on-climate.com

From Times Higher Education,

“Earth is at a critical crossroads,” announced the aptly named Earth Institute at Columbia University last year. The august research body warned the world solemnly that human activity was “threatening the health of the environment and potentially posing risks of unprecedented magnitude to our shared future”.

Fast forward to 2010, and with the dirty stain of oil spreading inexorably over the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to choke the delicate wetlands of Louisiana and Florida, you can’t help but make a link between the warning and the business model of BP. But there is an even better reason to “Think BP” when you hear the Earth Institute’s warnings: a key member of its advisory board is none other than Carl-Henric Svanberg, chairman of BP and now perhaps persona non grata.

In June 2009, when the beleaguered oil multinational chose Svanberg for the top job, it explained that this was because, in addition to his dynamic business track record, he was personally committed to and an advocate of many corporate-responsibility issues, including human rights and climate change. Naturally, he is at home at the Earth Institute, where, as its website informs us, everyone is deeply worried that “today, approximately one in six people on the planet subsist on less than $1 a day. The world’s population is expected to increase to 9 billion people by 2050, further straining Earth’s resources and humanity’s ability to thrive.”

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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.

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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?”

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From Astra Taylor, Adbusters

Last October, in anticipation of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives — a tiny nation made up of more than one thousand low-lying islets in the Indian Ocean — called an urgent and highly unusual meeting of his cabinet. Government officials donned scuba gear and headed into the sea, convening on the ocean floor five meters below the surface where they signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. The half-hour meeting, observed by snorkeling journalists and captured on video by waterproof camera was, to use a phrase coined by political theorist Stephen Duncombe, an “ethical spectacle”: a theatrical attempt to call attention to a very real threat and moral predicament. The Maldives aren’t submerged yet, but they will be soon enough if the world doesn’t take action to prevent such a fate.

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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.

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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.

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