"Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically." Link.
[more inside]
posted by BobbyVan
on Jan 27, 2012 -
264 comments
Social Credit is a movement that takes a different view of economic expansion. Mostly it focuses on how value is created and what happens to the excess value. Proponents can be
very aggressive or
very mellow but a key part of their philosophy is that we must recognize the value we've inherited from the past. In other words, we don't start our lives with an empty ledger but have inherited many physical and intellectual gifts from previous generations. Recently I began wondering whether we shouldn't look at the other side of the ledger, particularly when it comes to ecological impacts - i.e., the messes we inherit. It turns out that in the early 90s, some
social credit economists were writing about this and were even talking about climate change as something that needed to be added to the equation. Is this an idea whose time has finally come?
posted by BillW
on Jan 7, 2012 -
13 comments
"Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there's no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths.
The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation."
Direct PDF link.
posted by brundlefly
on Jan 3, 2012 -
33 comments
Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. "Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change," from Kim Stanley Robinson.
Previously.
posted by gerryblog
on Dec 22, 2011 -
15 comments
Climate Variability and Climate Change: The New Climate Dice An excerpt from what should be a very incendiary academic paper by
Hansen, J, et al:
Thus there is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow
in 2010, which exceeded 3σ – it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the
absence of global warming. If global warming is not slowed from its current pace, by midcentury 3σ events will be the new norm and 5σ events will be common.
posted by Renoroc
on Nov 11, 2011 -
38 comments
Although the past 12 years have seen the warmest 10 years on record, temperatures have remained fairly steady, even while CO2 emissions grew by nearly a third. Temperatures should have been increasing during this period, rather 1998 was tied with 2010 for hottest on record. Now a
study suggests why (pdf): sulfur emissions from Asian coal plants (China mostly) are so high they mimic the effects of a volcano which can cause short term cooling by reflecting light back into space. Insidiously, the long-term warming caused by CO2 (coal) has been masked by short-term cooling of sulfur (coal).
posted by stbalbach
on Jul 5, 2011 -
85 comments
Sunspots, first observed by Galileo, normally follow an 11-year cycle. We are into a few years into (recorded) cycle number 24 but according to NASA it's looking rather
underpowered. Nobody is certain exactly what the consequences will be, but one distinct possibility is a
cold period; a previous low in solar activity, the
Maunder minimum, is correlated with a brief
Little Ice Age. Nobody really knows how this unusual solar weather pattern might interact with human-caused climate change.
Previously, albeit somewhat controversially.
posted by anigbrowl
on Jun 14, 2011 -
28 comments
Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history,
according to the latest estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA). After a dip in 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, emissions are estimated to have climbed to a record 30.6 Gigatonnes (Gt), a 5% jump from the previous record year in 2008, when levels reached 29.3 Gt. The
likelihood of exceeeding
450 ppm CO2 and associated two degrees of warming has now
receded greatly.
posted by wilful
on May 30, 2011 -
33 comments
Yale's 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators tracked across ten policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national government scale of how close countries are to established environmental policy goals.
posted by wilful
on Apr 22, 2011 -
8 comments
John Baez (mathematical physicist and master popularizer, former operator of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, current promoter of the idea that
physicists should start pitching in on saving the world) interviews Eliezer Yudkowsky (singularitarian, author of
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," promoter of the idea that human life faces a near-term existential threat from unfriendly artificial intelligence, and that people can live better lives by evading their cognitive biases) about the future, academia, rationality, altruism, expected utility, self-improvement by humans and machines, and the relative merit of battling climate change and developing friendly AIs that will forstall our otherwise inevitable doom.
Part I.
Part II. Part III. [more inside]
posted by escabeche
on Apr 2, 2011 -
47 comments
Australia is copping another pounding from natural disasters.
After the floods across Brisbane (
previously) in South-east Queensland,
North Queensland is in the firing line for a
Category 5 cyclone called
Yasi.
The official warning: THIS IMPACT IS LIKELY TO BE MORE LIFE THREATENING THAN ANY EXPERIENCED DURING RECENT GENERATIONS.
[more inside]
posted by bystander
on Feb 1, 2011 -
183 comments
Sustainable Growth is an Oxymoron Text of an outstanding talk that explains clearly why the idea of "sustainable growth" is impossible in the finite system that is the earth; how the compact energy-delivery system of fossil fuel is equivalent to mind-blowing amounts of free human labor, which cannot be sustained indefinitely; and why it's imperative for scientists to help humanity find ways to go back to "liv[ing] on the sun in real time."
[more inside]
posted by Sublimity
on Nov 25, 2010 -
95 comments
What I've always wanted-
an atlas of the world's vulnerability to climate change (downloadable pdf on page).
posted by leibniz
on Oct 20, 2010 -
12 comments
