Climate Climate & Energy
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Droughts and desalination in Australia — another amplifying feedback
Our never-ending quest to identify all the amplifying climate feedbacks takes us back to Australia: The worst drought in a century, especially in Australia’s most populated and fastest growing regions, has forced state governments to make expensive, and in some quarters unpopular, decisions to secure water supply. As rainfall dwindles, new dams are a less-than-promising […]
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Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus
There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then. So begins an excellent review article [PDF] in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Thomas Peterson, William Connolley, and John Fleck. I had […]
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Acidifying oceans need to be addressed, says litigous green group
The U.S. EPA should use the Clean Water Act to address the growing problem of ocean acidification, says the Center for Biological Diversity — and if the agency doesn’t act, it’s gonna get sued.
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Cut defense spending in favor of clean-energy investing
Conventional wisdom, that dour specter, seems to be saying we don’t have enough money to fix many of our biggest problems, such as global warming or shifting to carbon-free energy. But wait! The Pentagon itself has determined that there are plenty of resources that the Defense Department could do without, according to the Boston Globe: […]
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NASA says October is sixth warmest on record
The corrected NASA temperature data for October is out here. It looks to be around the sixth warmest October on record, although interestingly (though not unexpectedly, see below), the five warmest Octobers on record are all from the previous five years. I don’t normally blog on the NASA monthly data, but the tiny, temporary, tizzy-inspiring, […]
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Sierra Club win shuts down 30 proposed coal plants at a stroke
Kate’s going to have a longer story about this soon, but just to get the word out quickly: the Sierra Club just won a huge victory before the EPA Environmental Appeals Board. Basically it will require all new coal plants to use Best Available Control Technology (BACT) for CO2. As I said, Kate will get […]
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Concerns grow about giant pollute-y cloud over Asia
A cloud of soot and other pollutants, blanketing Asia in a haze nearly two miles thick, is darkening cities, damaging crops, and killing thousands of people. But look at the bright side — it’s mitigating some impacts of climate change! Hey, they don’t call us a beacon in the smog for nothin’.
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Must-read IEA report explains what must be done to avoid 6 degrees C warming
The International Energy Agency is out with its World Energy Outlook 2008. I wrote last week about the report’s stark conclusions on oil. The IEA’s conclusions on climate are even starker: “Without a change in policy, the world is on a path for a rise in global temperature of up to 6 degrees C.” The […]
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Climate change and peak oil point us toward the same policies
This is, I think, one of the underappreciated aspects of the climate problem. I blog about it on Nature‘s Climate Feedback blog. While most pundits put the problems of energy supply and climate in opposition, my view is that a constrained fossil-fuel supply points our society towards the same policies that the climate problem does.
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If we try cap-and-trade systems, we have to handle coal separately
Below is a first draft of an essay I’m formulating. I welcome comments and will post a revised draft after a while: Why we must be more concerned about capping emissions than trading them If there is one thing that the recent financial debacle should have taught us, it’s that risk cannot be managed by […]
