Rural villagers in one of the poorest and driest parts of Senegal are turning on their taps for the first time and seeing water flow freely from the ground into their containers. JM Eagle, the world’s largest plastic pipe manufacturer, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University announced on January 14 the official completion of…
Earth Institute scientists are involved in long-term projects to study continued earthquake risk in Haiti and surrounding countries, and to aid reconstruction and development. Our Haiti Earthquake pages: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/blog/tag/haiti-earthquake/ contain continually updated resources for journalists. Seismologists, natural-disaster experts and others continue to provide interviews, images and essays on the implications and outlook. These include assessments…
McKinsey & Company has just released a new study outlining the potential costs of climate change mitigation. The report, which revises work originally published in 2007, evaluates 200 greenhouse gas abatement opportunities across 10 sectors and 21 world regions. It concludes that greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 35-40% below 1990 levels by 2030 are achievable…
Less than a week into his presidency, Barack Obama is poised to take his first step on the long road to averting climate catastrophe. The Times reports that Obama will allow California to raise automobile emissions standards for greenhouse gases above the national level. (OK, technically Obama has only ordered the EPA to review California’s…
I couldn’t have been happier when, back in October, my local electricity company offered me the chance to switch to alternative energy. The colorful advertisement from Consolidated Edison was festooned with windmills and said the switch would lead to only a 10 percent increase in the average family’s electricity bill. Here was a chance to…
New Study Shows Steady 50-Year Rise
There’s an article in today’s New York Times about PepsiCo’s effort to calculate the carbon footprint of its products, starting with Tropicana orange juice. A half-gallon of Tropicana represents the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. This is roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide emitted by a 5-mile drive to the grocery…
Far From Washington, Gathering Climate Data Under New President
I’ve been meaning to blog about Lonnie Thompson’s visit to Lamont last week; I suppose it’s the frigid temperatures here in New York that have kept melting tropical glaciers on my own back burner. For those who don’t know, Lonnie Thompson runs the Ice Core Paleoclimatology Research Group at the Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research…