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…

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.

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

You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:

• individually and jointly authored books;
• edited collections addressing a clear, intellectually challenging theme;
• collections of papers published in The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses.

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

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:

• Local Government Planning Responses to the Physical Impacts of Climate Change in New South Wales, Australia by Nadine E. White.
• Design Architecture: Cost Effective Solutions to Climate Change by Parul Kumtha and Sivaram Vemuri.
• Floodspace: Case Studies in Adapting to Climate Change-Related Flooding in Bangladesh by Simi Hoque and Erin Moore.
• The Impact of Climate Change on Heritage Tourism in the Caribbean: A Case Study from Speightstown, Barbados, West Indies by Michael Scantlebury.
• Aquatic Carbon Sequestration by the use of Pistia Stratiotes and its Relevance to Clean Development Mechanism by Hamed Haghparast.
• Carbon Trading in South Africa: The Clean Development Mechanism by Zingisile Ntozintle Jobodwana Z.N.

• Mapping of Micro-Urban Heat Islands and Land Cover Changes: A Case in Chennai City, India by Lilly Rose Amirtham, Monsingh David Devadas and Mohana Perumal.
• Non-disclosure of Social and Environmental Information in a Separate Statement of Annual Reports by Malaysian Listed Companies by Noriah Che-Adam, Lian Kee Phua and Fauziah Md Taib.
• Interpretation Plan for Ecological Awareness in Selected Areas of Kashmir by Asiya Nazir Khan and Kranti Yardi.
• Climate Change and the Liability of Developed and Developing Countries: How to Strike a Balance? by Astha Poonia and Anshu Choudhary.
• The Causes and Consequences of Tropical Deforestation: A Review by Richard J Culas.
• Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for U.S. Agricultural Businesses to Climate Change by Raphael Nawrotzki and Stephen Akeyo.

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).