Archive by date | October 2008

Royal Society launches geoengineering review

Royal Society launches geoengineering review

Last month I wrote that geoengineering proposals had practically made the scientific mainstream, gracing a special issue of one of the Royal Society’s journals. With global emissions steadily rising and policy responses slow to take hold, scientists have begun to call more loudly for research into the last-ditch technological fixes that might – or might not – be able to reset a rapidly changing climate.  Read more

The missing climate science message

In Science this week, a commentary (subscription required) from John Sterman, who studies systems thinking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argues that the public may shy off of action against climate change because their basic mental model of the problem is wrong. People don’t intuitively understand how changing rates of carbon dioxide emissions affect the overall concentration of the gas in the atmosphere, Sterman says. In fact, they often make mistakes when thinking about how ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ sum up to form a total ‘stock’ – “even in simple, familiar contexts such as bank accounts and bathtubs”.  Read more

From greed to green?

Is the global financial crisis good or bad for green issues? The ongoing controversy over the European Union’s ambitious climate and energy package suggests the latter might be the case. But political and economical analysts seem to be increasingly confident that the current crisis might give rise to environmentally healthier policies and investment decisions.  Read more

In search of the best climate graphics

In search of the best climate graphics

Flipping through Dire Predictions, the terrific new illustrated summary of the 2007 IPCC report (reviewed here), has me wondering about the best climate graphics out there. Page after page of beautiful, clear charts and illustrations add up to a lot of power, making the whole book a visual standout, but it would be hard to pick out any individual pieces that really pop with imaginative information design. Meanwhile, even after another banner year for climate science in the media, none of the most recent finalists in Science’s annual image contest concern themselves with the warming globe.  Read more

AGU Chapman conference: water vapor and climate

I’m here in Kailua Kona for the AGU Chapman conference on atmospheric water vapor and its role in climate. Given the high humidity and afternoon rain, the topic seems quite appropriate.  Read more

Cyclones’ carbon capturing

Cyclones’ carbon capturing

Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond Cyclones appear to be responsible for a large amount of organic carbon tied up in ocean sediments. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, Robert Hilton and colleagues report on the impact of cyclone-induced floods on carbon in the LiWu River in Taiwan. They found that between 77 and 92% of non-fossil carbon eroded from the LiWu catchment area was moved during floods linked to cyclones. As increased sea surface temperatures from global warming could increase the intensity of cyclones, this could create negative feedback, with bigger cyclones locking up more organic  … Read more