Last summer I found myself writing a Water Center Report on China’s massive South-to-North Water transfer project in lieu of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. While the world had its eyes fixed on the struggle between freedom-seeking Tibetans and the Chinese authority, the rumbling of a mammoth water crisis was underway. The Northern provinces (where Beijing…
Deep convection refers to the thermally driven turbulent mixing that moves air parcels from the lower to the upper atmosphere. In the tropics, this generally involves the vertical ascent of warm moist air and, ultimately, precipitation. But while some aspects of deep convection are well understood, others remain a mystery. Dr. Larissa Back, a NOAA…
Starting tomorrow and continuing on February 27, the Global Roundtable on Climate Change (GROCC), part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, will host its sixth meeting. The Roundtable is made up of more than 150 corporate, government, and non-governmental member organizations who have met regularly since 2005 to discuss and explore areas of potential…
Currently, in Northern China, they are experiencing the worst drought they have had in at least 50 years, according to the New York Times. This is extremely problematic for the people because 3/5 of the country’s wheat is grown in this area.
Last week, we learned that the Obama EPA will conclude that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act (CAA). But a so-called endangerment finding on CO2 won’t lead to comprehensive CAA regulation, as I argued a few posts ago. Rather, the Obama administration will use the CAA as a…
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article about how companies are starting to calculate their “water footprint” as well as their carbon footprint to institute more water friendly policies. Commercial companies have discovered that it takes “20 gallons of water to make a pint of beer, as much as 132 gallons of water to make a…
According to Tony Barnston of the IRI, the La Niña conditions which began in December are likely to continue until mid-March. Click on the graph below for a better look at the probabilistic forecast. As mentioned in an earlier post, La Niña events are characterized by unusually cold sea surface temperatures (SST) in the central…
President Obama visits Canada today, and climate change is expected to be on the agenda. In Canada, the big issue is the development of the Albertan oil sands, which promise greater energy independence from the Middle East (a longtime U.S. goal) but also greater emissions as a result of the energy-intensive process of extracting oil from…
It took two years and a new administration, but the EPA is finally going to formally consider regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. In the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court held that the Clean Air Act (CAA) was capable of regulating CO2 and ordered the EPA to give good reasons…