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2007: The year in environment
Catherine Brahic, New Scientist
It is hard to round-up the events of 2007 without leading with climate change. On the scientific and political fronts global warming came to the fore, with the publication of the latest consensus report on climate change science, a Nobel Peace Prize, international commitment to drafting a successor to the Kyoto protocol, a contentious sceptic documentary, and a U-turn on behalf of the Bush administration.
But there was much, much more to 2007. Nations raced for the North Pole, a myriad of new creatures were discovered while others continued their interminable decline, and the Earth revealed another of its secrets (it hums!).
Then there was the bizarre: one scientist decided to see what happens when you put a penguin on a treadmill.
“February 2, 2007 will be remembered as the date when the question mark was removed from the question, if human activity had anything to do with climate change,” declared Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), to a crowded auditorium in Paris, France, on the same date.
(22 December 2007)
Top 10 Global Warming Stories of 2007
Joseph Romm, Huffington Post
What events or actions had the most positive or negative impact on the likelihood that the nation and the world will act in time to avoid catastrophic warming? Here are my picks:
#10. Over a barrel: Oil nearing $100. Technically not a global warming story — but who can doubt that part of the renewed interest in energy policy in general and alternatives/efficiency in particular is due to record oil prices? Certainly OPEC is a bit worried. And if, as many believe, this is evidence that we are nearing peak oil — then this story foreshadows even more dramatic changes in the future.
(1 January 2008)
The Year in Review: The planet
Michael McCarthy, The Independent
The sheer scale of what happened hasn’t sunk in, it probably hasn’t sunk in at all, with most people. They’re not looking back on 2007 and talking about it, in the office, in pubs or over dinner. Listen to them: they’re talking about Brown taking over from Blair, or David Cameron’s prospects, or England failing to qualify for the European football championships. Or they’re talking about getting and spending, or love and hate, as they always have. But what happened in September dwarfs all that.
You might compare it, in its implications, to Hitler marching his troops into the previously demilitarised Rhineland, in March 1936 – the clearest possible sign that the world was in for serious trouble. Some people understood the potential consequences of Hitler’s move at once, but the world as a whole carried on with business as usual, until three years later the storm burst upon it. And so it seems to be with the ice.
(28 December 2007)
The Independent has been the most aggressive on climate change of all the mainstream English-language newspapers I’ve been monitoring. Looks like they have been right. -BA
It was all about oil, global warming
Gwynne Dyer, Trinidad & Tobago Express
THE year two thousand and seven was the year in which global warming finally began to be taken seriously. The climate change deniers were in full retreat, and the realisation that we face a long and grave crisis was finally dawning on the general public. However, it remains to be seen whether it was the year in which the world agreed on effective measures to deal with the crisis.
The global conference in Bali that was supposed to kick off negotiations for a new treaty to replace the Kyoto accord after 2012 ended ambiguously. The American delegation did not succeed in wrecking it, but it did manage to get all specific targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions removed from the text of the agreement.
The other countries went along with it in order to stop the United States from walking out, on the assumption that next year’s presidential election will produce an administration that is willing to co-operate. Then the hard targets for cuts will get put back in, and United States will sign up to them, and the Indians and the Chinese and the other big developing countries will make a deal that commits them to some cap on emissions in return for much technological and financial help from the developed countries in installing clean energy technologies.
That is the theory, and you can’t blame the other countries for going along with it because the alternative was a rogue America and no agreement. On the other hand, the history is not promising. It was Saint Albert Gore himself, then vice-president, who led the US delegation to the Kyoto talks in 1997 and drove the proposed emissions cuts down from 15 per cent to five per cent, in the hope of coming up with a deal that Congress would accept.
But Congress never did accept the Kyoto accord, because its paymasters in the US energy, transport and natural resources sectors said not to. Things may have changed a bit now – Congress passed a bill this month that mandates greater fuel economy in vehicles – but on the big issues it is still largely subservient.
(26 December 2007)
