on-climate.com

From Darrell Ince, Times Higher Education

The fragile state of climate research is such that a small piece of gravel tossed into the pool causes major ripples. At the end of June, a concrete block was thrown in.

The prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published “Expert Credibility in Climate Change”, a paper in which William R.L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold and the late Stephen H. Schneider use citation and publication data to examine the academic credentials of those who agree that human activity is driving global warming and those who are sceptical and believe, for example, that the climate data offered in support of human influence on atmospheric temperature exhibits a natural cyclical variability. The article concludes by stating that those convinced of man’s role in global warming have better academic credentials than the sceptics when judged by the numerical metrics the authors adopt for citation analysis.

The reception to the paper has been predictable: proponents of anthropogenic global warming have hailed it as proof that critics do not know what they are talking about, while those who have been critical have accused the authors of creating a blacklist of opponents and employing a flawed methodological approach. However, even academics in the first camp have expressed some major worries.

To Read More…

From The Long Now Foundation

All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe—3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of.

On Earth, 4 billion years of life accumulated geological hydrocarbons, which civilization is now burning at a rate of 10 million years’ worth per year. In 1900, 98% of the world’s energy came from burning carbon. By 1970, that was down to 90%, but it has not decreased since. It has to decrease some time, because there is only so much coal, oil, and gas. During this century every single existing power plant (except some hydro) will age and have to be replaced, and world energy demand is expected to triple by 2100.

To head off climate change, fossil fuel combustion has to end by about 2050. The crucial period for conversion to something better is between 2030 and 2050. The ideal new power source would be: affordable; clean; non-geopolitical; using inexhaustible fuel and existing infrastructure; capable of rapid development and evolution. Moses’ candidate is the “laser inertial fusion engine”—acronym LIFE—being developed at Lawrence Livermore.

To Read More…

From The Economist

If any industry ought to be seeing silver iridescence in the dark slick of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, it is renewable energy. However, since what is perhaps the biggest environmental disaster America has yet seen erupted at BP’s Macondo prospect on April 20th the RENIXX index, which measures the world’s 30 largest publicly traded renewable-energy companies, has fallen by 15%. This is even worse than the 12% fall in the MSCI world stockmarkets index in that period. Moreover, it continues a longer-term decline of more than two-thirds from the index’s all-time high in December 2007.

The oil spill might have been expected to revive a sense of urgency that the world, and America in particular, should reduce its dependence on oil, not least by switching to cleaner, greener sources of energy. Instead it is increasingly common to hear investors asking gloomily, “Is green dead?”

To Read More…

From David Biello, Scientific American

More than 100 countries have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord—the nonbinding agreement to combat climate change hastily agreed to this past December at a summit of world leaders. As signatories, the countries agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions to keep global average temperatures from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. The countries that have signed up to date represent more than 80 percent of the global emissions of such heat-trapping gases.

“Climate change is one of the most important challenges humanity faces today,” said Mexico President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa via videoconference from Mexico City at the State of the Planet gathering at Columbia University hosted by its Earth Institute on March 25. “This is urgent, we need to act now as countries and as governments.”

As part of signing on, countries also listed their national goals for emission reductions. Mexico, for its part, pledged to cut 50 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually by 2012. The U.S. pledged to reduce emissions by 4 percent below 1990 levels, pending legislation, whereas China promised cuts of 40 to 45 percent of the total CO2 per unit of economic production, so-called carbon intensity. And it will fall to Calderón and his colleagues in the Mexican government as hosts of the next climate change negotiation meetings in Cancún this November to continue progress toward an international, binding agreement. After all, without a legally binding treaty there will be no accountability on greenhouse gas emissions, warned United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the conference.

To Read More…

From Carl Zimmer, enviornment 360

A new study says the seas are acidifying ten times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. And, the study concludes, current changes in ocean chemistry due to the burning of fossil fuels may portend a new wave of die-offs.

The JOIDES Resolution looks like a bizarre hybrid of an oil rig and a cargo ship. It is, in fact, a research vessel that ocean scientists use to dig up sediment from the sea floor. In 2003, on a voyage to the southeastern Atlantic, scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution brought up a particularly striking haul.

They had drilled down into sediment that had formed on the sea floor over the course of millions of years. The oldest sediment in the drill was white. It had been formed by the calcium carbonate shells of single-celled organisms — the same kind of material that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover. But when the scientists examined the sediment that had formed 55 million years ago, the color changed in a geological blink of an eye.

“In the middle of this white sediment, there’s this big plug of red clay,” says Andy Ridgwell, an earth scientist at the University of Bristol.

To Read More…