according to Wu’s team.... [https://eos.org/articles/finding-glocal-solutions-to-flooding-problems] 2020-12-22. The Year in Climate. By The New York Times. Excerpt: 2020 was a crisis year: a pandemic, economic turmoil, social upheaval. And running through it all, climate change. Here’s some of the best reporting from The Times’s Climate Desk.... [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/2020-climate-change.html] 2020-12-16. Geoengineers inch closer to Sun-dimming balloon test. By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine Excerpt: For years, the controversial idea of solar geoengineering—lofting long-lived reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and diminish global warming—has been theoretical. ...Today, after much technical and regulatory wrangling, Harvard University scientists are proposing a June 2021 test flight of a research balloon designed to drop small amounts of chalky dust and observe its effects. ... the project, called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), must first win the approval of an independent advisory board, a decision that could come in February 2021. The need to study the real-world effects of releasing reflective particles is pressing, says David Keith, a Harvard energy and climate scientist and one of SCoPEx’s lead scientists. Solar geoengineering is no substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, he says, but it could ameliorate the worst damage of global warming, such as the extreme heat waves and storms that claim many lives today. ...But research in solar geoengineering has long been taboo, says Faye McNeill, an atmospheric chemist at Columbia University who is unaffiliated with SCoPEx. “We didn’t want it to appear that we were encouraging it.” One fear is that solar geoengineering could be done unilaterally by groups or nations, with unknown effects on plant growth and rainfall patterns. Another worry is that it would encourage a sort of addiction, adding more and more particles to block warming while not addressing the root problem of mounting emissions. But now, with so much warming already locked in, “the urgency of the climate problem has escalated,” McNeill says.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/geoengineers-inch-closer-sun-dimming-balloon-test] 2020-12-09. The world’s rich need to cut their carbon footprint by a factor of 30 to slow climate change, U.N. warns. By Brady Dennis, Chris Mooney and Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post. Excerpt: The world’s wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of 30 to help put the planet on a path to curb the ever-worsening impacts of climate change, according to new findings published Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program. Currently, the emissions attributable to the richest 1 percent of the global population account for more than double those of the poorest 50 percent. Shifting that balance, researchers found, will require swift and substantial lifestyle changes, including decreases in air travel, a rapid embrace of renewable energy and electric vehicles, and better public planning to encourage walking, bicycle riding and public transit. But individual choices are hardly the only key to mitigating the intensifying consequences of climate change. Wednesday’s annual “emissions gap” report, which assesses the difference between the world’s current path and measures needed to manage climate change, details how the world remains woefully off target in its quest to slow the Earth’s warming. The drop in greenhouse gas emissions during this year’s pandemic, while notable, will have almost no impact on slowing the warming that lies ahead unless humankind drastically alters its policies and behavior, the report finds.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/12/09/carbon-footprints-climate-change-rich-one-percent/] 2020-11-27. An unusual snack for cows, a powerful fix for climate. By Tatiana Schlossberg, The Washington Post. Excerpt: ...Asparagopsis taxiformis and Asparagopsis armata — two species of a crimson submarine grass that drifts on waves and tides all around the world’s oceans... could practically neutralize one of the most stubborn sources of a powerful greenhouse gas: methane emissions from the digestive processes of some livestock, including the planet’s 1.5 billion cows, which emit methane in their burps. ...In lab tests and field trials, adding a small proportion of this seaweed to a cow’s daily feed — about 0.2 of a percent of the total feed intake in a recent study — can reduce the amount of methane by 98 percent. That’s a stunning drop when most existing solutions cut methane by about 20 or 30 percent. ...growing seaweed used for the feed supplement could also help sequester carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, and reduce ocean acidification, because the plant sucks up carbon in the water as food.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/11/27/climate-solutions-seaweed-methane/]
2020-11-24. An ancient people with a modern climate plan. By Jim Morrison, The Washington Post. Excerpt: ...In 2010, the Swinomish became one of the first communities to assess the problems posed by a warming planet and enact a climate action plan. An additional 50 Native American tribes have followed, creating climate strategies to protect their lands and cultures, ahead of most U.S. communities. The Swinomish see the tasks beyond addressing shoreline risk and restoring habitats. They look at climate adaptation and resilience with the eyes of countless generations. They recognize that the endangered “first foods” — clams, oysters, elk, traditional plants and salmon — are not mere resources to be consumed. They are central to their values, beliefs and practices and, therefore, to their spiritual, cultural and community well-being. ...The Tulalip tribes, neighbors to the south, are relocating nuisance beavers from urban areas to streams with salmon to improve water quality and lower the temperature, reduce sediment flowing into streams and mitigate the effects of increasingly intense storms. The Karuk tribe of Northern California has a 232-page plan that calls for prescribed burning to reduce increasing wildfires and removing dams to help decreasing salmon and eel populations. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of Montana have a resilience plan that calls for prescribed burns and restoring whitebark pine, a key part of tribal culture. They plan to identify trees resilient to blister rust — a fungus exacerbated by climate change — collect their seeds and eventually plant 100,000 seedlings on their lands. And in Alaska, a partnership of 11 tribes has formed to identify harmful algae blooms so that it’s clear when shellfish can be safely harvested. Native Americans acutely feel the effects of the changing climate because they were forced onto the most vulnerable lands, places that were of little use to others, said Nikki Cooley, co-manager of the Tribes and Climate Change Program for the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals…. The institute has consulted with more than 300 of the 574 tribes in the United States, Cooley said. It’s natural that Indigenous people who have lived with the land for generations, attuned to the cycles of nature, would be leaders in adapting to climate change and marrying that to culture and health. “We’ve always been taught and are still being told we have to preserve for the future generations,” she added.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/11/24/native-americans-climate-change-swinomish/] 2020-11-11. How One Firm Drove Influence Campaigns Nationwide for Big Oil. By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times. Excerpt: In early 2017, the Texans for Natural Gas website went live to urge voters to “thank a roughneck” and support fracking. Around the same time, the Arctic Energy Center ramped up its advocacy for drilling in Alaskan waters and in a vast Arctic wildlife refuge. The next year, the Main Street Investors Coalition warned that climate activism doesn’t help mom-and-pop investors in the stock market. All three appeared to be separate efforts to amplify local voices or speak up for regular people. On closer look, however, the groups had something in common: They were part of a network of corporate influence campaigns designed, staffed and at times run by FTI Consulting, which had been hired by some of the largest oil and gas companies in the world to help them promote fossil fuels.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/climate/fti-consulting.html]. 2020-11-10. Reframing the Language of Retreat. By Julie Maldonado, Elizabeth Marino, and Lesley Iaukea. Excerpt: With so many communities facing relocation from a changing climate, reframing “managed retreat” is needed to respect people’s self-determination. When faced with the looming effects of climate change along coasts—larger storms, rising seas, flooding, and eroding shorelines—arguing to promote linguistic framing of climate change–driven migration may seem like a fool’s errand. Does anyone care what it’s called if hundreds of millions of people globally—up to 13.1 million people in the United States alone [Hauer et al., 2016]—relocate from coastlines en masse before 2100? ...Implicit in terms like managed retreat, forced migration, community relocation, and others are assumptions about who is deciding what is appropriate adaptation and how those decisions influence, suggest, or require compliance. How and, especially, by whom these plans are developed will have substantial impacts on affected or relocated people’s lives. ...Shifting from “managed retreat” to language that is more inclusive of who and what is included in “community” and that upholds the varying voices, opinions, knowledges, and lived experiences of those physically moving is more than a semantics issue; it also involves logistic and policy elements that can incite changes in practices related to people moving from coastal regions. The term community-led relocation, for example, includes consideration of the complex tapestry of people who leave a place they have inhabited to settle in another, as well as the fact that these community tapestries are bound not by geography but by relationships and practice. “Community led” also highlights the importance of community engagement, input, and leadership in decision-making, visioning, planning, and implementation [Marino et al., 2019].... [https://eos.org/opinions/reframing-the-language-of-retreat] 2020-11-05. Food and farming could stymie climate efforts, researchers say. By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine. Excerpt: ...Even if energy, transportation, and manufacturing go entirely green, emissions of greenhouse gases from the food system would put the world on track to warm by more than 1.5°C, a target set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. For the world to have a chance of preventing significant harm from climate change, the study authors say, all parts of food production need rapid and significant reform—everything from reducing deforestation for new fields to eating less meat. ...Carbon dioxide comes from many sources, such as cutting down tropical forests to make way for fields and pastures, running farm machinery, and manufacture of agrochemicals. Fertilizer also emits nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. And cows release methane, a powerful warming gas, in their burps and manure. ...The team assumed no radical changes in how food is produced, but continuing increases in efficiency. ...As incomes rise, people tend to eat more overall and consume more meat, dairy, and eggs—and animal products have a larger climate footprint than plant-based foods. The researchers then performed a thought experiment in which all other sources of greenhouse gases were immediately halted. Think: a complete transition to electric vehicles, geothermally heated buildings, renewable power, and so on. Given that climate utopia, but no change in how food is produced, the situation is still “very frightening,” Clark says. The simulation suggests the food system alone would contribute enough climate-harming gases that the planet (the hypothetical one with no other emissions, that is) would probably warm above the 1.5°C target sometime between 2051 and 2063, the researchers report today in Science.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/food-and-farming-could-stymie-climate-efforts-researchers-say]. See also New York Times article [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/climate/climate-change-food-production.html] 2020-10-28. How investors are coming up with the green to save the ocean blue. By Saqib Rahim, The Washington Post. Excerpt: Rob Weary ...as a dealmaker trying to convince small countries to protect their seas in a novel way — in partnership with big banks and international financial institutions. Four years ago, he struck a pioneering deal with the Seychelles, a splash of islands off the East African coast. ...the country was deep in debt.... Its economy depended on tourism and fishing, two industries facing decimation from climate change. As part of an investment team at the Nature Conservancy, the U.S.-based environmental group, Weary threw the Seychelles a lifeline: a chance to refinance more than $21 million of its debt. There were just two conditions. The government had to spend the savings on ocean conservation work such as coral restoration and trash cleanup, and it had to designate 30 percent of its waters as special zones where activities such as fishing and drilling are highly regulated or off limits. The nation’s leaders delivered. The Seychelles hasn’t missed a payment, and this spring its president announced it had met that target, protecting an area larger than Germany. Now some of the giants of the financial world are realizing there could be profits in ocean conservation. “Basically what we’re doing is financial engineering,” Weary said recently. “That’s typically used by hedge funds and private equity funds, with their goal of course to make returns for their investors.” It’s just that the investment objective here is different. “We’re doing all these to help Mother Nature.”.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/10/28/climate-solutions-ocean-conservation/]
2020-10-09. What’s Green, Soggy and Fights Climate Change? By Henry Fountain, The New York Times. Excerpt: Protecting intact peatlands and restoring degraded ones are crucial steps if the world is to counter climate change, European researchers said Friday. ... without protection and restoration efforts [for peat bogs], some targets for greenhouse gas emissions “would be very difficult or nearly impossible to achieve,” said Alexander Popp, an author of the study, which was published in Environmental Research Letters. ...Peatlands ...make up only about 3 percent of global land area, but their deep layers of peat are practically treasure chests of carbon, overall containing roughly twice as much as the world’s forests. In pristine bogs, that carbon remains soggy and intact. But when a bog is dried out, for agriculture or other reasons, the carbon starts to oxidize and is released to the atmosphere as planet-warming carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. ...Current estimates are that drained peatlands worldwide emit as much carbon dioxide annually as global air travel. But dry peat is also a fire risk, and peat fires have the potential to release a lot of carbon very quickly. In September and October 2015, peat fires in Indonesia, where bogs have long been drained for palm oil plantations and other purposes, released more carbon dioxide per day than all the fossil fuels burned in the European Union. Dried peatlands could be restored by allowing them to become wet again, which would saturate the decaying vegetation and prevent further release of carbon dioxide, and also eliminate the fire hazard.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/climate/peat-climate-change.html]
2020-10-07. Converging on Solutions to Plan Sustainable Cities. By Donald Wuebbles, Ashish Sharma, Amy Ando, Lei Zhao, and Carolee Rigsbee, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Climate change will exacerbate the food, energy, water, health, and equity challenges that urban communities face, but cities also have opportunities to improve sustainability and outcomes. ...a recent influx of “smart city” approaches views cities as mechanistic systems composed of discrete components to be optimized individually. However, cities cannot achieve sustainability without a holistic view of the interdependencies among essential human needs (food, energy, and water); constructed urban infrastructure; associated natural systems (air, water, land, ecosystems); and social, political, and legal decisions spanning all relevant scales (individuals, neighborhoods, municipalities, regions, nations). For example, national policy can limit or enhance what is doable within a city. At the local scale, residents of a single neighborhood can delay projects by tying them up in litigation. Inadequate consideration of these interdependencies can thus result in unintended social stresses, especially for the poor.... [https://eos.org/science-updates/converging-on-solutions-to-plan-sustainable-cities]
2020-10-04. ‘David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet’ Review: Ruin and Regrowth. By Natalia Winkelman, The New York Times. Excerpt: The majestic documentary “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” opens with its title subject standing in a deserted location. It’s the territory around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, a once buzzing area that was evacuated after human error rendered it uninhabitable. ...Calling the film (streaming on Netflix) his “witness statement” for the environment, David Attenborough goes on to trace his more than 60-year career as a naturalist, mapping how steeply the planet’s biodiversity has degenerated before him. Global air travel was new when he began his work, and footage of him as a young producer encountering exotic flora and fauna lends a moving, even haunting, note to his plea to restore ecological balance. ...upsetting is the loss of rain forests, showcased through the stark cutoff between flourishing vegetation and uniform rows of oil palms planted for profit. Such cinematic juxtapositions are persuasive: A dying planet is an ugly one, while healthy ecosystems please the eye and the earth. ...The most devastating sequence finds Attenborough charting the disasters we face in future decades — global crises that he, as a man now in his 90s, will not experience. Yet he finds hope by extrapolating small successes. Sustainable farming in the Netherlands has made the country one of the worldwide leaders in food exports. ...The film’s grand achievement is that it positions its subject as a mediator between humans and the natural world. Life cycles on, and if we make the right choices, ruin can become regrowth.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/movies/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet-review.html]
2020-09-03. Industrial waste can turn planet-warming carbon dioxide into stone. By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: In July 2019, Gregory Dipple, a geologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, hopped on a 119-seat charter flight in Yellowknife, Canada, and flew 280 kilometers northeast to the Gahcho Kué diamond mine, just south of the Arctic Circle. Gahcho Kué... is an expansive open pit mine.... ...Dipple and two students...were looking to use the mine’s crushed rock waste as a vault to lock up carbon dioxide (CO2) for eternity. At Gahcho Kué, Dipple’s team bubbled a mix of CO2 and nitrogen gas simulating diesel exhaust through a grayish green slurry of crushed mine waste in water. Over 2 days, the slurry acquired a slight rusty hue—evidence that its iron was oxidizing while its magnesium and calcium were sucking up CO2 and turning it into to carbon-based minerals. ... a wide array of rock and mudlike wastes from mining, cement and aluminum production, coal burning, and other large-scale industrial processes share a similar affinity for the greenhouse gas. Known as alkaline solid wastes, these materials have a high pH, which causes them to react with CO2 a mild acid. And unlike other schemes for drawing excess CO2 from the atmosphere, these reactive rocks can both capture the gas and store it, locked away permanently in a solid mineral. ...But there are major hurdles. Governments will need to offer incentives for mineralization on the massive scale needed to make a dent in atmospheric carbon. And engineers will need to figure out how to harness the wastes while preventing the release of heavy metals and radioactivity locked in the material.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/industrial-waste-can-turn-planet-warming-carbon-dioxide-stone] 2020-08-07. This Is Inequity at the Boiling Point. By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times. Excerpt: It was a record 125 degrees Fahrenheit in Baghdad in July, and 100 degrees above the Arctic Circle this June. Australia shattered its summer heat records as wildfires, fueled by prolonged drought, turned the sky fever red. For 150 years of industrialization, the combustion of coal, oil and gas has steadily released heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, driving up average global temperatures and setting heat records. Nearly everywhere around the world, heat waves are more frequent and longer lasting than they were 70 years ago. But a hotter planet does not hurt equally. If you’re poor and marginalized, you’re likely to be much more vulnerable to extreme heat. You might be unable to afford an air-conditioner, and you might not even have electricity when you need it. You may have no choice but to work outdoors under a sun so blistering that first your knees feel weak and then delirium sets in. Or the heat might bring a drought so punishing that, no matter how hard you work under the sun, your corn withers and your children turn to you in hunger. ...Extreme heat is not a future risk. It’s now. It endangers human health, food production and the fate of entire economies. And it’s worst for those at the bottom of the economic ladder in their societies.... [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/06/climate/climate-change-inequality-heat.html]
2020-08-05. Illegal deforestation in Brazil soars amid climate of impunity. By Herton Escobar, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen sharply in the past year—again. Estimates set to be released this week by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) will show clearings have increased by at least 28% during the current monitoring year, which runs from August through July, compared with the previous year. It is the second steep hike under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has made good on his campaign promise to loosen environmental law enforcement and step up development in the Amazon.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/illegal-deforestation-brazil-soars-amid-climate-impunity]
2020-07-08. How America’s hottest city will survive climate change. By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post. Excerpt: ...summer in Phoenix, where a cocktail of climate change and rapid development has pushed temperatures into the danger zone. The threats are greatest in black, Latino and low-income communities, which are significantly hotter than wealthier, leafier parts of the city. ...Yet the city is working to fight the literal heat. The goal is for Phoenix to become the country’s first heat-ready city — equipped to survive a rapidly warming world. Each year, more Americans die from extreme heat than are killed by storms, floods and wildfires combined. In few places is the problem more pronounced than in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and its suburbs. In 2019, the region saw 103 days of triple-digit temperatures and 197 fatalities from heat-related causes. It was the highest number of heat-associated deaths on record for the county, and the fourth year in a row of record-setting heat deaths there. Those numbers are only expected to increase as the climate changes. ...Phoenix’s rapid development in recent decades has made it a victim of what researchers call the “heat island effect.” All the trademarks of the urban environment — towering glass buildings, bustling industry, vast expanses of concrete and asphalt — absorb and amplify the heat of the sun. ... Natural environments, he explained, are incredibly effective at getting rid of heat. That’s because of the way trees and other vegetation release water into the surrounding air, a process called evapotranspiration. ...Edison-Eastlake’s plan calls for repaving the sidewalks with materials that stay cool by reflecting the sun, installing shade structures at bus stops and creating tree-covered “talking spaces” in a planned park.... [https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/climate-solutions/phoenix-climate-change-heat/]
2020-06-02. ‘Going in the Wrong Direction’: More Tropical Forest Loss in 2019. By Henry Fountain. Excerpt: Brazil was responsible for more than a third of the total global loss in 2019. [Images: Deforestation between 2001–2019 in Alto Paraiso, Brazil. (Source: World Resources Institute)] Destruction of tropical forests worldwide increased last year, led again by Brazil, which was responsible for more than a third of the total, and where deforestation of the Amazon through clear-cutting appears to be on the rise under the pro-development policies of the country’s president. The worldwide total loss of old-growth, or primary, tropical forest — 9.3 million acres, an area nearly the size of Switzerland — was about 3 percent higher than 2018 and the third largest since 2002. Only 2016 and 2017 were worse, when heat and drought led to record fires and deforestation, especially in Brazil.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/climate/deforestation-climate-change.html]
2020-05-08. Artificial chloroplasts turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into organic compounds. By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Just like mechanics cobble together old engine parts to build a new roadster, synthetic biologists have remade chloroplasts, the engine at the heart of photosynthesis. By combining the light-harvesting machinery of spinach plants with enzymes from nine different organisms, scientists report making an artificial chloroplast that operates outside of cells to harvest sunlight and use the resulting energy to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into energy-rich molecules. The researchers hope their souped-up photosynthesis system might eventually convert CO2 directly into useful chemicals—or help genetically engineered plants absorb up to 10 times the atmospheric CO2 of regular ones.... [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/artificial-chloroplasts-turn-sunlight-and-carbon-dioxide-organic-compounds#]
2020-05-13. In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S. By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: The United States is on track to produce more electricity this year from renewable power than from coal for the first time on record, new government projections show, a transformation partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic, with profound implications in the fight against climate change. It is a milestone that seemed all but unthinkable a decade ago, when coal was so dominant that it provided nearly half the nation’s electricity. ...powerful economic forces that have led electric utilities to retire hundreds of aging coal plants since 2010 and run their remaining plants less frequently. The cost of building large wind farms has declined more than 40 percent in that time, while solar costs have dropped more than 80 percent. ...As factories, retailers, restaurants and office buildings have shut down nationwide to slow the spread of the coronavirus, demand for electricity has fallen sharply. And, because coal plants often cost more to operate than gas plants or renewables, many utilities are cutting back on coal power first in response. ...The decline of coal has major consequences for climate change. Coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, and its decline has already helped drive down United States carbon dioxide emissions 15 percent since 2005. This year, the agency expects America’s emissions to fall by another 11 percent, the largest drop in at least 70 years. While the pandemic has made these projections uncertain, the decline is expected to come partly because Americans aren’t driving as much, but mainly because coal plants are running less often.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/climate/coronavirus-coal-electricity-renewables.html]
2020-03-30. Vodka From Thin Air: An Unusual Climate Prize Hits a Coronavirus Snag. By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...The five-year competition, the Carbon XPrize, was designed to create a financial incentive to capture carbon dioxide and use it profitably, instead of releasing it. ...as the Brooklyn vodka makers — along with the nine other finalists from as far afield as Nova Scotia (stronger concrete), India (an ingredient in pharmaceuticals) and China (a plastics replacement) — were approaching the finish line, the competition has been delayed by the coronavirus crisis. ...Mr. Niven wrote his thesis on how to turn carbon dioxide into concrete.... Dimensional Energy, with Mr. Salfi as chief executive. The technology uses concentrated sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into industrial energy sources like syngas, which is used to produce jet fuel, diesel and other liquid fuels. ...Air Co. entered its vodka in a blind taste test at last year’s Luxury Masters competition and won a gold medal.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/climate/xprize-carbon-coronavirus.html]
2020-05-24. Eight Lessons from COVID-19 to Guide Our Climate Response. By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The global response to the ongoing pandemic can teach us how we should, and shouldn’t, respond to the climate crisis. And most important, it shows that we can do something.... [https://eos.org/articles/eight-lessons-from-covid-19-to-guide-our-climate-response] For GSS Climate Change chapter 4. 2020-03-20. Basalts Turn Carbon into Stone for Permanent Storage. By Kimberly M. S. Cartier. Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Scientists have shown that mineral carbonation can permanently capture and store carbon quickly enough and safely enough to rise to the challenge of climate change. In carbon storage experiments tied to geothermal power plants in Iceland, 90% of injected carbon dioxide (CO2) transformed into minerals in just 2 years. Standard carbon storage methods can take thousands of years to do the same. “We are basing our methods on this natural process which is part of the big carbon cycle where all carbon on Earth derives from and ends up in rocks,” said one of the lead researchers, Sandra Snæbjörnsdóttir. She is the head of CO2 mineral storage at CarbFix [https://www.carbfix.com/].... [https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage]
2020-02-12. Global Financial Giants Swear Off Funding an Especially Dirty Fuel. By Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times. Excerpt: Some of the world’s largest financial institutions have stopped putting their money behind oil production in the Canadian province of Alberta, home to one of the world’s most extensive, and also dirtiest, oil reserves. In December, the insurance giant The Hartford said it would stop insuring or investing in oil production in the province, just weeks after Sweden’s central bank said it would stop holding Alberta’s bonds. And on Wednesday BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said that one of its fast-growing green-oriented funds would stop investing in companies that get revenue from the Alberta oil sands. They are among the latest banks, pension funds and global investment houses to start pulling away from fossil-fuel investments amid growing pressure to show they are doing something to fight climate change.... [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/climate/blackrock-oil-sands-alberta-financing.html]
2020-01-27. Wooden Buildings Could House the Carbon of the 21st Century. By Jonathan Wosen, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: To keep carbon out of the atmosphere, researchers argue that we need to return to one of the world’s oldest building materials: wood. ...Steel and concrete remain go-to materials for constructing new homes and commercial buildings. But although these materials are sturdy and durable, their manufacture and transport spew carbon into the atmosphere. ....microbes mastered carbon capture—photosynthesis—more than 3 billion years ago, with the first woody plants developing more than 300 million years ago. Churkina worked with a team of architects and scientists to calculate the benefits of using wood to build urban mid-rise buildings from 2020 to 2050. The team forecast four different scenarios. In the first, dubbed “business as usual,” 99.5% of new buildings would be built with steel and concrete. In the other three scenarios, 10%, 50%, or 90% of new buildings would be made from wood. The researchers estimate that the 90% scenario would keep up to 20 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere over the next 30 years.... [https://eos.org/articles/wooden-buildings-could-house-the-carbon-of-the-21st-century] For GSS Energy Use chapter 8 and Climate Change Chapter 10.
2020-01-21. Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum. The New York Times. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/climate/greta-thunberg-davos-transcript.html] For GSS Climate Change chapter 10. Excerpt: ...full transcript of her remarks... 2019-12-29. Our Cherished Rivers Are Under Threat. By Macarena Soler, Monti Aguirre and Juan Pablo Orrego, The New York Times (Opinion).
2019-12-12. Scientists and Activists Examine Need for Climate Action. By Randy Showstack, Eos/AGU.
2019-11-06. New reactor could halve carbon dioxide emissions from ammonia production. By Robert F. Service, Science. 2019-08-19. Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change. By Naomi Oreskes, Michael Oppenheimer, Dale Jamieson, Science. Life cycle assessment of supermarket carrier bags: a review of the bags available in 2006. Environment Agency (for protection of the environment in England and Wales).
2019-09-17. As Amazon Smolders, Indonesia Fires Choke the Other Side of the World. By Richard C. Paddock and Muktita Suhartono, The New York Times.
2019-08-30. A teachable moment: educators must join students in demanding climate justice. By Jonathan Isham and Lee Smithey, The Guardian. 2019-08-27. Water harvester makes it easy to quench your thirst in the desert. By Bob Sanders, UC Berkeley News.
2019-08-17. 'No sea sickness so far': Greta Thunberg update on Atlantic crossing. By Seth Jacobson, The Guardian.
2019-08-12. State of the Climate in 2018. By American NOAA, Meteorological Society (AMS).
2019-07-11. Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid. By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine.
2019-07-04. Adding 1 billion hectares of forest could help check global warming. By Alex Fox, Science Magazine. 2019-06-03. If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home? By Andy Newman, The New York Times. 2019-05-22. Historic Solutions to Sea Level Rise May Help Modern Communities. By Sarah Derouin, Eos/AGU.
2019-04-30. Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered—How to shop, cook and eat in a warming world. By Julia Moskin, Brad Plumer, Rebecca Lieberman and Eden Weingart, The New York Times. 2019-04-01. Youth Call Climate Change a Generational Justice Issue. By Randy Showstack, Eos/AGU. 2019-03-22. Judge Blocks Oil and Gas Leases on Public Land, Citing Climate Change. By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. 2019-03-15. Pictures From Youth Climate Strikes Around the World. By The New York Times.
2019-02-21. Slideshow---Student Councils: Help End Climate Silence and Congressional Climate Neglect with A Student Council Resolution. By Schools for Climate Action.
2019-02-12. Americans are Increasingly “Alarmed” About Global Warming. By Abel Gustafson, Anthony Leiserowitz and Edward Maibach, Yale University. 2019-01-22. Record Numbers of Americans Say They Care About Global Warming, Poll Finds. By John Schwartz, The New York Times.
2018-10-24. Scientists take opposing sides in youth climate trial. By Julia Rosen, Science Magazine.
2018-08-24. Meet the 15-year-old Swedish girl on strike from school for the climate. By Catherine Edwards, The Local.
2018-08-07. Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2018. By Jennifer Marlon, Peter Howe, Matto Mildenberger, Anthony Leiserowitz and Xinran Wang, Yale Program on Climate Change Education. 2018-07-30. California’s Birds Are Testing New Survival Tactics on a Vast Scale. By Wallace Ravven, The New York Times. 2018-07-12. Ammonia—a renewable fuel made from sun, air, and water—could power the globe without carbon. By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine.
2018-03-29. Scientists say we’re on the cusp of a carbon dioxide–recycling revolution. By Matt Warren, Science.
2018-03-06. A Secret Superpower, Right in Your Backyard. By Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times.
2018-02-05. No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It. By Maggie Astor, The New York Times. 2018-01-01. Fighting Climate Change, One Laundry Load at a Time. By Stanley Reed, The New York Times.
Highlights: we're probably not going to hit the 2°C target, and we can't even rule out a 5°C world. Research suggests that every 1C warming increases the risk of extinction for 10% of all species. Even if that's a 4-fold overestimate, it's still a profound result. Events that are already occurring at only 0.8°C above pre-industrial: wildfires, more intense hurricanes, droughts, the July 2012 Greenland melt, accelerating polar ice loss, arctic sea ice decline, ocean acidification, etc. It seems that even 2°C isn't "safe". There is a new understanding of aerosol forcings, which might increase the total anthropogenic radiative forcing from previous estimate ~1.6 W/m^2 to something more like 2.1 W/m^2. The last part of the talk is about finding ways to build a broad coalition of support for improving the efficiency and robustness of our infrastructure while we simultaneously try to decarbonize and feed more people with increasingly less food productivity. Sir Robert Watson also spoke at a session "The Anthropocene: Confronting the Prospects of a +4°C World." That is a 12 minute talk, starting at about 1hr 3min into the recording. 2012 November. Climate Change—Do the Math. This movie has recent climate change impacts on humanity, and a comparison of the cost of addressing climate change compared to the costs we currently incur every year to continue using fossil fuels. 2012 Oct 18. A Rogue Climate Experiment Outrages Scientists. By Henry Fountain, The NY Times. Excerpt: A California businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and government officials… The entrepreneur, Russ George, calling it a “state-of-the-art study,” said his team scattered iron dust several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in exchange for $2.5 million from a native Canadian group. The iron spawned the growth of enormous amounts of plankton, which Mr. George, a former fisheries and forestry worker, said might allow the project to meet one of its goals: aiding the recovery of the local salmon fishery for the native Haida. Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas, and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by burying carbon, they could also sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money.... 2012 July 19. Global Warming's Terrifying New Math | by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone magazine. Excerpt: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe. Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation…. Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees [C] …the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries … that act like fossil-fuel companies… the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn… is … 2,795 [gigatons] – is higher than 565. Five times higher. …If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets…. Read the full article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 2012 Jun 07. Warming nears point of no return, scientists say. By David Perlman, SF Gate. Excerpt: The Earth is reaching a "tipping point" in climate change that will lead to increasingly rapid and irreversible destruction of the global environment unless its forces are controlled by concerted international action, an international group of scientists warns. Unchecked population growth, the disappearance of critical plant and animal species, the over-exploitation of energy resources, and the rapidly warming climate are all combining to bring mounting pressure on the Earth's environmental health…scientists from five nations, led by UC Berkeley biologist Anthony Barnosky, report their analysis Thursday in the journal Nature…. 2012 Apr 12. Fuel to Burn: Now What?. By Jad Mouawad, The New York Times. An article relevant to GSS Energy Use chapter 3. Excerpt: The reversal of fortune in America’s energy supplies in recent years holds the promise of abundant and cheaper fuel, and it could have profound effects on what people drive, domestic manufacturing and America’s foreign policy. …High energy prices led to a wave of successful oil and gas exploration in North America, including in fields that were deemed uneconomical only a few years ago. Using techniques like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, oil companies are tapping into deeply buried reserves in shale rocks and in the ocean’s depths. …Ed Morse, head of global commodity research at Citigroup and a longtime energy analyst, says North America has the potential to become a "new Middle East." "The reduced vulnerability of North America — and the world market — to oil price spikes also has deep consequences geopolitically, including the reduced strategic importance to the U.S. of changes in oil- and natural gas-producing countries worldwide," Mr. Morse said in a recent 92-page report called Energy 2020. …The glut of natural gas supplies ... has effectively put an end in the United States to any new investment in coal plants, which produce much more emissions. But it also makes the economics of alternative, noncarbon energy sources like wind power or solar power difficult to justify without public support and subsidies. …Natural gas prices have fluctuated wildly in recent years, rising to $14 for a thousand cubic feet from $2 within a few years. The current glut, however, has driven prices back down again, to near $2 for a thousand cubic feet. …Shipping costs may be lower, particularly if transportation companies shift their fleets to natural gas-powered or electric vehicles. …. Read the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/business/energy-environment/energy-boom-in-us-upends-expectations.html?_r=1&ref=businessspecial2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120411 2012 Mar 18. Focus on technology overlooks human behavior when addressing climate change. University of Oregon Media Relations. Excerpt: Technology alone won't help the world turn away from fossil fuel-based energy sources, says University of Oregon sociologist Richard York. In a newly published paper, York argues for a shift in political and economic policies to embrace the concept that continued growth in energy consumption is not sustainable…. 2012 February 28. Belief in Global Warming on the Rebound: National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change. By Christopher P. Borick and Barry Rabe, Issues in Government Studies No. 44, The Brookings Institute. Excerpt: As 2012 begins, a growing number of Americans believe global warming is occurring. This is one of the key findings from the latest National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change (NSAPOCC). [PDF of full paper]. 2012 Feb 15. Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science. By Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman, The NY Times. Excerpt: Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the nation’s culture wars. 2012 January 27. Climate Change Debate Brewing in American Classrooms. By Sam Favate, Wallstreet Journal Law Blog. Excerpt: …State boards of education in Texas and Louisiana have established standards to require the presentation of climate change denial as a valid scientific position, while legislators in Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Kentucky have introduced bills to mandate equal time for climate change skeptics’ views in the classroom…. 2012 Jan 9. Real-World Learning Through Solar Power. NSTA Reports—Lynn Petrinjak. Schools across the country are turning to solar power as a way to simultaneously conserve energy and excite students about science. In Massachusetts, Diversified Construction Services, LLC, is erecting Solar Learning Labs (SLL) at 12 schools with support from a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the Department of Education. …“We’re trying to connect the curriculum to as pragmatic a situation as possible,” says Nick Young, superintendent of Hadley Public Schools in Hadley, Massachusetts. He anticipates about half of the district’s 300 middle and high school students will participate in courses using the SLL program. “This is a higher-end kind of program. It’s a way to connect to advanced subject matter. It’s a great opportunity for [self-motivated] students to be validated, and the hands-on application will appeal to some different learning styles, too.” During the installation of the solar panels, science teachers worked with Diversified. “It’s a school-based project. There’s an educational component built into construction,” explains Young. Although the panels will produce electricity on-site, Young admits it will be a “very modest amount.” 2012 Jan 6. The Technology Path to Deep Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cuts by 2050: The Pivotal Role of Electricity. By James H. Williams et al. Science. Abstract: Several states and countries have adopted targets for deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but there has been little physically realistic modeling of the energy and economic transformations required. We analyzed the infrastructure and technology path required to meet California’s goal of an 80% reduction below 1990 levels, using detailed modeling of infrastructure stocks, resource constraints, and electricity system operability. We found that technically feasible levels of energy efficiency and decarbonized energy supply alone are not sufficient; widespread electrification of transportation and other sectors is required. ...This transformation demands technologies that are not yet commercialized, as well as coordination of investment, technology development, and infrastructure deployment. 2011 June 20. NSF Press Release 11-122: Fastest Sea-level Rise in Two Millennia Linked To Increasing Global Temperatures. National Science Foundation News. Excerpt: The rate of sea level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years--and has shown a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level…. 2010 Sep 10. Polluter-Funded Evolution & Climate Exhibit at the Smithsonian. National Wildlife Federation. Excerpt: A "scientific" exhibit ignoring the threat of global warming at the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC? Reports The New Yorker: "The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. …The message… is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. … 2010 July 15. Bad science: Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause. By Jonathan Kay, National Post. Excerpt: Have you heard about the “growing number” of eminent scientists who reject the theory that man-made greenhouse gases are increasing the earth’s temperature? It’s one of those factoids that, for years, has been casually dropped into the opening paragraphs of conservative manifestos against climate-change treaties and legislation. 2010 June 8. The Climate Majority. By Jon A. Krosnick, The NY Times. Excerpt: Stanford, CA -- …National surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people. But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.
2010 May 6. Leading scientists condemn 'political assaults' on climate researchers. By Celia Cole, The Guardian. Excerpt: A group of 255 of the world's top scientists today wrote an open letter aimed at restoring public faith in the integrity of climate science. 2010 March 29. Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming. By Leslie Kaufman, NY Times. Excerpt: ...Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns. 2010 Feb 10. Climate-Change
Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze. By John
M. Broder, NY Times. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — As
millions of people along the East
Coast hole up in their snowbound
homes, the two sides in the climate-change
debate are seizing on the mounting
drifts to bolster their arguments. 2009 Dec 9. Science and Politics of Climate Change. New York Times. Interactive Feature. From Joseph Fourier to James Hansen, NOAA to I.P.C.C., and Kyoto to Copenhagen, a look at the history of climate study and diplomacy in the modern age of global warming. 2009 November 3. Religion’s
Role in the Climate Challenge. By Andrew
C. Revkin, The NY Times. Excerpt:
A remarkable conclave of leading
figures from nine of the world’s
major religions is under way at Windsor
Castle in Britain, under the auspices
of Prince Philip and the United
Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
Called “Many Heavens, One Earth,” the
meeting is intended to generate commitments
for actions by religious organizations,
congregants and countries that could
reduce emissions of greenhouse gases
or otherwise limit the human impact
on the environment. 2009 August 10. The
Earth Is Warming? Adjust the Thermostat. By John Tierney,
The NY Times. Excerpt: ...geoengineering...used
to be dismissed as science fiction
fantasies: cooling the planet with
sun-blocking particles or shades;
tinkering with clouds to make them
more reflective; removing vast quantities
of carbon from the atmosphere. 2009 August 8. Climate
Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security. By John
M. Broder, The NY Times. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — The
changing global climate will pose
profound strategic challenges to
the United States in coming decades,
raising the prospect of military
intervention to deal with the effects
of violent storms, drought, mass
migration and pandemics, military
and intelligence analysts say. 2009 July. Atomic Tracers. By Kathleen M. Wong, ScienceMatters@Berkeley. Just as crime scene investigators use blood, mud and other environmental clues to find their suspects, Berkeley professor Donald DePaolo uses isotopes to reveal the history of rocks, water and even the atmosphere.... 2009 June 15. A
Climate (Communication) Crisis? By
Andrew C. Nevkin, The NY Times.
Excerpt:
As debates over national and global
climate and energy policy continue
to drag out, there’s
been an intensifying exploration
of climate miscommunication among
those seeking concrete actions that
will make a noticeable difference
in the atmosphere someday. If the
science pointing to a rising risk
of dangerous human interference with
climate is settled, the thinking
goes, then why aren’t people
and the world’s nations galvanized?
Maybe it’s a language problem?... Everyone associated with environmental communication needs to read The Cluetrain Mainfesto of 1999 and take it to heart. The environmental struggle is one big exercise in persuasion. What the Cluetrain folks pointed out is that humans respond to human voices. You can “frame” all you want, but if the communication is coming from robots, the only ones who will respond will be the robots....The bottom line is it only takes a few seconds for people to listen to a voice and decide whether they trust it or not. If that voice is devoid of human qualities, and worse if there is a clear sense that the voice is speaking with “messages” that have been “framed” and “focus grouped,” it just ain’t gonna work for the masses. And double that for the younger masses. 2009 January 19. More-Reflective
Crops May Have Cooling Effect. By
Henry Fountain, The New York Times.
Excerpt:
Some of the most imaginative solutions
to the problem of global climate
change involve planetary-scale geoengineering
projects to reduce the sunlight reaching
the Earth’s
surface. But proposals like building
a huge sunshade in space or seeding
the atmosphere with sulfate particles
would cost enormous sums and require
a degree of international cooperation
that is difficult to achieve. 2008 October 30. Antarctica
hit by climate change. By Daniel Cressey,
Nature News. Excerpt:
In its landmark Fourth Assessment
Report, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) declared
in 2007 that human influence on climate "has
been detected in every continent
except Antarctica". Now a paper
in Nature Geoscience says that our
impact can be found even in the last
wilderness. 2008 August 30. Swimmer
aims to kayak to N Pole. BBC News. Excerpt:
Long-distance swimmer Lewis Pugh
plans to kayak 1200km (745 miles)
to the North Pole to raise awareness
of how global warming has melted
the ice sheet.... 2008 June 6. $45
trillion needed to combat warming. By Joeseph Coleman,
Associated Press. Excerpt: TOKYO
- The world needs to invest $45 trillion
in energy in coming decades, build
some 1,400 nuclear power plants and
vastly expand wind power in order
to halve greenhouse gas emissions
by 2050, according to an energy study
released Friday. 2008 May 15. NASA SATELLITE FINDS INTERIOR OF MARS IS COLDER. NASA RELEASE: 08-128. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- New observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate that the crust and upper mantle of Mars are stiffer and colder than previously thought. The findings suggest any liquid water that might exist below the planet's surface and any possible organisms living in that water, would be located deeper than scientists had suspected. [and here's the climate part...] ...The radar pictures also reveal four zones of finely spaced layers of ice and dust separated by thick layers of nearly pure ice. Scientists think this pattern of thick ice-free layers represents cycles of climate change on Mars on a time scale of roughly one million years. Such climate changes are caused by variations in the tilt of the planet's rotational axis and in the eccentricity of its orbit around the sun. The observations support the idea that the north polar ice cap is geologically active and relatively young, at about 4 million years. 2008 April 29. Court
Forces Government to Move on Polar
Bear Status. By
ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt:
...a Federal Court ruling today ...
forces the Bush administration to
decide by mid-May whether polar bears
deserve protection under the Endangered
Species Act because of Arctic impacts
from the warming climate. ...Dana
Perino, the White House press secretary,
...[said] in a briefing preceding
Mr. Bush's latest speech on climate,
the result was a looming "regulatory
train wreck. ...This would have the
Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species
Act, and the National Environmental
Policy Act all addressing climate
change in a way that is not the way
that they were intended to" 2008 April 12. Hurricane
Expert Reassesses Link to Warming.
By ANDREW C. REVKIN. The NY
Times. Excerpt:
A fresh study by a leading hurricane
researcher has raised new questions
about how hurricane strength and
frequency might, or might not, be
influenced by global warming. Eric
Berger of the Houston Chronicle nicely
summarized the research on Friday… That
work was supported by some subsequent
studies, but refuted by others. Despite
the uncertainty in the science, hurricanes
quickly became a potent icon in environmental
campaigns, as well as in "An
Inconvenient Truth," the popular
climate documentary featuring former
Vice President Al Gore. The message
was that global warming was no longer
a looming issue and was exacting
a deadly toll now. 2008 March 25. Link
to Global Warming in Frogs' Disappearance
Is Challenged.
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt:
The amphibians, of the genus Atelopus
- actually toads despite their common
name - once hopped in great numbers
along stream banks on misty slopes
from the Andes to Costa Rica. After
20 years of die-offs, they are listed
as critically endangered by conservation
groups and are mainly seen in zoos. 2008 Mar 18. Melting
Pace of Glaciers Is Accelerating,
Report Says By ANDREW
C. REVKIN Excerpt: Most of the world's
mountain glaciers, many of which
feed major rivers and water supplies,
are shrinking at an accelerating
pace as the climate warms, according
to a new report... issued Monday
by the World Glacier Monitoring Service,
which is based at the University
of Zurich and supported by the United
Nations Environment Program. ...The
study included data from 30 glaciers
spread around nine mountainous regions.
Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 9 2007 November 28. McKinsey Report on Carbon Reductions. 2007 November 20. "The Sky is Falling." Short video that won the Ecospot Award. 2007 December 10. Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. 2007 December 3. Climate
Talks Take on Added Urgency
After Report. By PETER GELLING and ANDREW
C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt:
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Dec. 2 - Thousands of
government officials, industry lobbyists,
environmental campaigners and observers are
arriving on the Indonesian island of Bali
for two weeks of talks starting Monday that
are aimed at breathing new life into the troubled
15-year-old global climate treaty. 2007 November 23. The 'Geo-Engineering' Scenario. Why even a desperate measure is starting to look reasonable. By Sharon Begley, Newsweek Web Exclusive. Excerpt: After decades spent studying volcanoes, Alan Robock can list 20 reasons why humans should not try to play God with the world's climate by, well, mimicking Krakatoa. Proponents of "geo-engineering" actually like the idea because the eruptions spread sulfate aerosols and other particles throughout the planet's atmosphere, reflecting incoming sunlight. The resulting cooling might counter the global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But that's not all sulfates do, which is where Robock's list comes in. The particles also deplete the planet's ozone layer, which is just starting to repair itself now that ozone-shredding chemicals are banned. They cause acid rain, too. And by cooling large land masses like Asia and Africa, the heat-reflecting particles reduce the temperature difference between them and the already-cooler oceans, which could stifle the monsoons that millions of people depend on for agriculture. Because the particles block direct sunlight more than diffuse rays, they also alter the balance of radiation reaching Earth's surface, with unknown consequences for plants that can be kind of finicky about the kind of sunlight they need. 2007 November 17. IPCC
- 4: the final, synthesis report from
the International Panel on Climate Change. 2007 November 13. Challenges
to Both Left and Right on Global Warming. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. NY Times. Excerpt: For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right. 2007 October 8. Expert
Studies Climate Change in Arctic. By THE
ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt:
OTTAWA (AP) -- Climate change may make Arctic
energy resources easier to reach but it could
also make them harder to exploit because of
changes to sea ice, a U.S. scientist said
ahead of an international oil and ice conference
in Alaska. 2007 September 20. STUDENTS
DISPLACED BY KATRINA TO ASSESS CLIMATE CHANGE. The
World Wildlife Fund and the Allianz Foundation
for North America have announced a new opportunity
for high school students displaced by Katrina
and now residing in nine U.S. cities to assess
the climate change vulnerability of the Southeastern
United States. "As these displaced students
know from being on the frontlines, we're all
increasingly vulnerable to climate change," said
Dr. Lara Hansen chief climate scientist, World
Wildlife Fund. "Now they have a unique
chance to shape the future of their region
-- by exploring the science of what's happening
and using what they discover to inspire action." The
project will give participating youth an opportunity
this spring to learn more about the science
of climate change by working closely with
scientists, using scientific tools for exploring
and explaining regional vulnerability. July - August 2007. Global
Meltdown. By Andrew Revkin, for AARP magazine. Excerpt:
It's becoming a legacy issue for older Americans:
what type of planet are we leaving our children?
One of the nation's top reporters on the environment
reveals the latest science behind climate
change. 2007 July 31. A
CONVERSATION WITH HEIDI CULLEN--Into the Limelight, and the Politics of Global Warming. By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, NY Times. Excerpt: Heidi Cullen is the only climatologist with a Ph.D. in the country who has her own weekly show, a half-hour-long video-magazine focused on climate and the environment. ...In June 2002, Heidi Cullen, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., received a telephone call from an executive at the Weather Channel. Would she audition for a program on climate and global warming that producers at the Atlanta-based cable television network were contemplating?... 2007 July 8. Wealthy Nantucket Homeowners Stake $25 Million in a War With the Sea. Cornelia Dean, The New York Times. "When erosion became a serious threat to bluff-top homes in the village of Siasconset on the island's southeast shore and homeowners decided to fight back by replenishing the beach, cost was not an issue. About two dozen of the owners joined with other island residents to form the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund, whose members are seeking permission to spend at least $25 million of their own money to dredge 2.6 million cubic yards of sand from a few miles offshore and pump it onto a 3.1-mile stretch of beach in Siasconset, or Sconset, as it is called here. They realize that the sand will inevitably wash away, so they are prepared to do much of the work all over again, perhaps as often as every five years. If the sand had to be transported by dump trucks, it could take 260,000 trips at 10 cubic yards a trip. Instead, it will be dredged up from the ocean bottom, mixed with water and pumped to shore as a slurry that will spew out onto the beach." 2007 May 1. Recruiting Plankton to Fight Global Warming. The New York Times - MATT RICHTEL. Excerpt: SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 - Can plankton help save the planet? ...Planktos, an "ecorestoration company," will deploy a ship to dissolve tons of iron, an essential plankton nutrient, over a 10,000-square-kilometer patch of ocean. ...In an effort to ameliorate the effects of global warming, several groups are working on ventures to grow vast floating fields of plankton intended to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and carry it to the depths of the ocean. ... the first commercial project is scheduled to get under way this month when the WeatherBird II, a 115-foot research vessel, heads out from its dock in Florida to the Gal‡pagos and the South Pacific. The ship plans to dissolve tons of iron, an essential plankton nutrient, over a 10,000-square-kilometer patch. ...When the trace iron prompts growth and reproduction of the tiny organism, scientists on the WeatherBird II plan to measure how much carbon dioxide the plankton ingests. The idea is similar to planting forests full of carbon-inhaling trees, but in desolate stretches of ocean. "This is organic gardening, not rocket science," said Russ George, the chief executive of Planktos, the company behind the WeatherBird II project. "Can it possibly be as easy as we say it is? We're about to find out.".... 2007 April 28. It's Maple Syrup Time, So Why the Whiff of French Fries? The New York Times - SAM HOOPER SAMUELS. Excerpt: WESTMINSTER, Vt. - ...To do his bit to stave off global warming, Mr. Crocker this year converted his sugar house from regular fuel oil to used vegetable oil. Such oil, sometimes pumped into the tanks of environmentally friendly "grease cars," can also be used as an alternative to heating oil. While a dwindling number of small, traditional sugar makers still boil their sap over wood fires, the majority burn heating oil, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming. Derived from living plants rather than fossil fuels, used vegetable oil adds little or no carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Mr. Crocker buys his from a company that collects it as a waste product from restaurants, then filters and processes out the dirt and impurities. By converting from traditional oil, Mr. Crocker is taking a stand for the environment. As an industry, Vermont's maple sugaring is highly vulnerable to climate change. Last year, of the 1.45 million gallons produced in the United States, nearly a third came from Vermont. The entire year's harvest of sap is gathered during a short season, which generally begins in March and ends by early April. ...That short season of daily freeze-thaw cycles is getting shorter. "Right now, the season is starting about a week earlier throughout New England than it did 40 years ago," said Timothy Perkins, director of the Proctor Maple Research Center at the University of Vermont, who has been warning of the challenge posed by global warming for a while now. "And it's ending about 10 days earlier than it did. Over 40 years, we've lost a net of three days of the season." Three days may not sound like much. But because the season lasts only about a month, it represents about a 10 percent reduction in the crop.... 2007 April 3. Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. NY Times. Excerpt: Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place. ...Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm - and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face - tend to be the richest. ...Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks, while poverty, geography and history place some of the world's most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm's way. ...[Article contains] four views of the climate divide. Malawi ...Australia ...India ...The Netherlands.... 2007 April 1. Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms. The New York Times. By ANDREW C. REVKIN Excerpt: The world's richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas. But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world's most vulnerable regions - most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor. ..."The inequity of this whole situation is really enormous if you look at who's responsible and who's suffering as a result," said Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations climate panel. ...The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world's industrialized nations, including the United States under the first President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 19927 March 2007. If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels. George Monbiot, The Guardian. Excerpt: Oil produced from plants sets up competition for food between cars and people. People - and the environment - will lose....The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burned. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks. ...So what's wrong with these programmes? ...Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022. Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn't happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orangutan in the wild....2.... 2007 March 14. Renewing a Call to Act Against Climate Change. By FELICITY BARRINGER, NY Times. Excerpt: MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - ...Bill McKibben ... is 46, his role as the philosopher-impresario of the program of climate-change rallies called Step It Up, .... His online call for locally inspired, locally run demonstrations on April 14 has generated plans for a wave of small protests under the Step It Up banner - 870 and counting, in 49 states (not South Dakota) - to walk, jog, march, ski, swim, talk, sing, pray and party around the idea of cutting national emissions of heat-trapping gases 80 percent by 2050. Skiers in Wyoming plan to descend a shrinking glacier. New Yorkers plan to form an unbroken human line (dress code: blue shirts) along what might be the new southern shoreline of Manhattan. A group of Dominican sisters and a Wisconsin environmental group are organizing a conference on Sisinawa Mound overlooking the Mississippi River.... Mr. McKibben also noted in a column on the environmental Web site Grist.org that popular momentum had lagged. "We don't have a movement," he wrote. "The largest rally yet held in the U.S. about global warming drew a thousand people. If we're going to make the kind of change we need in the short time left us, we need something that looks like the civil rights movement, and we need it now. Changing light bulbs just isn't enough." ...Van Jones, director the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif., is one of relatively few black community organizers to find common cause with those calling for drastic cuts in emissions from the country's tailpipes and smokestacks. Such changes could make poor peoples' electrical bills go up. But Mr. Jones says climate change will hit the poor first and harder than any increase in their electricity. "Two thousand seven is the year that global warming will become a marching issue; 2008 is the year it will become a voting issue," Mr. Jones said. "McKibben is one of the main drivers in moving this thing from the cafes and blogs into the streets.".... 13 March 2007. From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype. By WILLIAM J. BROAD. NY Times. Excerpt: Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," .... But part of his scientific audience is uneasy... alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism. "I don't want to pick on Al Gore," Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. "But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data." ...Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, ...director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, "Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees," adding that Mr. Gore often did so "better than scientists." Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president's work may hold "imperfections" and "technical flaws." He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States. "We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. "On the other hand," Dr. Hansen said, "he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate."...the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change... estimated that the world's seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches - down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent. ..."Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet," Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said.... 12 March 2007. Cooling Off Global Warming From Space. By John C. Cramer, Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine. Excerpt: …Is there anything that can be done to avert this global calamity? Several technical fixes have been suggested. One of them is based on the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions… The side-effects of such a remedy, however, appear to be as bad as the problem it is intended to fix. Acid rain form the sulfuric acid formed from the sulfur dioxide would become the standard kind of rainfall, irreversibly altering the ecology of the planet. March 2007 Exxon
Exposed. Catalyst magazine, Union of Concerned
Scientists. By Emily Robinson.Excerpt:
While publicly expressing concern about global
warming, oil giant ExxonMobil has quietly funded
organizations that portray climate science as
uncertain. The disinformation strategy parallels
the tobacco industry's campaign to confuse the
public about the dangers of smoking. ...As concern
over global warming has grown, some oil companies
such as BP, Occidental Petroleum, and Shell
have made public commitments to reducing their
heat-trapping emissions and have begun investing
in clean energy technologies. ExxonMobil has
made no such commitment, instead choosing to
confuse the public's understanding of the problem. March 2007. Will
the Northeast Be the Next Dixie? Catalyst
magazine, Union of Concerned Scientists. By
Erika Spanger-Siegfried. Excerpt:
Without deep cuts in heat-trapping emissions,
summers in New York near the end of the century
may feel as hot as Georgia summers do today.
Fortunately, March 2007. Carbon offset calculator - Native Energy 13 February 2007. Companies Pressed to Define Green Policies. By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH, NY Times. Excerpt: Tracey C. Rembert, the coordinator of corporate governance and engagement for the Service Employees International Union, acknowledges that Wells Fargo is the country's largest purchaser of renewable energy offsets and has specialists on staff studying all of the implications of climate change on its businesses. Still, Ms. Rembert's union has filed a shareholder's resolution asking Wells Fargo to specify how it is addressing both the risks and market opportunities presented by global warming.... "We want them to rethink their business, and set themselves up to take strategic advantage of climate change," Ms. Rembert said. The New York City Comptroller's Office feels the same way about Dominion Resources, an electric power and natural gas company, and Massey Energy, a coal mining company. The Sierra Club Mutual Fund feels that way about the retailer Bed Bath & Beyond, and the Calvert Group about ACE Insurance. All of them are calling upon companies to provide proof that their business decisions also consider issues involving climate change.... According to Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmental groups, investors have filed 42 resolutions asking for such information during the 2007 proxy season, up from 31 last year. And today, Ceres will issue a list of 10 companies that shareholders say are not looking at climate change through an investor's eye and may not be investing in alternative energy technologies. "This has nothing to do with social investing," the president of Ceres, Mindy S. Lubber, said. "These investors are owners who want the companies to stop being laggards when it comes to minimizing risk and taking advantage of opportunities.".... 13 February 2007. A Cool $25 Million for a Climate Backup Plan. By JOHN TIERNEY, NY Times. Excerpt: On Friday, when Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize to anyone who figures out how to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, Al Gore sat by his side and called it an "important and welcome" initiative. ...may be the start of competitions that ultimately yield nanobots or microbes capable of gobbling up carbon dioxide. As far-fetched as it seems today, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could turn out to be a lot more practical than the alternative: persuading six billion people to stop putting it there. ...the Gulf Stream scenario ...about it shutting down and sending Europe into an ice age, ..., originated by a 19th-century oceanographer, is "the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend," in the words of Richard Seager, a climate modeler at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.... February 2007. Political Science: A Report on Science and Censorship at National. Produced by Coalition Against Censorship. NCAC promotes and defend First Amendment values of freedom of thought, inquiry and expression. 12 December 2006. The Cost of an Overheated Planet. By STEVE LOHR. Published: NY Times. Excerpt: The iconic culprit in global warming is the coal-fired power plant. It burns the dirtiest, most carbon-laden of fuels, and its smokestacks belch millions of tons of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. So it is something of a surprise that James E. Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy, a coal-burning utility in the Midwest and the Southeast, has emerged as an unexpected advocate of federal regulation that would for the first time impose a cost for emitting carbon dioxide. But he has his reasons. "Climate change is real, and we clearly believe we are on a route to mandatory controls on carbon dioxide," Mr. Rogers said. "And we need to start now because the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive this is going to be." ..."Setting a real price on carbon emissions is the single most important policy step to take," said Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard University. "Pricing is the way you get both the short-term gains through efficiency and the longer-term gains from investments in research and switching to cleaner fuels." ...Mr. Rogers, who is also chairman of the Edison Electric Institute,... are also pushing for a carbon dioxide-pricing policy to reduce the risk to their companies. ...The two methods of pricing carbon are to charge a tax on each ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the air, or to place a cap on total emissions and then let polluters trade permits to emit a ton of carbon dioxide. Economists like William D. Nordhaus of Yale and Mr. Cooper of Harvard ... suggested an initial tax around $14 a ton of carbon dioxide emitted, which he calculated would translate roughly into a 100 percent tax on coal and add 12 cents to each gallon of gasoline. Such a tax would raise as much as $80 billion a year in the United States. ...a cap-and-trade system ... limit would be placed on overall emissions, with polluters allocated permits. Then, companies able to go below their emission targets would be allowed to sell their unused "permits to pollute" to companies that could not. ... developing nations like China and India, energy specialists say, would certainly avoid joining any international effort on global warming without an emphatic move by the United States....
22 November 2006. Co-op
America's 12-Step Plan for Climate Action. Excerpt:
...Scientists at the Princeton University's
Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) ...propose
stabilizing carbon emissions by ... doable
action "wedges" of equal size-each
with the capacity to reduce carbon emissions
by 1 billion tons/year by 2054. ...Here at
Co-op America, we ... screened out measures
that are too dangerous, costly, and slow (like
nuclear power plants, synfuels, and "clean" coal),
and we beefed up those that are safe and cost-effective.
...Here's our 12-step plan: 12 September 2006. A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES E. LOVELOCK: Updating Prescriptions for Avoiding Worldwide Catastrophe, By ANDREW C. REVKIN. NY Times. September 2006. Arctic sea ice continues "drastic" melting. Earth & Sky Radio Show. 27 June 2006. THE
ENERGY CHALLENGE | EXOTIC VISIONS - How to
Cool a Planet (Maybe). By WILLIAM J. BROAD. Excerpts:
In the past few decades, a handful of scientists
have come up with big, futuristic ways to
fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit
to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to
make them reflect more sunlight back into
space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping
greenhouse gases. 13 June 2006. Atlantic Hurricane Trends Linked to Climate Change. Michael E. Mann, EOS TRANSACTIONS, AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, Vol. 87, No. 24, pp. 233-244. Excerpt: Increases in key measures of Atlantic hurricane activity over recent decades are believed to reflect, in large part, contemporaneous increases in tropical Atlantic warmth [e.g., Emanuel, 2005]. Some recent studies [e.g., Goldenberg et al., 2001] have attributed these increases to a natural climate cycle termed the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), while other studies suggest that climate change may instead be playing the dominant role [Emanuel, 2005; Webster et al., 2005]. Using a formal statistical analysis to separate the estimated influences of anthropogenic climate change from possible natural cyclical influences, this article presents results indicating that anthropogenic factors are likely responsible for long-term trends in tropical Atlantic warmth and tropical cyclone activity. In addition, this analysis indicates that late twentieth century tropospheric aerosol cooling has offset a substantial fraction of anthropogenic warming in the region and has thus likely suppressed even greater potential increases in tropical cyclone activity. climate data [e.g., Delworth and Mann, 2000]. 24 April 2006. Earth's Big Heat Bucket. By Michon Scott ·for NASA Earth Observatory. Excerpt: ... Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Institute for Space Studies have learned to think of the ocean as ... Earth's "biggest heat bucket." And like a bucket placed under an overflowing sink, the ocean is filling up with the heat that increasing levels of greenhouse gases are preventing from escaping to space. By comparing computer simulations of Earth's climate with millions of measurements of ocean heat content collected by satellites and in-the-water sensors, a team of climatologists and oceanographers has provided what leading NASA climate scientist James Hansen calls the "smoking gun" of human-caused global climate change: a prediction of Earth's energy imbalance that closely matches real-world observations. ..."It turns out that the atmosphere, the air, really can't hold that much heat," explains Josh Willis, an oceanographer with the California Institute of Technology working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Heat capacity is the amount of energy that must be put into something to change its temperature, and air has a very low heat capacity. "If you put energy into the ocean, on the other hand, its temperature changes only very slightly." December 2005. CO2: Should We? Could We? by Seth Fisher. Pollution Engineering Newsletter. In Pollution Engineering's October newsletter, we asked two survey questions: "Should we control CO2 emissions," and "Is current technology available to adequately control CO2 emissions?" Your answers painted a grim picture; 67.9 percent believing we need to cut down on this greenhouse gas, but only 37.2 percent thought that currently available technology could do the job. ... Atmospheric CO2 content is up to 379 ppm from an estimated 280 ppm at the onset of the industrial age. ... there's a very good chance that Global Warming is being caused by human activity. So doing something about it now, if we can, hedges our bets.But don't take that last qualifier too lightly. According to our survey, the readers of Pollution Engineering, whom I would believe should know more about this kind of thing than the readers of MAD, or even National Geographic for that matter, don't think that currently available technology can control CO2. Certainly, international attempts to do so support this position. Of the 141 nations to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, many are having a hard time meeting their quotas - at last count, only four European Union countries were on track to meet their emissions target - and some of those that aren't can blame an economic crash (e.g. Russia) more than regulatory efforts for their success....The thinking is that this act of global solidarity can create an economic incentive to produce new technology, and even if we don't meet the official goal, the effort will have done more than enough good to justify itself. That seems a lot more responsible than a nation of SUVs pulling out because the treaty's unfairly kind to a nation of bicycles. ...the Department of Energy has been researching a plan to literally pump their CO2 to the bottom of the ocean, where it will supposedly create a static cloud. ...The best solution I've heard so far is to put grass gardens on top of our buildings. This would mean installation and maintenance cost hikes galore. But supposedly, grass on the roof can significantly help with insulation - lowering heating costs to a degree - while also giving residents and workers a pleasant leisure area.... October 2005. "Americans and Climate Change -- Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" - an interesting book that looks at American attitudes around this issue. It's a synthesis of insights and recommendations from the 2005 Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies Conference on Climate Change. Free download, linked from http://environment.yale.edu/climate/ 12 July 2005. Exxon Mobil Becomes Focus of a Boycott. By Felicity Barringer. Washington, July 11 - A coalition of environmental and liberal lobbying groups is planning a boycott of Exxon Mobil products to protest the company's challenges to warnings about global warming and its support for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The boycott is part of a public relations campaign to brand Exxon Mobil, the nation's biggest oil company, as an "outlaw," the groups say...A spokesman for Exxon Mobil said in an e-mail message that the company did recognize the risk of climate change. The spokesman, Russ Roberts, said Exxon Mobil had committed to "investments and strategic planning that address emissions today, as well as industry-leading research on technologies with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future." 18 February 2005. Experts: Global Warming is Real. Sharon Smith of the University of Miami found melting Arctic ice was taking with it algae that formed an important base of the food supply for a range of animals. And the disappearing ice shelves meant big animals such as walruses, polar bears and seals were losing their homes. "In 1997 there was a mass die-off of a bird called the short-tailed shearwater in the Bering Sea," Smith told the news conference. The birds, which migrate from Australia, starved to death when warmer waters caused a plankton called a coccolithophore to bloom in huge numbers, turning the water an opaque turquoise color. "The short-tailed shearwater couldn't see its prey," Smith said. February 2004. Global Warming "Undo-it". Twenty steps people can take to reduce global warming -- Environmental Defense Action Fund.
25 January 2003. Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) SCHEDULED FOR LAUNCH. The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) is a NASA-sponsored satellite mission, scheduled for launch January 25, 2003, that will provide state-of-the-art measurements of incoming x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, near-infared, and total solar radiation. The measurements provided by SORCE specifically address long-term climate change, natural variability and enhanced climate prediction, and atmospheric ozone and UV-B radiation. These measurements are critical to studies of the Sun; its effect on our Earth system; and its influence on humankind. 16 July 2002. LOOKING AT CLOUDS FROM ALL SIDES NOW. NASA-led research of cirrus clouds by more than 450 scientists could lead to improved forecasts of future climate change -- forecasts of your weather today, tomorrow and years into the future. RELEASE: 02-125 < 26 June 2001. A cloud of African dust crossing the Atlantic and raining bits of the Sahara Desert over the Caribbean. TOMS aerosol movie, which spans the interval June 13 through 21, 2001. |
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