Roger Pielke Jr., my favorite thrower of inconvenient hand grenades, wrote a provocative post this week about the linkage between malaria and global warming. Malaria, Jeffrey Sachs writes, causes poverty. (( The End of Poverty, p. 197)) It does this by reducing economic productivity, creating a vicious cycle in which people get sick, can’t work, …
For those of you who insist that of course every right thinking person agrees that the need to adapt to climate change shares equal importance with greenhouse gas reductions, Roger Pielke Jr. has another example worthy of your attention. The quote is from ClimateWire: Environmental and humanitarian activist groups plan to formally ask the World …
Drought in northern India has led to a ban on hair dye: At least 11 farmers have died from swallowing the hair dye in a drought-hit region of Uttar Pradesh state in the past three months, said Rajiv Agarwal, a senior state official. Two-thirds of India’s 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture, and most have …
cycling: Been sick for a week, happy just to get on the bike for 40 minutes this morning. paper of the day: Barnes and Roy quantify the radiative forcing due to land use changes in the United States reading: Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty factoid of the day: The average resident of Chad uses …
More evidence that getting this whole climate mitigation thing right is going to be hard: Early analysis of data out today from the European Commission shows that emissions rose about 1.1% last year to 1.9 billion metric tons. That’s after similar increases in 2005 and 2006.
That’s all well and good, Marty, but stop squirming and tell us how much you’d price carbon at? That’s all we really care about: Weitzman hemmed and hawed and noted that the whole point of his paper was that there are these big uncertainties, and that previous attempts to calculate the socially optimal price on …
My initial reaction was that this was important confirmation of the whole global warming thing, but then I noticed how close the thermometer apparently is to all that blacktop, so maybe we need to throw this one out. (photo courtesy Dave Thomas)
Martin Weitzman’s paper on the economics of catastrophic climate change is rather like Moby Dick – something we all nod to knowing references while we’re secretly saying to ourselves, “WTF? Did you actually understand this?” I actually went so far as to enlist an environmental economist of my acquaintence (being a journalist has its advantages). …
Given David Roberts’ apparent conversion to the view that simply everyone who matters in the climate change community agrees that the need to adjust to the problems being caused by climate change (“adapt”, in the lingo) shares equal importance with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigate”), I thought a scorecard of Gristmill’s coverage …
Just when you thought this whole adaptation-mitigation discussion could not get more absurd comes this document from California’s state government interagency Water-Energy Subgroup of the Climate Action Team (WET-CAT). California faces some potentially serious climate change-related water problems, and the new report suggests some useful approaches to reduce the state’s water consumption. The reason? Reduced …