Monthly Archive for November, 2010

From The Economist,

This column, emblematically, comes to you from a bus. In the annals of UN climate diplomacy, the Cancún meeting—the 16th conference of the parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is also the 6th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto protocol—will be remembered, more succinctly, as the conference of the buses. To all but a few, they are the inescapable essence of the Cancún experience.

This particular bus is headed from the Moon Palace to the Cancún Messe, a journey of about 20 minutes. The Moon Palace, a vast resort on the Gulf coast some way to the south of both Cancún proper and its separate hotel zone, is hosting the negotiations. It is large enough that it itself requires internal shuttle buses to connect its various parts, such as the halls where negotiations are taking place with those in which the journalists would be sequestered. Would be, because journalists want to be where the action is. The isolated press centre is largely deserted; the few in the press room are as likely as not filing pieces about how empty it is, or indeed interviewing each other on the subject.

The Moon Palace also contains the offices for the delegations to the conference, and many of the delegates themselves in some 2000 suites. It has a multiplicity of swimming pools and other attractions, lawns, palms and lazy iguanas. It probably looks a lot less like a car park with set dressing by someone who couldn’t get a job at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas when these various attractions are being enjoyed by a throng of happy honeymooners, as they are intended to be. At the moment they are mostly empty. Whether the same is true of the jacuzzis provided in every suite, who can say. Those in suites your correspondent has visited on business are being treated as embarrassments, but the press is not always present. (Full disclosure: some journalists, including this one, have simply through the nature of the accommodation Cancún has to offer been forced to accept jacuzzis of our own.)

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Scientist Sergey Zimov says Siberia's total carbon storage is equivalent to all the world's rain forests. photo by Arthur Max / Associated Press

From Arthur Max, Associated Press, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.

Gas locked inside Siberia’s frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane – a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide – at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

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