Just a quick round-up to point you towards a couple of interesting pieces about the periodic table…

Thanks to Daniel for letting me know about a cool periodic table project where science and art collide – see his post at The Great Beyond for details.

This also reminded me of a post I saw not so long ago by David Bradley over at Sciencebase that gives us a tour of online periodic tables.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Senior Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Now that the dust is beginning to settle on the road that will lead from Bali to Copenhagen in December 2009, where the world is set to agree a new global climate deal, and the euphoria of seeing the US yielding under global pressure has begun to fade, the question is emerging of whether Bali actually accomplished what it set out to achieve.

So, was Bali a success? I give my take on Bali on the latest Climate Podcast from Nature, which covers highlights from the two weeks of talks as well as a round-up on what was agreed at the eleventh hour.

On ClimateBiz, James Murray takes the pragmatic view that it’s too early to tell:

There are still plenty of reasons to be confident that a solid successor to Kyoto will be agreed in 2009, but at the same time any Chinese leader commenting in 200 years time on whether the Bali conference was a success or not may sadly be doing so from a coastal resort in the Himalayas.

Murray rightly points out that whether you judge Bali as a success depends on whether you had realistic expectations to begin with:

The fact is Bali has achieved everything it was ever going to achieve. This was always going to be a meeting about future meetings and the environmentalists and European politicians who worked themselves up into a frenzy of excitement over the prospect of getting emission targets agreed were always going to be left disappointed.

Over on Open Democracy, which features a diversity of informed views on the outcome of the Bali conference, Oliver Tickell of the Kyoto 2 initiative gives a far bleaker take on Bali:

And is the world saved? Far from it. It is going to hell in a handcart….If this is success, well, give me failure! At least failure would give us a chance to start again and devise an effective framework that really could cut greenhouse-gas emission effectively, while delivering the goods on adaptation, forests, soils, peatlands, farming and the decisive shift we need to a low carbon global economy.

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