World’s first climate collective intelligence event
The world’s first climate collective intelligence experiment is looking for participants. Read more
The world’s first climate collective intelligence experiment is looking for participants. Read more
Now that Barack Obama has been elected, Washington DC is involved of its two favourite activities: scrambling for the hard-to-get tickets to the 20 January inauguration, and speculating wildly on who might get positions of power in the new administration. Read more
More elderly readers of these pages may remember having heard in their school days back (circa 1970s) that scientists then thought an ice age would be coming soon. I certainly do – even though the alleged ‘global cooling consensus’ in the scientific literature of the time has recently been disproved as a myth. Now an interesting new paper in Nature [subscription] suggests that a rapid natural transition towards a stable glacial climate, with permanent ice sheets covering large parts of North America and Eurasia, could indeed be ahead. Thomas Crowley and William Hyde ran a coupled energy-balance/ice-sheet model to test … Read more
Guest Commentary by Andrew Dessler There is an emerging view among some experts that recoverable fossil-fuel reserves are far smaller than previously thought. If so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) highest emissions scenarios could be unrealistically high, thus limiting the worst-case climate change during the 21st century. This view of a constrained fossil-fuel supply points to a potential convergence of thinking about policies and actions needed to address the seemingly divergent problems of energy supply and climate change. <img alt=“oil_plot.jpg” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/oil_plot.jpg” width=“400” height=“211” border=“0” align=“right” hspace=“10px”//> One of the standard techniques for estimating future oil production is the … Read more
Cross posted from the Great Beyond Let us get one thing clear right at the start: lemmings do not commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs into the sea. However, their populations do undergo massive size fluctuations, leading to mass migrations where the cute critters may go swimming to find new food sources. At least, they used to undergo massive population explosions. In a paper published this week in Nature a group of researchers analyse the absence of such events since 1994. The culprit, you guessed it, is climate change. Nils Stenseth and colleagues show that changes in winter weather … Read more
Cranking out 11th-hour regulations has become a tradition among exiting US presidents, and despite early hopes to the contrary it looks like this year will be no different. Read more
Following Obama’s landslide victory in the US presidential elections last night, pundits are already speculating on how he will deal with the formidable challenges in his in-tray, not least of which will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the economy into clean-energy mode. The news that Obama will be the 44th President of the US has been met with jubilation by environmentalists (as reported here and here), who are hopeful that the new administration will come good on promises to protect the planet. Over on the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog, James Kanter reports that hopes have soared … Read more
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