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However you slice it, the scientific news has not been good on the pace of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The weekend saw a pair of new studies that confirmed the fact that—far from curbing greenhouse gas emissions—we’re warming the atmosphere faster than ever, even as the slow-moving U.N. climate talks underway now at [...]
OK, fine. It’s not quite the case—as you might have concluded from my Going Green piece earlier this week—that the U.N. climate negotiations, now under way in Durban, are completely useless. On Tuesday negotiators agreed on where next year’s summit should be held, with the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar just beating out South Korea. [...]
Yesterday the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with an early summary of a new report projecting the future of renewable energy. As with many international studies of the sort, readers were free to use parts of the results towards whichever conclusion they’d already reached on alternative power and climate change. Optimistic [...]
Today kicks off the UN International Year of Forests. (I know, it feels like International Polar Year just ended—probably because it was actually two years.) The event is meant to focus global attention on the plight of the world’s forests, which provide carbon sequestration, climate regulation and are host to an astounding variety of biodiversity. [...]
I have a piece on the home page today about the persistent problem of energy poverty in the developing world. We know that the poorest countries of Africa, Asia and South America are held back by diseases like HIV and TB, along with lack of education and infrastructure. But a major part of what keeps [...]
I’m not down in sunny, congested Cancun yet—I’ll be arriving next week for what’s become an annual holiday season trip to the U.N. climate summit. (At least this year won’t be as cold as Copenhagen, though I’ve heard that the food is just as bad.) I’ve already written a preview of the major issues on [...]
Sometimes, I admit, this green beat can be a little depressing. Shrinking icecaps. Rising seas. Endangered species. Air pollution. Acidifying oceans. Oil spills. Invasive Asian carp. And perhaps worst of all, the United States Senate. It can seem as if life is getting is worse every day—like a Beatles record played backwards. But take a [...]
Although most of the attention on the end of last week’s meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya focused on the modest agreement made to reduce biodiversity loss, that wasn’t the only outcome of the two week-long summit. Member nations at Nagoya also agreed on a possible moratorium on research into the [...]
