Climate Climate & Energy

Cool.

Here's a nifty little guide to setting up your Prius as an emergency power supply for your house.

(via BB)

McKibben and Sierra Magazine

Every column Bill McKibben writes on climate change becomes more dread-laden and portentous, but I never stop enjoying them. His latest is "Year One" in Sierra Magazine. The money clip:

We will soon learn, for example, that what we've been calling "global warming" is better thought of as excess energy trapped in the atmosphere, which will express itself in every possible way. Like the Bush administration's energy bill, these manifestations will also be about "more": more evaporation in arid lands and then more flooding when it eventually rains; more wind as air pressure rises from warmer areas; more extreme heat waves like the one that killed tens of thousands of Europeans in 2003 or the one that cut North American grain yields by a third in 1988; more ecological disruption as summers lengthen, winters shorten, and sea levels rise; more disease as mosquitoes spread to once-cool climes; and even more nonlinear surprises like the possible shutdown of the Gulf Stream.

Katrina revealed deep helplessness among our rulers. Part of it stemmed from cronyism and incompetence, part from the sheer overwhelming force of the blow. We will slowly recover, but even the United States has only so many hundreds of billions to spare. New Orleans will be rebuilt -- this time. But what if hurricanes like Katrina go from being once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms? How many times will we rebuild?

The same issue of Sierra has a Decoder on the edits made by Philip Cooney to federal climate-change reports. Quite incisive and entertaining.

Then there's a set of Sebastiao Salgado photos from Galapagos (the photos aren't online, though), and a fascinating interview with Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, about his BRT (bus rapid transit) system.

Is Sierra always this good?

Is It Hot in Here, Or Is It Just Me?

2005 to be one of the hottest years recorded This year will go down as one of the hottest on record. NASA’s Goddard Institute says 2005 will beat 1998, the current record-holder, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.K. Meteorological Office — using the same land and ocean data as NASA, but […]

The Talk of the Drown

Polar bears drowning as Alaska sea ice disappears OK, we’re trying to keep a positive outlook here, but … drowning polar bears? Seriously? And just when therapy was starting to work. In September 2004 (the year the polar ice cap receded a record 160 miles from Alaska’s north coast), federal researchers doing routine aerial surveys […]

Polar bears drowning

I thought this new Greenpeace commercial was kind of a cutesy joke. But no: Turns out polar bears really are drowning.

(Yeah, it's subscription only, so there's an excerpt below the fold.)

Gas prices

It's an open question how much gasoline prices affect gasoline consumption. But apparently gas prices are pretty tightly correlated with something else. Click to find out what.

(Via Tapped)

Off Season

Climate change is messing with the seasons in a Rocky Mountain forest Since 1968, researchers have gathered air samples from near the summit of Colorado’s Niwot Ridge in the Rocky Mountains, and tracked carbon dioxide levels in the conifer forest below. They’ve amassed the world’s third-longest record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and that record provides […]

All This Aggravation Ain’t Satisfactionin’ Us

Montreal summit wraps up with agreement to … have more summits The U.N. climate talks in Montreal ended this weekend with plenty of drama but little progress. The big news, such as it is, is an agreement by a coalition of some 150 nations to convene new talks to generate a set of binding greenhouse-gas […]

Let’s Take This Slow on the Road

Campaign by right-wing U.S. group aims to derail E.U. climate policy American lobbyist Chris Horner is trying to convince major European companies to join a campaign against the Kyoto Protocol and any future such strategies to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases — but he’s not making much headway. Horner is a senior fellow at the […]

The Summit of Our Discontent

U.S. continues to stomp mightily on Montreal climate summit Poor Canada got it from both sides this week at the Montreal climate summit. On Tuesday, it suggested that the 189 nations party to the original 1992 U.N. climate convention meet formally over the next two years to discuss post-Kyoto strategies for greenhouse-gas reduction. The Bush […]