There are a couple of news reports out about a new Hadley study on the synergistic effects of greenhouse warming and the urban heat island. The urban heat island effect, often used by skeptics to discount global warming data, is the very real effect in which all that pavement, buildings and other thermal mass that …
Reading Mickey Glantz’s Climate Affairs, I ran across this odd reference to what appears on first blush to be Thomas Jefferson’s great insight into the effects of humans on climate. It quotes an 1824 letter in which Jefferson writes that climate surveys “should be repeated oce or twice in a century to show the effect …
A scientist grasping the distinction between fiction (the new “Day After Tomorrow” climate porn film) and realty, and respecting the public’s intelligence to do the same: “My first reaction was, ‘Oh, my God, this is a disaster because it is such a distortion of the science. It will certainly create a backlash,’ ” said Dan …
My story on climate change and national security ran in this morning’s paper. It gave me a chance to take a stab at explaining the idea of “no regrets” policies – climate change responses that are robust to the endless and apparently unsettleable argument in our political arena over the nature and causes of climate …
More stuff I wrote elsewhere, from today’s Albuquerque Journal, one of those straightforward pieces of climate change research that has the potential to narrow the uncertainty in the models: A New Mexico researcher hunting for water vapor in the upper atmosphere has found less than expected, suggesting global warming may be less than some predictions. …
Pikas, pygmy possums and tiny flowers in the high Swiss Alps are climate changes “canary in the coal mine,” signalling changes underway, according to a news piece in today’s Science by Kevin Krajick (sub. req.): Alpine ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to climate change, and recent studies suggest that mountain dwellers–from delicate flowers in the Swiss …
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A British research group is suggesting a sort of localized version of Kyoto-style emissions trading, according to the BBC: Every man and woman in the country could be issued with a fixed number of permits to pollute the atmosphere under an idea from government-sponsored researchers. It’s been proposed by academics at the Tyndall Centre – …
Continue reading ‘Think Globally, Trade Emissions Locally’ »
There’s a new set of long-term climate change data out, this one for Europe over the last 500 years, and once again it’s shaped like a hockey stick:
A new UN report may signal the death knell for the Kyoto treaty by giving Russian treaty opponents the ammunition they’ve been looking for, according to a piece today by Paul Webster in Science (subscription required). The problem, according to Webster, is that previous UN calculations that seemed to show the Russians would have carbon …