climate change
illconsidered | May 9, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionMay 8, 2011 Chuckles, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk, Flooding, Timoney & Lee Attributions, Nisbet, Lenton, Bottom Line, UNGCF, Cook, Post CRU, Chambergate Melting Arctic, Frauenfelder, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Lobell, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production…
hrynyshyn | May 5, 2011I like Tim's Lenton's style, and his substance. He has his detractors -- and his latest essay in Nature is a little light on supporting data -- but he's almost always worth reading. This one is probably a doomed to be ignored because it advocates focusing climate policy efforts on the complex issue of radiative forcing instead of politician-friendly temperature rise, but he's probably right. A teaser:
Ongoing negotiations for a new climate treaty aim to establish a target to limit the global temperature rise to 2 °C above the average temperature before the industrial revolution. But that is…
illconsidered | May 2, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...May 1, 2011 -- Happy May Day! Chuckles, COP17+, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk, Chernobyl Tuscaloosa, Attribution, Nisbet, MEF, Williams, Boyce, UNGCF Bolivia, US CoC Hack, Thermodynamics, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Methane, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, Food Riots…
illconsidered | April 26, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsApril 24, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Fukushima Heroes, F. News, Nuclear Policy, F. Talk Chernobyl & TMI, Power Shift, Earth Day, Nisbet, Kang GFIs, Bolivia, Thermodynamics, EWS, Cook, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Eroding Coasts, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food…
sastyk | April 25, 2011
Almost exactly four years ago, my friend Miranda Edel and I were discussing the recent IPCC report on Climate Change and George Monbiot's book _Heat_ and the reactions that we got when we talked about about the sheer depth of the reductions in climate emissions that would be needed to stabilize the climate. Whenever we began to discuss emissions reductions on the order of 80 or 90% (depending on your country of origin - for the US Monbiot's estimate was 94%, although there are reasons to question that number now), the universal reaction we got was that it was impossible - impossible to…
sastyk | April 25, 2011Kurt Cobb has a very funny essay that argues that plants and animals have joined with the climate denialists to bring about the better for them "World Without Us":
The reversal of strategy began when domestic cats and dogs watched the Life After People series on The History Channel along with their putative owners. The cats and dogs then described scenes from the show to their wild counterparts. From there word swept through the animal kingdom and was overheard by many plants as well.
Life After People seemed like a utopian fantasy until some enterprising house plants realized that they might…
sastyk | April 25, 2011As part of their ongoing series on population, National Geographic has a fascinating, and typically visually brilliant article about how the Bangladeshi population is using strategies of adaptation to deal with climate change. This isn't the kind of adaptation most of us are prepared for, but as the authors point out, it may be the kind of adaptation we need:
Ibrahim Khalilullah has lost track of how many times he's moved. "Thirty? Forty?" he asks. "Does it matter?" Actually those figures might be a bit low, as he estimates he's moved about once a year his whole life, and he's now over 60.…
illconsidered | April 23, 2011There is a very interesting article on Nature.com that provides an example of something a bit uncommon in the climate wars: an intelligent and well reasoned disagreement with the IPCC. (h/t to Climate Etc.)
The article is well worth the read in its entirety, but its central point is a relatively straightforward one. The smaller the portion of the earth's surface (or time period for that matter) you are examining, the more difficult and less useful it is to consider attribution of climate change. And yet, the IPCC, according to this article, is seeking research that specifically attributes…
illconsidered | April 18, 2011How much wrongness can you pack into one short paragraph? This is from Rep. SHEILA BUTT (R-Columbia) in Tennessee, spoken in favor of a bill to "teach the controversy" in science class:
At the risk of drawing this out, which I hate to do, but I do know, as Rep. Dunn has mentioned, that I was taught things in science class in high school which have turned out not to be true. I remember so many of us when we were seniors in high school, we gave up AquaNet hairspray. You remember why we did that? Because it was causing global warming! That aerosol in those cans was causing global warming. Since…
illconsidered | April 18, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdom{Note: I have been offline due to illness. Coverage is spottier than usual, particularly early in the week. -het}April 17, 2011 Chuckles, Bangkok, COP17+, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk Cochabamba+1, Power Shift, Howarth, UNGCF, Psych, Cook, FOIA Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane…
sastyk | April 17, 2011I'll be offline much of the next few days for the Passover holiday. This is a subject we're talking about in the Adapting-in-Place class, and one that comes up a lot - how do you make environmental changes with a spouse who isn't on board? What happens when this strains your marriage?
I get emails more or less constantly on this subject: "I want to prepare for peak oil/live more sustainably/change my life to deal with climate change and my spouse (and/or the rest of my family) don't want to, or don't think it is important enough."
This is something I've heard over and over - marriages…
hrynyshyn | April 15, 2011Proponents of shale gas extraction are not particularly pleased with the attention drawn this week to a new study in Climatic Change that found widespread development of Marcellus natural gas may actually accelerate climate change rather than slow it down. Unfortunately for them, their primary argument rests on a lack of hard data on 1) the actual greenhouse-warming potential of methane; and 2) how much methane finds its way into the atmosphere during drilling and transmission of natural gas. You can find a good summary of the defense's case at something called the Marcellus Shale Coalition.…
kcollins | April 14, 2011
In her quest to study the fundamentals of climate change, prominent geochemist and
climatologist Kim Cobb has sailed on six oceanographic research voyages and led five caving expeditions to the rainforests of Borneo.
Her challenge: working out of her primary research base in the tropical Pacific, how to better understand and reconstruct climate variability of the past in order to construct a sense of what climate changes or trends to expect in the future, including, for example rainfall.
"There is so much we still do not understand about predicting rainfall, especially because
satellite…
hrynyshyn | April 12, 2011It was in Bill McKibben's first, and arguably best, book, The End of Nature, that I first came across the challenge posed by fugitive emissions. Back then -- just 20-some years ago -- natural gas was touted as a cleaner alternative to coal and oil because the combustion of its primary constituent, methane, results in markedly fewer CO2 emissions than other fossil fuels.
That argument is being made even more forcefully now. Everyone and his or her dog is touting the advantage of converting coal mines and car engines to natural gas as a way to mitigate global warming, as well as reduce oil…
illconsidered | April 11, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionApril 10, 2011 Chuckles, Bangkok, COP17+, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk, IRENA, Goals, BEST Carbon Tariffs, Subsidies, GFIs, McKinsey, Psych, Thermodynamics, Open Science, Cook, MDGs Melting Arctic, Fresh Water Pool, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel…
hrynyshyn | April 6, 2011We can't seem to stop thinking about nuclear power. Given what's at stake -- the biosphere, the economy, our genetic integrity -- this is understandable. But I think too many are getting distracted from the fundamental problem with splitting atoms and arguing scientific questions we are unlikely to resolve anytime soon.
Much of the recent hand-wringing is a reaction to George Monbiot's quasi-conversion to a nuclear power advocate. His latest column, Evidence Meltdown, practically radiates scorn for the "anti-nuclear movement," which he manages to reduce to a monolithic cult led by Helen…
hrynyshyn | April 5, 2011See that black box over on the left-hand side of this blog? The one with the numbers counting down? That's a little widget I assembled by rejigging one from trillionthtonne.org. The basic idea is that, if our climate can be expected to suffer severe disruption at a certain amount of global warming due to a certain amount of carbon emissions (since the beginning of the fossil-fuel era around 1850), then our best strategy should be to limit the cumulative carbon emissions to somewhere below that level, in this case 1 trillion tonnes of carbon.
But there's plenty of uncertainty surrounding the…
hrynyshyn | April 4, 2011A new review paper in Nature makes a stab an answering the question "Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?" In an apparent effort to satisfy a variety of audiences with different evidentiary and skepticism standards, Nature and the reviews authors, led by Anthony D. Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley, offer a variety of phrasings.
First we have the paper's abstract, which wraps up with:
Our results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting the need for effective conservation measures.
Then we…
illconsidered | April 4, 2011 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...April 3, 2011 Chuckles, Fukushima Heroes, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk BEST, Thermodynamics, Cook, Earth Hour Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, IPY, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, Ecological Services, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks,…
hrynyshyn | April 1, 2011No one is more surprised than I to see something worthwhile reading in The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad magazine. You might even be forgiven for suspecting an April Fool. But there it is. It's an editorial by Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst at frequently misnamed Reason Foundation, exploring the fundamental problem with nuclear power. Dalmia's indictment goes far beyond the nuclear industry, though. Intended or not, it strikes at the heart of the economic philosophy that dominates pretty much the entire planet To wit:
The liability cap effectively privatizes the profits of nuclear and…