IPCC

More and more voices joining 350.org’s Prez to Poland campaign

Students and faculty at Barry University invite the prez-elect to Poland.   You can count the hours until the election is over, which means the debate has been reduced to its basic elements: Who’s a socialist? Who’s a plumber? Who’s ahead? But against that backdrop, one large group of people — voters here in America […]

Denmark’s prime minister travels to U.S. to sell climate treaty talks

Taking steps to combat global climate change can produce big economic benefits for countries, and it’s time for the United States to reengage in international talks for setting specific goals for carbon emissions cuts. That’s the message Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen brought to New York this week, part of his campaign to build […]

Global carbon emissions jumped 3 percent in 2007

The Global Carbon Project released its “Carbon Budget 2007” [PDF] today. The report shows a continuation of the grossly unsustainable growth rate in CO2 emissions since 2000, which is nearly four times the growth rate of the 1990s: As reported by AP: … it was large increases in China, India and other developing countries that […]

Danish P.M. urges United States to reengage in climate talks

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is in the United States this week to encourage engagement in the negotiations over a new global climate pact between now and the United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled to take place in Copenhagen in late 2009. In a speech before a meeting of the Environmental Grant Makers Association […]

IPCC needs to update projections to include deforestation feedbacks

The following post is by Ken Levenson, guest blogger at Climate Progress. —– As deforestation accelerates and grows ever more concentrated the climate change consequences appear even greater than previously thought. As reported in New Scientist: Pristine temperate forest stores three times more carbon than currently estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and […]

Previous warm periods don’t mean we’re not responsible for this one

For those interested in temperature reconstructions of past climates, in particular the kerfuffle over the hockey stick, I recently found a pretty good website. It contains a load of useful information, some of which I did not know. For example, consider this famous plot from the IPCC's First Assessment Report:

Skeptics have used this plot to argue that today's warmth cannot be caused by humans because it was warmer one thousand years ago. The website does a good job of laying out the history behind the plot. For example, I learned that:

Oklahoma senator makes stuff up, wastes time in climate change debate

James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Senate’s leading climate change denier, had plenty of kooky and alarmist things to say in yesterday’s debate over climate change legislation. Think Progress has video of one of his wing-nuttiest contributions to the discussion, in which he lies about Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, and the IPCC: Yep, the same IPCC […]

CJR panel on climate journalism

The Columbia Journalism Review recently held a roundtable on climate journalism: There were three journalists: Andrew Revkin, the New York Times’s lead climate reporter/blogger; Bill Blakemore, who has spearheaded climate coverage at ABC News for the last four years; and John Rennie, the editor in chief of Scientific American who recently helped craft two issues […]

IPCC likely too optimistic about recoverable coal

Anyone interested in the climate should watch this talk by Professor David Rutledge from Caltech. He makes the argument that there are a lot less recoverable fossil fuels than assumed by just about everyone, including the IPCC emissions scenarios. His conclusion is that even if we burn all the fossil fuels on the planet, atmospheric carbon dioxide will not exceed 500 ppm.

Is he right?  Perhaps, although his analysis considers only conventional fossil fuels and does not take into account unconventional oil sources like tar sands or shale. He also does not consider carbon cycle feedbacks that could also add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

If true, it's undoubtedly good news for the climate but potentially bad news for our society, since it means that we will be seeing the price of energy inexorably rising in the future as competition for remaining energy resources becomes more fierce.

My sense is that, while we can quibble about the numbers, it does seem likely that the IPCC emissions scenarios have overestimated recoverable coal reserves. This suggests that, at the very least, the highest emissions scenarios may be physically impossible to realize.