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 …
I’d like to offer up a very concrete example that illustrates the problem with the current dynamic in the political debate over the extent to which thinking about adaptation should be explicitly made a part of the political discussion about our societal response to climate change. I wrote a story for the newspaper a year …
Xdcd Xkcd (oops, typoe) neatly captures what Revkin might call the “drama of climate change’s front page thought” – permafrost chasers: Dammit, Harding, it’s not worth your neck! Get the hell out of there!
Charles Keeling’s Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record is a tour de force, one of the great works of science of the 20th century. It shows the inexorably rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. But its iconic status today derives from hypotheses confirmed and ideas well understood, things that were anything but certain when …
David Roberts and Roger Pielke Jr. took another turn around the adaptation/mitigation block today. Roger argued, as he has for some time, that adaptation to the problems caused by climate change needs to be given the same due in policy discussions as attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigation,” in the parlance of the field.) …
I’m a little bit suspicious that we’ve got one of those “underpants gnomes” business models here, but whatever. Keith Johnson reports on some moves by big-time financial players into the carbon market: Merrill Lynch launched a new carbon-market index aimed at giving all sorts of investors access to the carbon markets. Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan said …
A new paper by Maximilian Auffhammera and Richard T. Carson suggests that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising much more quickly than presumed in the IPCC’s emissions scenarios. A reminder that The IPCC’s “mistakes” don’t all break in one direction. The common rhetorical conception has the IPCC’s errors uniformly overstating the effects of greenhouse emissions …
A story out of Jerusalem about drought in Israel reminds that the place labels change, but the themes remain: Israel’s water problem stems from population growth and an improvement in quality of life that brings a greater desire to water lawns and gardens, Schor said. This winter was the fourth that Israel got less than …
As Scot points out, there’s a crapload of snow all over the western U.S. right now. That’s probably the most interesting bit from a climatological perspective. You typically see wet up north and dry down south, or vice versa. But we’ve also hit a warm spell down here, which means you’re starting to see things …
reading:The Nature of Economies, by Jane Jacobs listening: Bongo Fury word of the day: fuggy – stuff or smelly paper of the day: lead in the North Pacific – Ice cores from the Yukon record rising lead levels resulting from the industrialization of Asia