Year: 20094
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Is the U.S. Leading, or Leaving?
Difficult as it is to discuss global warming in the midst of a snowstorm (such as Copenhagen is experiencing right now), discussions proceed on multiple tracks, though “tracks” implies more linearity and parallelism than actually exists. The hidden elephant (or polar bear) in many of the rooms is the U.S. Senate. Virtually every other […]
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Greatest Show on Earth?
There are many shows taking place in Copenhagen right now. Where the real action is, however, is another question entirely. Over the weekend a mass demonstration — estimates of the number of participants range from 30,000 to 100,000 — took over parts of the city, leading to nearly 1,000 arrests. When I arrived at the…
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Water Problems: No Prediction Needed
With Copenhagen heading for an apparent impasse, the world faces an uncertain and potentially dire climate future. Of particular concern is the inability to predict how rainfall across the globe may change in intensity, frequency and seasonality. If there are droughts in some places and floods in others, there will be direct impacts on agriculture,…
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Using Climate Information for Humanitarian Assistance
Using Climate and Weather Forecasts to Improve Humanitarian Decision Making
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The Outrageous Complexity of This Enterprise
As the Copenhagen talks enter their second week, you may be wondering: how does this work? This is not a dumb question. The UN climate treaty (the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC) lays out a set of fundamental principles to guide the development of an international set of rules for the governance…
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Almost No One Is Being Completely Unreasonable
Peter deMenocal is a marine geologist who studies sea-bottom sediments for clues to past climates. Among other things, he has found evidence that previous civilizations suffered and fell during sudden climate swings. He also teaches an undergraduate class in basic earth sciences at Columbia University. As the Copenhagen summit headed for its second week, journalist…
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The Military-Climatological Complex
In the movie 2012, the world’s governments must respond to the ultimate global change: overheating of the earth’s core, with attendant giant mega- earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. The effective international cooperation it inspires is proportional to the impacts. As the prospects for anything remotely appears to shrink in Copenhagen , this flight of political fancy…
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We Can’t Solve the Problem–But We Can Make It Less Bad
This week, the spotlight of the 24-7, web-based global media on steroids has shifted some of its attention from Tiger Woods to the climate negotiations in Copenhagen. That is good news for Tiger, and for the rest of the world. The basic science of global climate change is now generally accepted as fact. There is…
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The Long and Winding Road to Copenhagen
A lot of hopes have been placed on the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP-15) which began earlier this week in Copenhagen. Convened on December 7, the conference has been considered by many our best hope at keeping global temperature from rising to what many researchers consider potentially dangerous levels. The gathering of delegates from throughout…
