Science Daily: Black carbon aerosols and tropospheric ozone, both human made pollutants emitted predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere’s low- to mid-latitudes, are most likely pushing the boundary of the tropics further pole ward in that hemisphere, new research by a team of scientists shows. While stratospheric ozone depletion has already been shown to be the [...]
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New Scientist: Could Christiana Figueres have the world’s toughest job: getting all nations to agree how to tackle climate change? We talk to the UN’s climate chief. You are in charge of the United Nations climate negotiations – a notoriously tricky process. What would be considered a successful outcome?The governments need to put in place [...]
FIBL: Climate change mitigation is urgent, and adaptation to climate change is crucial, particularly in agriculture, where food security is at stake. Agriculture, currently responsible for 20-30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (counting direct and indirect agricultural emissions), can however contribute to both climate change mitigation and adaptation. The main mitigation potential lies in the [...]
The Independent: Waste milk creates a carbon footprint equivalent to thousands of car exhausts, according to a study that highlights the environmental costs of inefficient farming and the aggressive marketing of supermarket food. Scientists have calculated that the 360,000 tonnes of waste milk that is poured down British drains each year creates greenhouse gases equivalent [...]
National Geographic: Giant sauropods produced huge amounts of greenhouse gases, study suggests. Dinosaurs may have helped warm ancient Earth via their own natural gaseous emissions, a new study says. Like modern-day ruminants, giant plant-eating dinosaurs likely had microbes in their guts that gave off large amounts of methane—a potent greenhouse gas even more effective at [...]
The Hindu: Countries in Asia and the Pacific must strike a balance between rising prosperity and rising emission as their success or failure will have repercussions worldwide, a latest report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has said. “The Asia-Pacific region must continue to grow economically to lift millions out of poverty, but it [...]
New Scientist: [Michael Marshall ]Europe is doing it, Brazil is doing it, and now Mexico is doing it too. The country has passed a package of laws committing it to act on climate change. It is only the second developing nation to set greenhouse gas emissions cuts in the letter of the law. The package [...]
New Scientist: As Arctic sea ice breaks apart, massive amounts of methane could be released into the atmosphere from the cold waters beneath. High concentrations of the greenhouse gas have been recorded in the air above cracks in the ice. This could be evidence of yet another positive feedback on the warming climate – leading [...]
Telegraph UK: Carbon emissions from goods imported and consumed in the UK are rising more quickly than greenhouse gases are being cut domestically, MPs have warned. The Energy and Climate Change Committee warned that “outsourcing” of pollution to other countries meant the UK’s record on cutting greenhouse gases was not as good as official figures [...]
Livemint (Jacob P Koshy) : Scientists reaffirm that climate change has led to heat waves, record high temperatures and heavy rainfall. Although greenhouse gases released by human activities are changing global climate, it’s not yet clear if that has an effect on monsoon patterns, a report said on Thursday. The report on extreme events and [...]
J.C.Moore: Science is about using observation and reason to understand the physical world. Some people are suspicious of computer models and theories; so here is some of the the basic data in pictures and graphs. Ice core data gives a good picture of what has happened to the Earth in the last several ice ages. Please [...]
Efforts to stem global warming have nurtured a strong urge worldwide to deploy renewable energy. As a result, the use of wind turbines has increased 10-fold over the past decade, with wind power often touted as the most cost-effective green opportunity. According to Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s commissioner for climate action, “People should believe [...]
Many of the world’s rarest and richest forests, located in high-altitudes, could be all but wiped out by the combined impact of man-made climate change and habitat destruction. An international scientific team has warned of the near-total loss of one of the world’s most delicate ecosystems, the Mexican cloud forest, along with 70 percent of [...]
Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, but its net effect in the atmosphere is to lower temperatures. Proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and most IPCC climate models assume the opposite: AGW hypothesis: Carbon dioxide, a weak greenhouse gas, begins warming the planet. This warming evaporates water and so puts water vapor into the [...]
What if it is too late to save the climate by cutting greenhouse gas emissions? What if the amount of carbon dioxide already added to the atmosphere by human activity is so great that it is going to produce big temperature changes no matter what, with big shifts in rainfall and in ocean chemistry? Options [...]
Hydrogen fluoride emissions from brick kilns have been found to damage trees and crops in new studies conducted by an international team of scientists in the Peshawar area of northern Pakistan. Peshawar has 450 brick kilns and hydrogen fluoride is also released by factories making aluminium, ceramics, and phosphate fertilisers. Reporting their findings in the [...]
Three startup companies led by prominent scientists are working on new technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The scientific community is skeptical, but these entrepreneurs believe the process of CO2 removal can eventually be profitable and help cool an overheating planet. With global greenhouse gas emissions still on the rise, despite decades of [...]
Under the Kyoto Protocol, the US was expected to lower its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 6% below the 1990 levels. Instead the world’s largest emitter’s emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide increased by 14% between 1990 and 2010, according a draft report of the US government. The US refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol [...]
There are two main policy responses to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation addresses the root causes, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while adaptation seeks to lower the risks posed by the consequences of climatic changes. Both approaches will be necessary, because even if emissions are dramatically decreased in the next decade, adaptation will still [...]
When it comes to improving global air quality and reversing anthropogenic changes to the climate, we don’t exactly have much room for error: Experimentation with ultimately unhelpful management techniques could waste precious time and resources, and might even do further damage. Luckily, climatologists and meteorologists have developed increasingly precise mathematical models that allow researchers to [...]
Sometimes people question whether or not Climate Change is real. After viewing the feature documentary, Chasing Ice, I can assure you that the debate is over. On Monday, January 23, 2012 — Chasing Ice, had its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival featuring documentary director Jeff Orlowski and his Academy Awarding winning production [...]
India’s rural development minister has slammed a United Nations report which includes reducing C02 emissions as a development target agreed by poor countries, saying it was a “mistake” and that the international body was “sending the wrong signal”. Jairam Ramesh, a former environment minister, was India’s voice – echoing that of many developing nations – [...]
Report: Over 20 percent of forests and grasslands in developing countries could lose vital ecosystem services and biodiversity by 2030. Global warming will get worse as agricultural methods accelerate the rate of soil erosion, which depletes the amount of carbon the soil is able to store, a United Nations’ Environment Program report said on Monday. [...]
The paradigm shift towards sustainable development envisaged in the historic Agenda 21 adopted at the first Rio conference in 1992 and confirmed in the 2002 Johannesburg Plan of Implementation is missing in the “zero draft outcome document” for June’s U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly known as the Rio+20 summit. In effect the document now [...]
Meat and cheese top the list of foodstuffs that have a negative impact on the environment, according to research If everyone in the UK went vegetarian or vegan it would have the same environmental benefit as talking half of all cars off the road, according to new research. Scientists have calculated the impact of 61 [...]
A recent article in Science Magazine demonstrates how controlling methane and soot can have positive effects in a relatively short time on global warming, the Arctic, human health and agricultural productivity. It should be mandatory reading for all of the Republican presidential hopefuls and for President Barack Obama. If the next president refocuses international climate [...]
This year, the elites in Davos – debating the future of capitalism – faced a little more self-doubt than usual as to whether they have the best ideas to run the world, not least in the face of the intractable euro crisis. But the future of capitalism is just one big global challenge among many [...]
It is official: India has the world’s most toxic air. In a study by Yale and Columbia Universities, India holds the very last rank among 132 nations in terms of air quality with regard to its effect on human health. India scored a miniscule 3.73 out of a possible 100 points in the analysis, lagging [...]
There are many forces at work making it difficult to stop global warming. Many assume that the cost of creating a healthy planet will be astronomical in comparison to the results it will yield — partially because the benefits will be far in the future. The old standby of restricting carbon dioxide (CO2) and other [...]
The National Atmospheric Research Laboratory (NARL) attached to the Department of Space, government of India, is planning to set up a network of LIDAR (Laser Radar System) with the help of indigenously developed sensor tools in ten locations across the country in the first phase to study the aerosol distribution over India. This was disclosed [...]
NewYork Times: Agriculture has long been a stepchild in global negotiations over the climate. Hopes had risen that this might change at the latest big global climate session, in Durban, South Africa, in December. It did not. Now, a group of experts led by John Beddington, the chief science adviser of the British government, is [...]
Reuters: Norway will spend NOK 1.8 billion ($300 million) a year to devise ways to help some of the world’s poorest people get better access to energy and to develop a new market-based system to limit emissions from global energy production, a foreign ministry official said Wednesday. The Nordic nation expects to launch a plan [...]
DNA: A study conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) has some good news for India, particularly about how to improve crop production and reduce premature death caused due to black carbon and methane emission. It prescribes 14 strategies to reduce black carbon and methane emission which are known to aggravate respiratory and [...]
IOL Scitech: There are simple, inexpensive ways to cut back on two major pollutants – soot and methane – and taking action now could slow climate change for years to come, international scientists said on Thursday. When it comes to fending off global warming, the focus often is on harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil [...]
SciDevNet: Reducing methane and black carbon emissions could quickly tackle climate change while improving food security and people’s health, especially in developing countries, a study reports. Scientists identified 14 emission control measures that, when applied together, could reduce global warming by around 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, avoid up to 4.7 million premature deaths, and [...]
DowntoEarth: IPRs are blocking access to mitigation and adaptation technologies. India offers a way out. Debate on the rights and wrongs of intellectual property rights (IPRs) always gets stuck on a fundamental question. Would there be any incentive to invent and create without the incentive of IPRs such as patents and copyright? The conventional view [...]
RTCC: Scientists offered stark warnings in 2011 about what the world would experience if climate change ran out of control. As people ready themselves for a new year full of new promise, RTCC asks what lessons can be learnt from last year’s key research findings. Greenhouse gas emissions One of the clearest warnings in 2011 [...]
IPS News: In his quest to make the most efficient possible use of energy generated through wood combustion, Salvadoran René Núñez developed a simple but highly efficient wood stove that produces no smoke and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent. A whole meal can be cooked on a Turbococina or “Turbostove”, as he dubbed [...]
Apa Sherpa who has climbed Mount Everest a record 21 times, will trek hundreds of kilometres along some of the world’s highest mountains to highlight the impact of climate change on the Himalayas, organisers said on Monday. Apa Sherpa, 52, will be accompanied by two-time Everest climber Dawa Steven Sherpa on the gruelling 1,700km 120-day [...]
Canberratimes: Canada’s announcement before Christmas that it will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol could not have been better timed to puncture the sense of progress generated by the UN climate change conference in Durban just two days earlier. There, delegates had celebrated a dramatic and unexpected conclusion that saw all 194 countries (including Canada) [...]
David Archer, the author of “The Long Thaw” and a Realclimate.org contributor, has weighed in at length on questions and assertions about the greenhouse risk posed by methane released from warming Arctic seabeds and tundra. I encourage you to have a look in relation to the string of recent posts here aiming to restore some [...]
Scientific American: A NASA study finds that climate change will change the mix of plants on nearly half of the planet. Climate change will alter the mix of vegetation on 49 percent of Earth’s land surface by the end of this century, scrambling and shifting existing ecosystems, according to a new study. Researchers at NASA [...]
Chikagoist: Notre Dame researchers want to turn your house into a power plant. No, not like the Fisk coal plant in Pilsen. In fact, their vision is quite the opposite, turning every building into a passive solar collector with little more than a paintbrush. And in Chicago, with our monumental skyline and sprawling neighborhoods, the [...]
BioOne: Offsetting Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Himalaya? Clean Development Dams in Himachal Pradesh, India. The carbon-offsetting scheme Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has evolved into one of the most important instruments for the funding of renewable energy projects in mountain regions in developing and newly industrializing countries. The CDM allows industrialized states to compensate for [...]
UNEP: China is the largest producer, consumer and exporter of HCFCs in the world. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection today launched the HCFC Phase-out Management Plan (HPMP), a US$270 million project to cut consumption of Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) by 1 January 2015. The HCFC-phaseout in China is impacting chemical production, foam, industrial and commercial refrigeration, air [...]
Green Conduct: The last COP in Durban ended in a success for the UNFCCC process, but has more nebulous implications for the climate itself, with Kyoto put on artificial respirator and a more comprehensive agreement being pushed back to a later date. The most significant progress at Durban for climate change adaptation came in the [...]
Dawn: There is now near consensus in the international climate community that Asia will be the most severely affected continent because of the changes associated with global warming. And Bangladesh, the Maldives, parts of India and almost all of Pakistan are likely to suffer the most. Bangladesh and the Maldives will be hurt because of [...]
The Glob and Mail: So what that Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto died long ago. Most of the countries that ratified Kyoto, starting with Canada, failed to meet their greenhouse-gas reduction targets. Big polluters – the U.S., China and India – didn’t accept targets. At the Durban climate-change conference, Canada got paddled by [...]
National Geographic: Wind is a form of solar energy created by interactions between atmospheric heating, irregularities in the earth’s surface and the earth’s rotation. Wind is a clean energy source that is endlessly renewable and remarkably reliable. It does not pollute the air or cause acid rain like fossil fuels. (See References 1) Advances in [...]
NDTV: At the recently concluded UN climate change talk in Durban, the world agreed to a new global climate change regime by 2020 to bring down emissions to save the planet. But cutting carbon emissions will be a tough task for India in the years to come as the country needs to balance its development [...]
ABC Science: New research beneath farmland in Australia’s Otway Basin suggests carbon capture and storage is a safe and effective option, say researchers, but not all are convinced. Professor Peter Cook of the CO2CRC, and colleagues, report their findings this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We were able to show very [...]
IISD Reporting: The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, was held from 28 November – 11 December 2011. The conference involved a series of events, including the seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the seventh meeting of the [...]
Pakistan Journal of Meteorology: The Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindukush lofty mountain ranges meet each other in Pakistan hosting more than 5000 glaciers in Pakistani geographical limits which feed snow/ice melt water to the Indus River System together with summer monsoon. Due to global warming, frozen water resources have been losing their reserves at an unprecedented [...]
Himalayan Times: In the main plenary meet of the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, Nepal has urged countries to let go of narrow short term interests to work towards a broader vision to save the planet from the perils of climate change by agreeing on second period commitments of the Kyoto Protocol. Nepal’s [...]
The Economist: Despite governments’ failure to put a price on carbon, more businesses see profits in greenery. Shortly before the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, many companies got into green. The summit was expected to lead to new regulations restricting greenhouse-gas emissions. Dozens of chief executives came to see history being made and to [...]
The conversation: One of the topics under discussion at Durban is the role carbon farming and other forestry measures could have in reducing emissions. With the possibility that negotiations will not bring about an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, delegates are working on measures that could take place outside a climate agreement. The Conversation [...]
Zee News: (Durban) The US today shocked observers at the climate change conference here by saying that the 2 degree Celsius limit for increase in the Earth’s temperature is not like a “national target” but only a “guidance”. The 2 degree limit to global temperature rise was agreed in previous climate talks in Bali in [...]
Science Daily: Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by 49 per cent in the last two decades, according to the latest figures by an international team, including researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia. Published December 4 in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new [...]
Durban Post by Dr.C. S. Silori*: This note is on the major happening during COP 17 at Durban in South Africa during UN Climate Change Conference on December 4-5, and how the ‘equity’ issues has emerged as major challenge for the world leaders in context to future development and climate change. December 4, Sunday, was [...]
