Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong by William D. Nordhaus. The threat of climate change is an increasingly important environmental issue for the globe. Greenland Research Station Reveals Past and Future of Climate Change Impacts. Second in a three-part series.
SUMMIT STATION, Greenland -- At first glance, this research station on the highest point of Greenland's vast ice sheet doesn't look like much. A scattering of trailers perch on stilts high above the snow, with a neat grid of small yellow tents off to one side. There's a tall metal tower, a few outhouses. A pile of fuel bladders stands in stark contrast next to the carefully groomed ice runway.
But this nondescript outpost is a magnet for scientists trying to answer some very big questions. Columbus Blamed For Little Ice Age. MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate.
The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” said Nevle. Reign Check: Abundant Rainfall May Have Spurred Expansion of Genghis Khan's Empire.
The Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan carved out the largest contiguous land empire history has ever witnessed, reaching at its apex from Asia's Pacific coast to eastern Europe and down into Persia and southeastern Asia.
Although conventional wisdom suggests drought may have pushed them across the steppe to conquer more bountiful lands, ancient, long-dead trees discovered in a forbidding lava field in Mongolia give evidence that unprecedented rains might actually have helped fuel their expansion. Farmers May Have Kicked Off Local Climate Change 3,500 Years Ago. Iron-rich dust fuelled 4 million years of ice ages - environment - 03 August 2011. Can Fracking and Carbon Sequestration Co-Exist? Natural gas production and carbon sequestration may be headed for an underground collision course.
That is the message from a new study finding that many of the same shale rock formations where companies want to extract gas also happen to sit above optimal sites envisioned for storing carbon dioxide underground that is captured from power plants and industrial facilities. The problem with this overlap, the researchers found, is that shale-gas extraction involves fracturing rock that could be needed as an impenetrable cover to hold CO2 underground permanently and prevent it from leaking back into the atmosphere.
"Shale gas production through hydraulic fracturing can compromise future use of the shale as a caprock formation in a CO2 storage operation," said Michael Celia, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Princeton University and a co-author of the study. Malcolm Bull reviews ‘A Perfect Moral Storm’ by Stephen Gardiner · LRB 24 May 2012. Climate Skepticism Not Rooted In Science Illiteracy. The Battle Over Climate Science. Is Earth Nearing an Environmental "Tipping Point"? Human activities are pushing Earth toward a "tipping point" that could cause sudden, irreversible changes in relatively stable conditions that have allowed civilization to flourish, a new study warns.
There are signs that a toxic brew of climate change, habitat loss and population growth is dramatically reshaping life on Earth, an international team of researchers reported yesterday in the journal Nature. Those pressures are greater than the natural forces that caused the end of the last ice age roughly 11,700 years ago, a time when half the planet's large mammal species went extinct and humans migrated out of Africa.
"We are doing enough to cause one of these tipping points," said lead author Anthony Barnosky, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. The Climate Extremists - Bjørn Lomborg. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space COPENHAGEN – Extreme weather is often said to be one of the main reasons for taking firm action on global warming. NOconsensus.org - Global warming info you deserve to hear. Not Too Hot to Handle - By Charles Kenny. It's a great time to be depressed about the fate of the planet. The last United Nations confab on climate change, a November meeting in Durban, South Africa, suggested we're unlikely to see any new deal on greenhouse gasses having an impact before 2020.
And it was over less than a day before Canada withdrew from what is the only current legally binding treaty on climate change -- the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of this year. The United States never signed up for Kyoto in the first place, of course -- and Barack Obama's administration has hardly been leading the charge for a replacement. Meanwhile, we're less than three months away from the next big environmental summit, Rio+20, the U.N. The Authoritarian Impulse and Climate Change « NoFrakkingConsensus.
March 13, 2012 at 4:18 pm.
NoFrakkingConsensus. When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’ A December 18 Washington Post poll, released on the final day of the ill-fated Copenhagen climate summit, reported “four in ten Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment.”
Nor is the poll an outlier. Several recent polls have found “climate change” skepticism rising faster than sea levels on Planet Algore (not to be confused with Planet Earth, where sea levels remain relatively stable). The Emperor’s New Climate-Change Agreement - Bjørn Lomborg. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space COPENHAGEN – Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa, in December was no exception. Hot Air: The EU's Emissions Trading System Isn't Working - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. In the perfect world of economic liberals, every commodity has its price. Limited supply makes goods more expensive and vice versa. That's how markets work -- at least in theory. In practice, things often look different, and this is especially true when it comes to emissions trading, a business subject to a very different mechanism: laws dictated by the European Union.
Economists have generally praised the trading scheme as a nearly ideal instrument for reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions. "Carbon Emissions’ Friendly Skies" by José Maria Figueres. Will the EU ground its flying carbon tax? For several years now, a conflict has been brewing between the European Union and many of its largest trading partners over European attempts to control carbon emissions.
The specific issue has been the vast quantities of carbon dioxide generated every year by the world's aircraft. With global negotiations aimed at addressing aircraft emissions stalled, the EU took action of its own: As air travel becomes cheaper, EU emissions from aviation are increasing fast. India Balks at Greenhouse Gas Emission Cuts. India appears to be pressing the reset button on its international climate change commitments. In a submission to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change last week, India declared it would not even consider scaling back more greenhouse gas emissions until after 2020 -- and then would do so only in exchange for Western dollars.
The Climate Threat We Can Beat. For more than two decades, diplomats have struggled to slow global warming. A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming. Energy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world. Climate politics: hockey-stick to hamster-wheel. In her opening speech at the International Polar Year (IPY) conference held in Montreal on 22-27 April 2012, Norway's former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland reminded the several thousand attendees of the importance of the Kyoto protocol on climate change.
"Global emissions are steadily increasing", she said. "In 2010, the emission of greenhouse gases was at its highest level ever. We must therefore continue to encourage action by all countries and build the basis for a new global regime. " "Green Unilateralism" by Simon Zadek. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space. "The High Stakes of Rio+20" by Achim Steiner. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space. "When Democracies Collide" by Volker Perthes. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space. Mexico puts climate change action into law - environment - 25 April 2012. Europe is doing it, Brazil is doing it, and now Mexico is doing it too.
The country has passed a package of laws committing it to act on climate change. It is only the second developing nation to set greenhouse gas emissions cuts in the letter of the law. The package promises to cut the country's emissions by 30 per cent below "business-as-usual levels" by 2020 – meaning 30 per cent below what they would be without any intervention – and by 50 per cent below 2000 levels by 2050. It is part of a slow trend for nations to tackle climate change on their own, in the absence of a United Nations treaty to cut emissions beyond 2012. Since 2008, Mexico has been the world's 11th largest emitter. "The Particle-Emissions Dilemma" by Henning Rodhe. Beijing Emission Cuts May Underestimate Use of Coal.