Climate
- Climate
EPA: Greenhouse gases still endanger health
In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that based on its reading of the science, greenhouse gases threaten public health. Since then, the public and legions of interest groups have weighed in on the subject, shooting EPA some 380,000 separate comments. “After a thorough examination of the scientific evidence and careful consideration of public comments on the ruling,” EPA today reiterated its so-called “endangerment” assessment of greenhouse gases
By Janet Raloff - Climate
Newspapers issue strong warning on climate
SN senior editor Janet Raloff blogs from Hamburg, Germany, before going to Copenhagen to attend the climate talks.
By Janet Raloff - Earth
Countering Copenhagen’s Carbon Footprint
The United Nations’ Climate Change Conference, beginning Monday (Dec. 7), will draw legions of people to Copenhagen from 192 countries. Traveling to Denmark — sometimes from the far corners of the Earth — will expend huge amounts of energy. And spew plenty of the very carbon dioxide that the meeting negotiators are trying to rein in. So several bodies will be offsetting the carbon footprint of this gathering — with bricks. Or brick ovens, anyway.
By Janet Raloff - Earth
Ocean’s carbon dioxide uptake varies year to year
Data taken hourly by cargo ships show that how much of the greenhouse gas North Atlantic waters absorb varies more than thought.
By Sid Perkins - Climate
Climate might be right for a deal
The upcoming Copenhagen negotiations will take steps toward an international, climate-stabilizing treaty.
By Janet Raloff - Humans
Record chills are falling, but in number only
Weather-monitoring stations in the Lower 48 have been logging record daily highs in temperature at twice the pace of record lows. Yet more evidence of climate warming. Many people have pointed to colder than normal winters — or summers — as evidence that global warming is a myth. Climatologists have countered that weather, the meteorological features that we experience at any given hour or day, may show anomalies even as Earth’s overall climate warms. So weather can locally mask the planet’s overall slowly rising fever. Except that any such mask appears to be disappearing throughout most of the United States, according to a new study.
By Janet Raloff - Climate
Guarded optimism on Copenhagen climate talks
Negotiators representing 181 nations completed their final prep work in Barcelona, Spain, last Friday, on a new climate treaty — one that they hope to build a month from now at a major conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. But at least one scientist worries that what comes out of the Copenhagen deliberations may not have sufficient coordination and strength to meet the challenges that Earth’s climate has begun throwing at us.
By Janet Raloff - Climate
Kyoto climate treaty’s greenhouse ‘success’
There are 33 days until the opening of formal negotiations in Copenhagen on the next global climate-protection treaty. The hoped-for accord would take up where the current treaty leaves off. But to get some perspective on just where that is, a new United Nations report describes for negotiators and the public just how much the Kyoto Protocol has achieved. And real strides have been made in slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, thanks to many European nations (albeit with little help from North American ones or Japan).
By Janet Raloff - Climate
Mount Kilimanjaro could soon be bald
The world-renowned ice caps could disappear by 2022, new research suggests.
By Sid Perkins - Chemistry
Aerosols cloud the climate picture
A NASA model incorporates how atmospheric aerosols and greenhouse gases interact, yielding better estimates of the gases' warming and cooling effects.
By Sid Perkins - Climate
Winter forecast: Sustained blizzard of climate news
At least in our area of the country, consumers are already being assaulted — well before Halloween — with Christmas music, decorations and holiday-themed goods. Reporters are smack in the throes of their own early seasonal blitz: News items carrying a climate or global-warming theme. And I don’t expect the crush of climate news and seminars to diminish until around Christmas. That’s when the next United Nations COP — or Conference of the Parties — will end this year’s pivotal round of negotiations in Copenhagen aimed at producing a new climate treaty.
By Janet Raloff - Climate
Carbon emissions: Trend improves, but …
Sometimes what’s bad for the economy can be good for the planet. Or so argued Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, yesterday. This environmental trend spotter pointed to several developments that may have escaped our attention as the global economy alternately sputtered and entered periods of freefall throughout the past 18 months. Trend one: U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, have taken a tumble.
By Janet Raloff