This is not cheery news. So far, this story seems to be running only on BBC: UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica. If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea […]
Read more...This story, reporting on work by an international group published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warned that human induced change could push the climate to certain tipping point as early as the current century. This research is getting little coverage in the US. According to a search in Google News, it […]
Read more...Perhaps my memory is failing me, but the insistence by three major Wall Street firms, that utilities prove that their new coal-fired plants are economically viable, is at a minimum highly unusual (I’d say unprecedented). Normal Wall Street practice is simply “disclose and sell.” Under securities laws, if the issuer presents its financial situation and […]
Read more...Since the market meltdown ’round the world is pre-empting a lot of other programming, I thought we’d turn to other important topics. A study looking over 40 years led by UC Berkeley researchers concluded that first world environmental degradation of third-world countries cost them more, in aggregate, than their foreign debt. Indeed, the researchers argue […]
Read more...It seems the more we learn about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the more we discover that warming processes are self-reinforcing. Melting of Arctic ice means that white polar surfaces, which reflected heat back into the atmosphere, are replaced with open ocean, which absorbs heat well and accelerates warming. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, […]
Read more...This article from Daniel Gros, Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies at VoxEU argues that high priced oil will worsen CO2 emissions, because it will encourage greater use of coal, which releases more CO2 per unit energy than gas. and Once that infrastructure is in place, the switching costs are high. From VoxEU: […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly regarded economics editor, looks at a fundamental and troubling issue in his latest article, “The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy.” From the Industrial Revolution onward, the world has enjoyed economic growth, producing rising living standards and making possible an extension of democracy (Wolf argues that the […]
Read more...Peter Mumby has an article today in the Guardian which discusses an underreported consequence of rising CO2 levels, namely, ocean acidification, which wrecks havoc with the the formation of calcium-based structure. Bye bye shrimp, lobster, and coral reefs. An article in the New York Times, “Before It Disappears,” discusses “the tourism of doom,” for people […]
Read more...Oh frabjous day! America appears finally to be getting on the climate change bandwagon, rather than taking a page from the Japanese negotiating handbook and playing obstructionist at every turn. BBC reports this as breaking news; I’m sure we’ll have better analysis in a few hours. So far, this merely looks like an agreement to […]
Read more...It falls to an uber economist like Nobel Prize winner Ken Arrow to look at climate change and make the economic case for prevention work without resorting to smoke and mirrors. This is a non-trivial accomplishment. For those who have not followed this aspect of the debate, one Sir Nicholas Stern prepared the so-called Stern […]
Read more...An article at VoxEU, “Climate change negotiations PLC?” by Ralf Martin gives a nice recap of some prediction markets on climate change just launched at Intrade. I wish he had gone a bit more into the limitations of prediction markets; while they aren’t a panacea, they have their uses. Big caveats: the markets need to […]
Read more...Just to be clear, the US is not at the dead bottom of the Climate Change Performance Index; Saudi Arabia has the dubious distinction of being #56 on a list of 56. The US is 55, down from 53 last year. The report is worth reading; it has a detailed methodology and looks at emission […]
Read more...I saw this story yesterday on the BBC, which reports on the danger of collapse of bluefin tuna stocks, and didn’t cover it then because I thought it was the sort of thing that would get plenty of media attention. The fact that the not-terribly-environmentally-minded US is supporting a 3-5 year ban on tuna fishing […]
Read more...The fourth and final installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth, summary report is to be released later today. As with earlier versions, certain elements have already been passed on to the press, but there seems to be far less anticipatory chatter than with the previous installments. I hope this isn’t a sign […]
Read more...This blog is not for the fainthearted, but even I found this item sobering. Mark Thoma at Economist’s View featured an interview with Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Note that one commentator at Thoma’s site disputed Diamond’s argument that the genocide in Rwanda was caused by competition for […]
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