Climate & environment – Dec 16

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Next Climate Summit May Turn on Rich Nations’ Approach to Poor Ones
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
The acrimonious end to the United Nations talks here early Saturday morning highlights the challenge rich and poor countries will face as they seek a global climate pact in the coming year, as well as a possible path toward compromise.

Much of the debate this year focused on how to structure the year-old adaptation fund, which devotes a small portion of the money industrial nations pay on clean-energy projects in developing nations to helping those same countries cope with global warming.

Poor nations had hoped to strike a deal in which some of the money raised by auctioning international pollution allowances in the next few years would go toward this effort, but industrialized countries resisted.
(13 December 2008)

Global Warming, Hitler and World War II Rationing
Craig Mackintosh, Permaculture Research Institute
It’s an unusual title, I know – but bear with me.

If you were to personify global warming, to literally morph it into some kind of effigy – something you could tie to a stake in the town square, and throw cabbages, or rocks at – what would the guy look like?

I guess the degree of grotesquery in your visualisation would largely depend on where in the world you live, and to what extent this ‘person’ has adversely influenced your life, although in some ways it could be easy to conjure an image of one of last century’s most notorious, infamous villains – Adolf Hitler. Couldn’t it?…
(7 December 2008)

Arctic melt passes the point of no return
Steve Connor, The Independent

Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.

Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.
(16 December 2008)