Climate Climate & Energy
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Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al
The good news: We can avoid multimeter sea-level rise, the loss of the inland glaciers that provide water to a billion people, rapid expansion of the subtropical deserts, and mass extinctions — each of which is all-but inevitable on our current path of unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions. The not-so-good news: We will probably need an […]
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A new record for the hurricane season of 2008
As Jeff Master, our favorite meteorologist and hurricane blogger, wrote on Saturday: This year is now the only hurricane season on record in the Atlantic that has featured major hurricanes in five separate months. The only year to feature major hurricanes in four separate months was 2005, and many years have had major hurricanes in […]
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America’s energy crunch comes home
This is a guest essay by Michael T. Klare, a professor at Hampshire College and an author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. It was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. —– Of all the challenges facing President Barack Obama next January, none […]
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Governating Alaska: not as fun when oil revenues are down
“Now we kick in that fiscal conservativeness that needs to be engaged, and we progress this state with $57-a-barrel oil.” — Alaska governor Sarah Palin, commenting on the changed fiscal landscape she’s returned to in her home state
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Al Gore offers a five-part plan for solving the climate and financial crises
Al Gore has a fantastic op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times. There’s lots of good stuff, but one thing I was particularly pleased to see is this dismissal of the rush lately toward dirty domestic fuel: Some still see this as a problem of domestic production. If we could only increase oil and coal production […]
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Heartland’s climate experts: No actual expertise required
A journalist friend recently sent me this: I just got my “Journalist’s Guide to Global Warming Experts” from The Heartland Institute in the mail. They list four “experts” in Texas. It’s an awesome list. … Robert Bradley, energy expert H. Sterling Burnett, policy analyst Dr. John Dale Dunn, emergency physician Michael Economides, petroleum engineer As […]
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Q. Does daylight savings time save energy?
A. According to this UC Berkeley Energy Institute study [PDF], DST does not save energy. Usage goes up about 1 percent, mostly due to people calling other people to tell them to change their clocks. A better solution would be to just have permanent summer.
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Green investment does create jobs
Robert Pollin has issued a direct rebuttal, “Green Investments and Jobs,” to the Heritage Foundation’s lame “debunking” of Green Recovery, a study Pollin co-authored for the the Center for American Progress. My line-by-line response to the disanalysis by Heritage’s Donald Kreutzer is here. Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at U. Mass-Amherst, concludes: […]
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Scientists eye rock that converts CO2 to solid mineral
A rock that converts carbon dioxide into a solid mineral form could be wrangled into the global-warming fight, say geologists publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The rock, called peridotite, is found commonly in Earth’s mantle but occasionally shows up on the surface of the globe as well, mainly in the continent […]
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Current climate warming trend hottest since human civilization began, study says
The current climate warming trend the Earth is experiencing is the most dramatic climate change since human civilization began some 5,000 years ago, according to a new Cornell University study published in the journal Ecology. Researchers also studied ecosystem changes caused by warming and glacial melt in the Arctic and North Atlantic and found major […]
