Monthly Archive for May, 2009

“How Obama Made Energy Platform ‘Pop”

After a long day of campaigning on July 8, candidate Barack Obama arrived at his Chicago headquarters for a three-hour brainstorming session about a suddenly hot issue: energy and climate change. He had summoned a cross section of experts, including top executives from three utilities and two oil companies, the chief energy economist of an investment bank, a climate scientist, a California energy and environment expert, an oil consultant-historian, and several campaign staffers. Despite the late hour, one participant recalled, “He walked in as if he had just gotten up after a refreshing night’s sleep to lead a class. He was clearly there to harvest information and then do something with it.” More…

Climate Change Journal now listed with Ulrichs

The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses has been accepted for inclusion in Ulrich’s listings.

Ulrichs is an authoritative knowledgebase of information about more than 300,000 serials of all types from around the world—academic and scholarly journals, peer-reviewed titles, online publications, newspapers and other resources. Bibliographic records provide details such as ISSN and title, publisher, online availability, language, subject area, abstracting & indexing coverage, searchable tables of contents, and full-text reviews.

On Climate Imprint Launched

Common Ground Publishing has launched a new imprint, On Climate.

You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:

Books should be between 30,000 words to 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.

Climate Journal, Volume 1, Number 2 now available

The second issue of the new Journal, The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses, has now been published.

Volume 1, Issue 2 contains:

Continue reading ‘Climate Journal, Volume 1, Number 2 now available’

Learning about Rapid Climate Change

In a Perspective article, Shifting Gear, Quickly (Science, 24 April 2009), E. G. Nisbett and J. Chappellaz describe research on the methane contained in the Greenland ice to learn about past climate changes, some of which may have occurred very swiftly.

Earth’s climate can change gear very quickly, either sharply warming or fiercely cooling (1). Past shifts of this kind were massive, and some took place within a few years (2). About 11,600 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas cold period, the planet warmed very suddenly, with strong increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially methane. On page 506 of this issue, Petrenko et al. use radiocarbon (14C) data to identify the sources of the additional methane (3).