The UK’s National Trust announced that they are aiming to organize the largest green movement with millions of members in support of conservation efforts and in combating climate change.
The most recent report from the world’s top climate scientists is not overflowing with optimism: drought, disease, famine, smog-related deaths. “This is the story. This is the whole play. This is how it’s going to affect people. The science is one thing. This is how it affects me, you and the person next door,” says University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver.
No one can have failed to notice the shift in public perception of climate change in the past few months: the scientific debate, dangerously prolonged, is truly over. But this is not in itself a victory for those who are struggling to avert planetary disaster (as I’m sure most readers are well aware). Before there is anything to celebrate, we’ll ...
Something that worries many people about offsetting emissions with trees is how can you guarantee that they will last long enough? Trees take time to absorb carbon, extracting it slowly from the atmosphere as they grow. But saplings are vulnerable to bad weather, neglect and damage by animals. Older woodlands and forests face the risk of fire, pests and disease, ...
The World Bank is planning a US$250 million fund to aid developing countries to stop deforestation in return for carbon credits. The plan has attracted international support and the World Bank will chose five countries to launch the pilot stage of the project to.
In my last entry I took a page from the Weather Makers, and cited Tim Flannery’s observation that one of the obstacles to decisive action on climate change is that the whole idea of global warming has become a cliché even before it has been understood.
My example of a cliché was the Kyoto protocol, which people talk about without really paying attention to. Kyoto is largely just a symbol of our feelings about global warming, rather than an indication that we’re ...
A note from Australia’s minister of the environment to Zerofootprint founder and CEO Ron Dembo.
It has hardly escaped notice that the wealthy nations of the north unleashed the crisis of climate change, while the poor nations of the south will bear its most immediate consequences. What are the wealthy doing to mitigate the problems they’ve created for their southern nations? Not much.
At least the debate is not whether climate change is actually happening. Now we’re figuring where to spend the money to fight it.
Just as the chorus of anti-environmental and faux-environmental voices attacks the G8 meeting to look for a post-Kyoto agreement reaches a crescendo, a host of alternative solutions to intergovernmental treaties to cut CO2 emissions start to make Kyoto look not only feasible but inexpensive.