Climate Climate & Energy

Bad news from down south

Scientific and observational data from Antarctica are driving home the message that we have entered a period of consequences.

Most recently, scientists have discovered ice streams hiding bigger reservoirs of water in West Antarctica. The evidence has "major implications for glacial melt rates and associated sea-level rises" and the rate of warming.

And their PM is still in denial

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in a sticky, yet dry, situation.

Even though a drought has caused Australia's agricultural production to fall 25 percent in the last year, Howard may have to ban irrigation so that urban centers can have drinking water.

The targeted river basin, the Murray-Darling, is known as Australia's "food bowl" because it houses 72 percent of Australia's farm and pasture land. If insufficient rain continues through the next few weeks, this year's harvest will be devastated and cities will need to implement water usage restrictions.

Prime Minister Howard doesn't accept the connection to global warming, but scientists and farmers disagree, saying "this drought has the fingerprints of climate change all over it." In climate models, Australia is predicted to be one of the first areas seriously impacted.

America is Dragon

China’s carbon-cutting more ambitious than many assume Used to be, the U.S. couldn’t do anything about climate change because climate change wasn’t real. Now the U.S. can’t do anything about climate change because … China’s not doing anything about climate change. But surprise! Turns out China, despite being the huge energy-sucker that slipped through the […]

Shenanigans everywhere

The WSJ has a story today about the high hopes riding on the few large-scale carbon-capture demonstration projects under construction. The entire global political and economic elite desperately wants carbon sequestration to work, so they can keep us hooked up to the fossil fuel mainline. But as the WSJ notes, it’s a tough row to […]

Happy birthday!

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

"Sustainable development" is 20 years old this week.

On April 27, 1987, after four years of deliberation, the World Commission on Environment and Development released its report. The inquiry -- also known as the Brundtland Commission -- was led by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland.

I was at university then, and devoured the contents of the report, which was later published as the book Our Common Future. Here, at last, was someone tying together the environment and development agendas. The report had much to say, too, about the relationship between poverty and environmental degradation. And as a female leader, Brundtland was such an antidote to our own prime minister; she was pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher was not.

The report gave us an enduring definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need."

So 20 years on, what is the legacy of sustainable development as a concept?

Some miscellaneous but connected items

The daily news is never short of articles on biofuels these days, but these three caught my eye today.

Getting the Fax Straight

New Canadian climate policy leaks out, is kinda leaky Canada’s Conservative government, known for consistently pooh-poohing the Kyoto Protocol, planned to unveil emissions-reduction targets today and urge participation in carbon markets, a la Kyoto. But the news got out early when a draft of the speech was accidentally faxed to the Liberal Party on Tuesday. […]

He Also Tried “Climate Fun Time Happypants”

Wolfowitz deputy allegedly tried to weaken climate-change message The brouhaha over World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz giving financial favors to his lady friend is spreading into a look at whether he’s been pushing the Bush administration agenda on family planning and climate change. The bank’s chief scientist, Robert Watson, says Wolfowitz deputy Juan José Daboub […]

Hustle and Muscle

Schwarzenegger, frustrated by inaction, threatens to sue U.S. EPA In a smackdown between U.S. EPA head Stephen Johnson and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), who would you bet on? It’s OK if you need time to ponder, because their battle is unfolding in slow motion. On Tuesday, Johnson said he had begun the process of […]

New island ‘made’ by global warming

In the same week that science discovers a new, earth-like planet, we get a new island off the coast of Greenland. From The Independent:

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Yikes.