climate summit
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Developing Countries Fuel Momentum For Ambitious Climate Targets
A group of the least developed countries have held a climate summit to showcase their ambitious plans and hold developed nations to account.
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Why This Climate Scientist Is Taking to the Streets
In my early years I didn’t talk about the politics of global warming much. I didn’t bring it up with friends or family, let alone engage in any public way. It seemed to me unseemly for a scientist to be vocal on a political issue related, even indirectly, to his own research. Wouldn’t that be…
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Deutsche Bank and Columbia Climate Center Enhance Global Climate Change Policy Tracker
The Earth Institute, Columbia University is pleased to announce that Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors (DBCCA) of Deutsche Asset Management will continue work with Columbia Climate Center (CCC) researchers to update and enhance their Global Climate Change Policy Tracker. The Policy Tracker is a computer model that estimates the impact of policies on greenhouse gas…
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Taro Takahashi Wins Top U.N. Award for Environmental Leadership
The United Nations has awarded Taro Takahashi, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, its highest honor for environmental leadership, the Champions of the Earth award, for his research on the oceans’ uptake of carbon dioxide and its implications for global warming. He was presented with a trophy and a $40,000 prize on Thursday, April 22,…
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Copenhagen: The False “Victory”
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…
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Whole-Earth Management
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…
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There Was No Big Bang, and There Won’t Be
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…
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Cities Are Moving Ahead
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 […]
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The (Welcome) End of Unanimity
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…