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A Canadian view of Copenhagen

  This is an interview with Tzeporah Berman, Executive Director and co-founders of PowerUp Canada.  If you don’t think the U.S. is doing enough, you’ll love what our northern neighbors are (not) doing:   Let’s just look at clean energy. This year in the budget, Obama is outspending Canada 14 to 1 per capita on […]

Why are Hadley and CRU withholding climate data from the public?

No, not the stuff in the stolen emails — although the University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) have yet another statement out I’ll excerpt below.  It notes “Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several […]

NOAA: Models indicate El Niño will continue through Spring 2010

We seem to have settled into a moderate to strong El Niño.  NOAA’s latest weekly update on the El Niño/Southern oscillation, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions“ shows that the key region of the Pacific Ocean has stayed quite warm for all of November (see here for figures and data). The question is […]

Are the oceans the future of food?

If the the future of food is hazy right now due to overconsumption, globalization, and climate change, the future of seafood is even murkier. The global fish catch topped out sometime in the 1990s, leaving many fish populations more or less permanently overstressed. Aquaculture has grown to satisfy rising global demand – but fish farms […]

‘An overwhelming bias toward inaction’

Anyone who wants any kind of reform in this country need to grapple with Ezra Klein’s important and clearly argued insight into our current system of “government”: The U.S. Congress is hostile not only to liberal power, but also to conservative power, and for that matter, to majority governance. The rules trump the election, trump […]

Hamlet’s lessons for climate negotiators

I’ve been threatening my editors with a post on what Shakespeare’s Hamlet can teach the diplomats gathering next week to draft a new international climate treaty. Hamlet being a fictional Danish prince, and Copenhagen being in Denmark and … OK, it’s a flimsy hook. Don’t care. As I write this, I’ve got 12 hours of […]

How to explain Copenhagen to a comedian

Photo illustration / iStock images Comedian Eugene Mirman is going to Copenhagen for Grist to cover the international climate talks. Eugene is a fairly well-informed guy (he at least scans Google News looking for reviews of his latest album), but he’s the first to admit that he doesn’t live, eat, and smoke climate policy. At […]

Byrd calls tactics of ‘fear mongering’ coal industry ‘morally indefensible’

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. The West Virginia coal industry has become a virulent opponent of President Barack Obama’s reform agenda, and the state’s political leaders have cheered it on. In June, West Virginia declared coal the state rock. In September, the coal industry sponsored a rock concert and rally to […]

America’s greenest mayor, laid off and looking on

Greg Nickels. It was a dark, dreary, drizzly November morning in Seattle when I visited Greg Nickels, the city’s lame-duck mayor and an influential national voice on the need for climate action over the last decade. Outside the LEED Gold-certified City Hall, a gray murk hung in the air, nearly obscuring Elliott Bay five blocks […]

Developing country action to reduce global warming pollution: Copenhagen (part 3)

“If only developing countries would take action to reduce their global warming pollution.” That is the refrain that was heard in capitals around the world for years. This was driven partly by a concern over competitiveness in some places (e.g., the U.S. and E.U.). And it was also driven by the reality that global emissions […]