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...Climate change is rapidly joining a host of media stories, like Darfur and the deterioration of living standards in Iraq, where the public half-heartedly follows the updates because they believe there’s no underlying news and even if they are bothered, there is nothing they can do. For example, the final, summary report from the Intergovernmental […]
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...Martin Wolf, in today’s Financial Times, does a very nice job of summarizing the International Energy Agency’s newly released World Energy Outlook. Some tidbits: energy consumption will rise 50% by 2030; coal will increase its share of energy production; even if the powers that be get serious about greenhouse gases, their level will be 30% […]
Read more...The BBC conducted a large-scale survey of 22,000 people in 21 countries and found widespread support for curtailing lifestyle in to fight global warming. Note that this survey was conducted before the news of the extraordinary Arctic summer ice melt, which could have shifted opinion further in the direction of taking action. Of course, the […]
Read more...A good article from the Associated Press, “World’s Coal Dependency Hits Environment,” doesn’t appear, at least according to Google News, to have been picked up elsewhere, which is a shame. While the title refers to “world’s,” the story is largely about China. We’ve discussed the environmental damage done by coal-fired electrical plants, yet China and […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly regarded economics editor, has an usually blunt article today, “Biofuels: a tale of special interests and subsidies.” While the main target is the way special interests are turning biofuels into yet another agricultural pork barrel, he makes a number of important observations: biofuels are only marginally cleaner than conventional […]
Read more...Ozone is getting increasing attention as a greenhouse gas, and the findings are not pretty. We reported earlier on research that found that ozone interferes with plant photosynthesis, which both reduces its effectiveness as a carbon sink and reduces plant productivity. A new MIT study (hat tip Mark Thoma) reports that rising ozone levels are […]
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