As you know yesterday was Christmas, and things are just a little bit different on such a holiday aboard a research vessel. Although the sub was in the water, many of the crew had the day off. As far as I can tell, most of them work around the clock, so such a rest was…
Not everything on a research vessel always goes according to plan. Today we awoke to find out that during the night the primary CTD winch failed, leaving about 2000 meters of cable and a large instrument package over the side. Alvin cannot dive when we have a wire in the water, so this situation is…
After a search during dive 4576, Scott finally found a suitable site for the VentCam deployment, and later that evening we launched the system overboard for its first trip to the seafloor. The next day, with the help of pilot Bruce Strickrott and pilot-in-training Anton Zafereo, we dove in Alvin to recover the device and…
With much of the world focused on the climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark over the past two weeks, many of you in the Great Lakes area may be wondering, “how will climate change affect the Lakes?” So let’s take a moment to briefly look at this question.
Two years of climate change negotiations have now ended in a farce in Copenhagen. Rather than grappling with complex issues, President Barack Obama decided instead to declare victory with a vague statement of principles agreed with four other countries. The remaining 187 were handed a fait accompli , which some accepted and others denounced. After…
The issues that emerged at the Copenhagen climate conference serve to remind us of the difficulty of solving complicated cross-national environmental problems. Ever since Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner first popularized the idea of a single interconnected biosphere, it’s been obvious that national sovereignty would make it difficult to solve some global environmental problems. The…
The three pages of text that emerged after years of preparation and two weeks of intense negotiation in Copenhagen signally fail to address what the document correctly calls “one of the greatest challenges of our time” – global climate change. To many, the Copenhagen Accord will seem a setback; actually, it is a continuation of…
Although critics have given harsh assessments of from the international summit at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, most probably would have concurred with the positive message flowing out of Copenhagen City Hall, the site of the Climate Summit for Mayors. The mayors’ summit emphasized local action to address climate change […]
The most common reaction to Copenhagen is dismay at the failure to reach binding emission reduction targets. But Copenhagen actually represents a major success. Why? It signals, finally, the abandonment of an experiment in hyper-multilateralism that never had much chance of success. From the early days of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the…