Archive by category | Features

Climate science ’09: the highs and lows

Climate science '09: the highs and lows

For climate science, the year 2009 brought significant discoveries and startling controversies. We’ve got a wrap-up from Kurt Kleiner of the top ten climate science stories of the past twelve months over on Nature Reports Climate Change.  Read more

Copenhagen: the scientists’ view

Nature has a feature out today looking at the UN Climate Change Conference from the perspective of the scientists. Jeff Tollefson asked scientists what they hope to gain from attending the negotiations. Of the 34,000 registered delegates, many hundreds are scientists. Writes Tollefson:  … Read more

Madagascar: how to save a forest

Anjali Nayar, an International Development Research Centre fellow at Nature, recently visited a pioneering project in Madagascar that’s aiming to protect one of the country’s few remaining forests. About 90% of the species in Madagascar’s rainforests are found nowhere else on Earth, but efforts to save the island nation’s forests are about more than conserving biodiversity.  Read more

Climate games: small pacts are no big deal

Climate games: small pacts are no big deal

Hopes that the UN conference in Copenhagen will result in an ambitious climate treaty have faded, with UN climate chief Yvo de Boer now conceding that reaching a legally binding agreement will be impossible this year.  Read more

Australia’s carbon capture institute

Australia, the world’s largest coal exporter, launched an institute last week to galvanise large-scale demonstrations of carbon capture and storage (CCS) (or ‘clean coal’) technology [see Nature coverage here; press release].  Read more

What’s going Bonn?

What’s going Bonn?

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond This week’s UN hosted climate change talks in Bonn, Germany, are well underway. According to New Scientist this climate summit is “more important than the G20”. So what’s going on in Bonn? This meeting is the first of five sessions leading up to what the UN says will be an “ambitious and effective international climate change deal” to be finalised in Copenhagen in December (pdf). The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has already started its ‘countdown to Copenhagen’ timer. However, as Reuters pointed out on Wednesday, delegates from 175 nations even managed  … Read more