climate change

Tweak or Transformation?

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“There are no experts.” This was my biggest take-away message from the inaugural National Adaptation Forum, held in Denver recently. Although it was my second major climate change adaptation conference in three weeks, I wasn’t sure what to expect. In Europe, there’s no need to whisper the words “climate change” in large gatherings for fear of offending someone, but America is different. Would people even attend a three-day conference on adaptation? And what would the presenters talk about in the sessions? I jumped into a rental car and drove to Denver to find out.

Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the “Stonewall” of the Climate Movement?

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A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast the “Selma and Stonewall” of the climate movement. Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news.

Farmers respond to climate change

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City dwellers may have enjoyed the sunshine during one of the driest winters on record, but the unseasonable weather has many farmers worried, and with good reason: their livelihoods hang in the balance. Fluctuations in weather do not necessarily indicate changes in climate, but climate change does impact the weather. Fearing the current weather patterns could be the new normal, California farmers are paying close attention to the forecast.

Stealing from the future

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I thought – or hoped — Paul Krugman’s recent New York Times op-ed, “Cheating Our Children,” was going to be about an important issue involving our individual and societal responsibilities to our descendants. It was – just not the one I anticipated from the headline. Perhaps I was practicing wishful thinking, but when I read “Yes, we are cheating our children, but the deficit has nothing to do with it,” I assumed he was going to talk about the fact that the decisions we make today are determining the environment (and hence the future) for upcoming generations, and that those generations have absolutely no voice in those decisions.

Chilling out globally

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What has the atomic number of 16, and is liable, in the form of a compound, to be spritzed into the stratosphere by the mega-ton? You’d be right if you said sulfur. That’s one of the interventions suggested by geo-engineers to reduce global warming, along with such initiatives as making biochar, "sequestering" CO2 under the earth, brightening clouds by spraying water upwards, and dumping iron powder in the sea. A sulfur compound injected into the middle atmosphere would mimic a massive volcanic eruption, which is known to reduce the mean surface temperature.

Current U.S. energy policy: Risk management that is worse than ever

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Current U.S. energy policy is, in fact, a hodgepodge of disconnected policies designed for specific constituencies with no coherent goal. What never gets asked and answered definitively in the policy debate is this: What should our ultimate goal be and when should we aim to achieve it?

Climate, politics & money – Mar 29

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•Giant investment bank taken over by hippie alarmists •Fossil Fuels Divestment Fever: Canadian Students, Doctors Launch New Campaign •Republican Mayor Leads City To First-Ever Solar Energy Mandate •New Research Confirms Global Warming Has Accelerated •Why Russian doomsday climate predictions may prove prophetic •Carbon in Worst Quarter Since 2011 Set for Rescue Vote

The other job

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This is a blog about carbon, and by extension climate change mitigation, but there’s another big job that’s rising fast on a lot of people’s To Do lists. It’s called adaptation, and suddenly everyone’s talking about it – for good reason as I learned last week. And the reason is this: the future is now. Climate-related changes are bearing down on us faster than many scientists expected, requiring action by individuals, communities, cities, and nations to reduce their effects. Inaction (like so much else connected to climate change) will only magnify the challenges, making them much harder to solve later. In other words, our collective To Do list just got a lot longer.