Climate273
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Collective Action Curse
In the lexicon of sociologists, a social dilemma is when individual rationality leads to collective irrationality. With climate change, we are experiencing a very major and extraordinarily complicated social dilemma. On a social level, the benefit that many human individuals are getting from consuming energy is being pitted against humanity in general, because the impacts…
-
Protestors Should Press the U.S.
By Dana Fisher At this point, most everyone agrees: the climate talks in Copenhagen will not result in a binding treaty. It is not for want of trying; negotiators have emitted tons of carbon flying to meetings around the globe for the past few years. Now, leaders have announced that the talks will merely serve…
-
Cities Produce the Emissions. Cities Must Deal With Them.
By Elliott Sclar It is always good news when the international community gathers to address an important problem. On the other hand, an international conference on climate change implicitly frames this as a nation-state problem. It is, for all intents and purposes, an urban problem. Nations are supposed to be the ones governing carbon emissions;…
-
Farming in Future Climates
Agronomist Pedro Sanchez has helped many regions of the world boost food production through better use of nutrients, and now heads the Earth Institute’s Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program. He is at the Copenhagen summit looking for support to build a global soil map that will help farmers work more efficiently in the future.…
-
Real Scientists Are Climate Skeptics
The emails stolen from climate researchers at East Anglia University and released online—“Climategate,” as it has come to be known to some–may say a lot about some of the scientists involved. But they also reveal much about the dangerous political atmosphere into which the messages have emerged, coincidental with the Copenhagen climate summit. Scientists need…