Climate Climate & Energy

The ‘in it for the money’ theory of climate science doesn’t pan out

We have all heard the following argument: in order to get funding for research, the scientific community is forced to produce alarmist predictions of climate change.

There's a lot wrong with this argument. But it recently occurred to me that it doesn't even make sense. In the latest IPCC reports, what the scientific community said is that our understanding of climate change is quite good (although not "settled"). This does nothing to build up research funding.

Man wants to put wind turbines on his ailing farm

Opposition from neighbors drives man to suicide. And you thought the rich whingers at Cape Wind were irksome!

Beachfront property in Hawaii for only $40!

That is, if you’re willing to wait 10,000 years for the ocean to reach it.

And the Mining Seems So Safe and Clean

Congress considers legislation that would give coal a boost What if there was a liquid fuel with the potential to produce nearly twice as many greenhouse gases as petroleum? And it would cost nearly four times as much to build a processing plant for this fuel as for petroleum? You’d say no thanks. But Congress […]

We’ve Got Frenzy In Low Places

U.S. continues to stonewall climate progress ahead of G8 summit In the diplomatic scramble leading up to next week’s G8 summit, there are two sides: the Bush administration and the rest of the world. The burning issue, of course, is climate change. Following weeks of grumbling from both sides, leaked documents show that U.S. red […]

There’s a connection between energy waste and our military adventurousness, so let’s stop the draft

This is what every utility in America should be required to provide in return for that monthly service charge that makes people who conserve energy pay more per unit of juice than people who waste it.

Not so perma, not so frosty

Thanks to global warming, the permafrost is no longer very perma, nor very frosty. I've noted before about how the ultimate release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases formerly trapped in the tundra could create a "self-perpetuating climate time bomb." But we shouldn't ignore the severe local impacts.

Arctic sea ice and global thawing

Once again National Geographic Magazine has managed to knock my socks off, this time with its June '07 issue. Vanishing Sea Ice is journalist and photographer Paul Nicklen's touching homage to the Arctic and its wildlife through the lens of his camera: a decade-long documentary of its accelerating demise. Big Thaw, meanwhile, zooms out to the global level to tell how ice around the world is fast receding. Global warming-induced meltage is a familiar story by now, but new studies are showing that -- due to multiple positive feedback effects -- the decline is occurring more rapidly than scientists had anticipated. Which, as the article discusses, brings sea level rise and habitat loss to the visible horizon.

A point which I personally hadn't considered is the widespread fallout of mountain glacier melting:

The cost of acting first on climate change vs. the cost of not acting

"Lose-lose: the penalties of acting alone stall collective effort on climate change" is an article the Financial Times ran a while back. While the piece gives a panoramic analysis of the international prisoner's dilemma, there are two other angles that are missing. The first is the penalties of no one acting. According to the UK's environmental minister, the economic rationale for inaction is that the first country to act risks undergoing some degree of economic hardship. This, he explains, is "the last refuge of the deniers -- the idea that it's not worth anyone doing anything unless everyone does it."

Are Americans smart enough to learn from Australia’s crisis?

What if there was a country that was like America in many ways, such as the obstinate refusal of its government to acknowledge that pursuing economic growth at the expense of the environment is simply a way to commit suicide faster, a fondness for beer, and an enormous capacity to live the high energy lifestyle as if there was no tomorrow?

Could Americans learn anything from it?