population
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Population growth and climate: The E.U.-15 vs. the U.S.
The relative population trends of the E.U.-15 and the United States seem to be a source of some confusion, if comments to my recent post on the European Union’s effort to meet its Kyoto targets are any indication. One commenter writes “EU population is flat/declining. US population is growing.” Even our friend Roger Pielke, Jr. […]
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New Scientist on how our economy is killing the earth
The graph above comes from the introduction to the New Scientist‘s special report: "How our economy is killing the Earth." It takes the following as its central premise: A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic […]
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Cote d’Ivoire’s West African chimp population drops off dramatically
The population of West African chimpanzees in Cote d’Ivoire has declined 90 percent in the last 18 years, according to a new study published in Current Biology. In the 1960s, the West African country was home to about 100,000 of the apes; in 1989-1990, scientists counted 8,000 to 12,000, which they estimated to be half […]
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Overrun by humans, Galapagos Islands crack down
The Galapagos Islands are totally hot right now. To tourists, the island chain 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador offers stunning biodiversity (blue-footed boobies!) that infamously inspired Charles Darwin to write The Origin of Species. To residents, the tourism-driven economy offers high wages, top-notch public schools, and a dearth of violent crime. But as […]
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Minsky on population
Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky takes on the fraught subject of population in a rambling, semi-coherent TED talk: (Thanks LL!)
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Are biofuels a core solution?
As part of my ongoing series on core climate solutions (see links below), let's examine biofuels.
If we are going to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes, we need some 11 "stabilization wedges" from 2015 to 2040. So if you want to be a core climate solution, you need to be able to generate a large fraction of a wedge in a climate-constrained world. And that is a staggering amount of low-carbon energy.
Princeton's Socolow and Pacala describe one wedge of biofuel in their original August 2004 Science article [PDF] on the wedges:
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Revisiting Malthus
Robert Kaplan: Nevertheless, if Malthus is wrong, then why is it necessary to prove him wrong again and again, every decade and every century? Perhaps because a fear exists that at some fundamental level, Malthus is right. For the great contribution of this estimable man was to bring nature itself into the argument over politics. […]
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Anti-immigrant groups hide agenda behind environmental concerns
Via Feministing, it appears a group of anti-immigration organizations are trying to cloak their agenda in environmental concerns. They took out this half-page ad in The New York Times last week (click for larger version): Alien Nation Here’s the text: Americans spend a lot of time in their cars. Not because they want to. But […]