climate change

Climate, politics & money – Feb 22

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•Arctic Death Spiral Bombshell: CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed •Canada’s environmental activists seen as ‘threat to national security’ •The virtues of being unreasonable on Keystone •Why China’s carbon emissions may not matter •U.S. government risks financial exposure from climate change – GAO •E.ON lobbied for stiff sentences against Kingsnorth activists, papers show •Fear, optimism and activism: What drives change?

Shale gas, tight oil, and fracking – Feb 20

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•Reports: Shale Gas Bubble Looms, Aided by Wall Street •Geologist’s provocative study challenges popular assumptions about ‘fracking’ •China slow to tap shale-gas bonanza •Fracking is the only way to achieve Obama climate change goals, says senior scientist •Marcellus Shale Fracking Study To Research Natural Gas Drilling Health Effects

Is Bill McKibben’s math finally adding up?

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You can’t build a movement without numbers. If anyone understands that, it’s 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. Standing in front of an estimated crowd of 50,000 people gathered for the Forward on Climate rally yesterday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. he said, “All I ever wanted to see was a movement of people to stop climate change, and now I’ve seen it.”

Individual matters

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While environmental advocates urge individuals to reduce their carbon footprint by taking small, simple actions, others argue that individual actions are irrelevant. Do such actions have meaningful impact on the global systems that drive severe weather? Or is policy—corporate and government—the only thing that will make a real difference?

Economic growth, population growth and climate change

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Recent work cited in our report shows that the remaining global fossil fuel resources (mainly coal) would produce an enormous 9-13 trillion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. If all of it were burnt without capturing the carbon it would be enough to raise the average global temperature some 18 degree C, may be more. This 9-13 trillion tonnes is large compared with the 0.5 trillion tonnes already produced since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Nearly half of this 0.5 trillion tonnes remains in the atmosphere causing serious problems resulting from a warming of only 0.6 degree C. A recent report by independent consultants shows that there are planned mega fossil fuel projects which would add nearly 2 trillion tonnes of carbon by 2020 . Discharging all of this to the atmosphere would set the world on a path to warming 5 -6 degree C, already the stuff of nightmares. Discharging the additional 7-10 trillion tonnes would be an act of insanity.

Sliding down the slippery slope: A truth too big for Obama

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Now, the good news is, we can make meaningful progress on this issue [climate change] while driving strong economic growth.” With that sentence from his State of the Union address, President Obama capitulated to paltry cynicism. Alas, he will not be the president who finally comes clean on the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection. Obama is now committed to win-win, green-growth rhetoric.

Two Books that Shed Light on Our Present Predicament: Arcadia and The Dog Stars

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There’s no shortage of modern writers who are exploring our modern dystopia by, as someone has put it in a different context, “remembering forward.” Recently, I happened to read two such novels back to back, both quite fine and both illustrative of that something in the zeitgeist that makes our grinding apocalypse worth writing about. Neither is a techy, sci fi, plot-driven novel such as those of William Gibson or Paolo Bacigalupi, nor are they fully akin to sociological horror stories such as 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale. They are less didactic than World Made by Hand or The Road.
 

Climate, politics & money – Feb 15

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•Sanders, Boxer Outline ‘Gold Standard’ Climate Bill •Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks •HSBC and Aviva back project to identify ‘stranded’ high-carbon assets •The transformational challenges of climate change: An interview with Professor John Schellnhuber and Professor Ottmar Edenhofer •Carbon trading has failed: scrap the ETS now •In historic turn, Sierra Club gets arrested for the climate •Fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks are still rising •There is no such thing as climate change denial

Forever Groundhog Day for climate? A tale of ice, smokescreens and rebellion

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Just a few days ago, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, announced that ‘Greenland’s surface melting in 2012 was intense, far in excess of any earlier year in the satellite record since 1979.’ Our future is melting before our very eyes… When significant parts of the corporate media are openly embracing and indeed pushing climate ‘scepticism’, is there any meaningful justification for this in the climate science? No. Geochemist James Lawrence Powell recently conducted an exhaustive study of the peer-reviewed literature on climate science. Going back over 20 years, his search yielded 13,950 scientific papers. Of these, only 24 ‘clearly rejected global warming or endorsed a cause other than carbon dioxide emissions for the observed warming of 0.8 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era.’