A good post by Joseph Romm at Gristmill explains why planting trees isn’t as good a CO2 reduction measure as it is commonly believed. However, I take issue with his title: “The first rule of carbon offsets: No trees.” Actually, the first rule of carbon offsets is do something else, anything else, first. While in […]
Read more...The BBC website has this grim story on how climate change and unsustainable farming practices is projected to produce an increase in deserts, leading to mass migration. Sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia are worse affected, but parts of Australia and the American West are also drying out. From the BBC: Tens of millions of people […]
Read more...Six highly respected climate scientists have published a paper, “Climate change and trade gasses,” in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (hat tip Gristmill) that says things are worse than is being reported. The paper takes issue with some of the assumptions of the IPCC report, arguing that it ignores that ice sheets melt […]
Read more...Researchers have found that spring is arriving in the polar regions considerably earlier, and they anticipate that the long-term effect will be that species from warmer climates will establish themselves further north, competing with and in some cases crowding out now-native flora and fauna. From the BBC: Spring in the Arctic is arriving “weeks earlier” […]
Read more...I figure readers would like to hear good news now and again. From PhysOrg: In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, three cubs are seen near their mother at the Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province. (AP) — Eighty-four Siberian tigers, among the world’s rarest animals, have been […]
Read more...The sudden disappearance of bees from many colonies is arguably the most underreported environmental story. Varroa mites have devastated the feral bee population, and as a result, one-third of the crops in the US depend on commercial beekeeping operations (meaning bees are brought in to a farm solely for the purpose of fertilizing its crops). […]
Read more...Gristmill pointed us to this news item, “Warming behind kitty boom, pets group says.” The theory is global warming = more warm weather = more randy cats = more cat fornicating = more kittens (which it tantamount to “more cats”): Droves of cats and kittens are swarming into animal shelters nationwide, and global warming is […]
Read more...One of the big bones of contention in the “what to do about global warming” debate is whether to use carbon taxes or carbon trading to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In theory, either regime could produce a satisfactory result, and many commentators prefer carbon trading, out of what amounts to an ideological bias in favor […]
Read more...Yet another instance of the Administration fudging the data in an effort to change the record. After a proud history of climate change denial, the White House now claims that the US has been more successful than Europe in reducing greenhouse gases. “The Political and Selective Use of Data: Cherry-Picking Climate Information in the White […]
Read more...Can you tell who is who on this test? Now admittedly there is sample bias (I’m sure they had to cherry pick the Unabomber’s saner moments). But I scored only 25%!javascript:void(0)
Read more...Ever since we learned that the perilous state of the oceans is a top 25 underreported story, we decided to our bit to rectify that by giving articles on the state of the seas more prominence. At current fishing rates, fish stocks will collapse by 2050. But why hasn’t the invisible hand interceded? If fish […]
Read more...Earlier this month, the national science academies of the G8 plus those of China, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and India, issued a strongly worded joint statement about global warming and energy usage. Let us stress that it is pretty much unheard of for this many independent science bodies to agree on such an unequivocal […]
Read more...This is a great post on Gristmill (courtesy Brad DeLong): How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic Below is a complete listing of the articles in “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments […]
Read more...Larry Summers keeps getting better and better as an op-ed writer. His current article in the Financial Times lays out a series of practical recommendations on what to do about climate change. He focuses on the problem of the developing world, since they will account for 75% of the increase in greenhouse gases, and as […]
Read more...This was the headline of the lead story in the weekend edition of the Financial Times, and oddly, it appears to have been picked up in no other news organ tracked by Google News. Now even though other advanced countries have drug problems too, the US is the only one that thinks it can fly […]
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