Climate

Climate

‘Climate-gate’: Beyond the embarrassment

The United Nations Climate Change meeting, which I arrive at tomorrow in Copenhagen, is currently deadlocked on more important issues than who said what impolitic thing about somebody else in a private email to a colleague.

Ecosystems

Greening Christmas

I love the smell of balsam and firs and decorating holiday cookies – preferably with the sound of popular holiday standards in the background. I even enjoy shopping for and wrapping carefully chosen presents in seasonal papers festooned with huge bows. So when my hosts, this week, asked what I wanted to see during my visit, the answer was simple. Take me to one of Germany’s famed Christmas markets. And literally within a couple hours of my plane’s landing, they were already ushering me into the first of what would be a handful of such seasonal fairs. But as I also quickly learned, this first was an unusual one: a "green" bazaar.

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

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.

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.

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.

Climate

Climate might be right for a deal

The upcoming Copenhagen negotiations will take steps toward an international, climate-stabilizing treaty.

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.

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.

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).

Climate

Mount Kilimanjaro could soon be bald

The world-renowned ice caps could disappear by 2022, new research suggests.

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.