Climate277
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Over Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica
PUNTA ARENAS, Chile–After flying for several hours over a windswept Southern Ocean, the mission director announces that we will be slowly descending towards Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. Just below are the Hudson Mountains, a small group of extinct volcanoes poking through the ice. As we approach our survey area, John Sonntag from NASA’s flight facility…
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Climate News Roundup – Week of 10/18
WWF: We Have Until 2014 to Stop Global Warming, Popular Science The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) publishes a new report concluding that by 2014 the world must fully embrace low-carbon technologies. By “embrace” they mean a minimum growth of 22% in green industries, which they estimate could translate into a 63% reduction in emissions by…
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Risks Cloud Financing for Curbing Climate Change
Policies Uncertain and May Not Stop Warming, Says Study
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Scientists Visit Carbon Capture and Sequestration Site in Iceland
Reducing carbon dioxide emissions while meeting the world’s ever increasing energy needs is one of the greatest challenges of this century. Scientists, researchers and students at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, with the enduring support of donors like Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest, who helped establish the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, are developing novel approaches…
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Potential El Nino Impacts
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) has recently released a series of documents designed to walk policymakers through the potential impacts of the current El Niño. In addition to the health-related report featured earlier, two new papers highlight weather and socioeconomic concerns associated with current climatic conditions. As readers of this blog…
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Assessing Global Metrics for Agriculture
On October 1, I attended a symposium entitled “Going Beyond Rhetoric: Metrics for Assessing Global Agriculture,” hosted by the Earth Institute and convened at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Fifteen stories in the air, we were surrounded by miles of urban landscape — Queens to the east, Manhattan to the west, and no…
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Night Watchman
Nick Frearson, Gravimeter Instrument Team, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: PUNTA ARENAS, Chile–I have become a night watchman of sorts. The gravimeter we’re using in our flights over Antarctica must remain powered at all times, so between flights I hole up in the old terminal next to the aircraft watching, …and watching. We won’t be on the…
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Climate News Roundup – Week of 10/11
Memo Calls for Reversing Law to Phase Out German Nuclear Plants, The New York Times German Chancellor Angela Merkel moves to reverse legislation that gradually phases out nuclear power by 2022. The proposed reversal, contained in a working document sent to Merkel’s political coalition partner, the Free Democrats, calls nuclear power the crucial “bridge” to…
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On the Surface of Climate Change
Blog Action Day 2009’s theme this year is Climate Change. Thousands of people on blogs all over the world are writing today on this single issue, and the Columbia Water Center is joining them. On Climate In a recent study at Columbia University, correlations were drawn between sea surface temperature on the coast of Africa…