climate change

Should we add one more gas to the Kyoto list?

Time to head back into my pillow fort:

Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) can be called the missing greenhouse gas: It is a synthetic chemical produced in industrial quantities; it is not included in the Kyoto basket of greenhouse gases or in national reporting under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); and there are no observations documenting its atmospheric abundance...With 2008 production equivalent to 67 million metric tons of CO2, NF3 has a potential greenhouse impact larger than that of the industrialized nations' emissions of PFCs or SF6, or even that of the world's largest coal-fired power plants.

by Ben Block and Christopher Flavin

On Thursday, politician-turned-activist Al Gore called for the United States to rely 100 percent on zero-carbon sources of electricity by 2018. Regardless of the logistical practicality of the goal or of the existence of political will to achieve this target in a single decade, Gore's statements made it clear: the U.S. environmental movement finally has a leader.

In the 20 years since global warming first entered the conscience of environmentalists, the ability to motivate progressive change has been, to put it mildly, a struggle. The opinions of scientific skeptics, supported by the fossil fuel industry, tended to resonate more powerfully in the public mind than the research generated by peer-reviewed international experts. Voters were not getting the message.

Image from D G Brown

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes the case that 208-250 billion tons of carbon dioxide -- roughly equivalent to a century's worth of future emissions (122-147 years, to be exact) -- could be safely stored under the Juan de Fuca plate, reports The Guardian's Alok Jha.

The tectonic plate, which ari...

The argument could be made that COP 15 -- the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at the end of next year -- may well be the most important diplomatic meeting of the century. That's because Copenhagen (as insiders call it) may well be our last, best hope for decisive action on climate change within a timeline that matters.

In the run up to that meeting, then, it's really worth noting the good arguments emerging in support for radical action, and the good thinking about what radical action might look like. Tony Blair's Breaking the Climate Deadlock is a step in the right direction, laying out a mainstream plan for achieving the new G8 goal of a 50% reduction in greenhouse gasses by 2050 (the so-called "50 by 50" plan) without damaging the global economy:

Times Are Changing
The climate science debate is over. Policy action is what it's all about. In spite of the US' delaying actions, other developed nations and many large companies are focused on real policy choices. Even Tony Blair has stopped 'beating around the bush'.

Scan Tony's recent speech on Breaking The Climate Deadlock, given to the Climate Group. Then download the full report on Breaking the Climate Deadlock (downloadable pdf file ...

Photo of land cleared for cattle in the Amazon by Leonardo F. Freitas

A new report from the Rights and Resources Initiative starkly quantifies the amount of additional land which will have to be put under cultivation to satisfy the demands of a growing world population for food and biofuels.

Land equivalent to 12 Germanys will have to go under the plow
Unless agricultural productivity of land rise sharply—the exact opposite of trends since the Green Revolution and the subsequent introduction of GM crops—an additional 515 million hecta...

photo: Getty Images

Usually when we talk about transportation emissions causing climate change here at TreeHugger, we focus on CO2 emissions or methane emissions—the usual suspects in the global warming discussion. In regards to cargo shipping, companies are investigating how much slowing down ships can reduce emissions. A new study conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado shows, however, that it’s not just the carbon emissions from cargo shipping which are a serious global warming concern, but also the soot these s...

Image from hdptcar

Time for another round of good news, bad news. First, the good: According to a weighty new UN report (it's 6,300 pages long and includes submissions from 2,500 experts) uncovered by The Independent, the world stands poised to enter a new era of peace, prosperity and empowerment. Increased democratization, economic and technological advances and medical breakthroughs have the potential to bring millions out of povert...

illustration from Worldchanging

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing and Alex Steffen of Worldchanging got together for coffee and had an idea.

"What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. "

"Imagine these folks...Helping rural landowners apply cli...

Image from Greenpeace

It's bad enough fish already have to deal with the consequences of overfishing; now, according to a new study authored by a team of UBC fisheries scientists, dozens will be faced with the prospect of extinction by 2050. Even slight fluctuations in temperature could cause many cold water species to perish as they attempt to seek out new, more am...

Peter Barnes is no dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist. A successful entrepreneur, writer and now senior fellow at the Point Reyes Station, Calif.-based Tomales Bay Institute, Peter has co-founded and has led several companies, including Working Assets (with former TH interviewee Michael Kieschnick).

He is a prolific author -- some of his recent books include Capitalism 3.0 (you can download a free copy

Image from Reuters/Marcos Brindicci

Cow flatulence and its link to climate change has been a favorite topic for us to cover at TreeHugger. So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that we'd jump on a Reuters story describing the climatic implications of cow burps.

Researchers in Argentina have been "collecting" cow burps by strapping big, red plastic tanks to their backs. Just as cow farts are a significant source of methane emissions, so ar...

Transport Infrastructure Will Change
With the i-MIEV electric car being rolled out sooner than expected and electric vehicles like the G-Wiz and Vectrix becoming ever-more common sights on our streets, it’s a good time to start figuring out what the transport infrastructure of the future will look like. Dale Vince of Ecotricity fame, who is h...

photo by Damien Rafferty/Fly Global Music Culture

I admit that it’s often easy to get down when thinking about environmental degradation, especially in a place like Africa which has had so many other problems as well. Every once in a while though you come across a story that makes you reconsider your assumptions about stopping a seemingly relentless force such as the expanding desertification in the Sahel.

The Great Green Wall
ENN is running a story about how African nations on the creeping southern border of the Sahara are taking action to attempt to halt the...

Corporate Climate Action Pioneers
In recent years, a handful of large corporations have estimated and publicly documented the cumulative carbon "footprint" of their operations. Most firms, however, are waiting...nervously eying pioneering efforts...for the declaration of the corporate environmental "footprint" to become a community standard.

The usual starting point is to sum the Green House Gas equivalent (GHG-e) emissions of manufacturing sites under company control, including contract manufacturing. a.k.a. "outsourced manufacturing." A trickier aspect is to apportion the corporate footprint attributable to joint venture m...

photo: Getty Images

All I have to say is ‘wow’. When I posted a video clip of T. Boone Pickens promoting his grand scheme for saving the US from energy dependency I promised commentary on it in a future post, but commenters have stolen most of my thunder in pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. I guess that “post an intelligent and civil comment” button brought out the best in people. Kudos to TreeHugger readers. However their are some points still worth mentioning.

...

photo by Matt Hansa

A couple of days ago we wrote about how the Internataional Energy Agency believes how it is wrong to blame speculators for the current high oil prices. Based on an email titled “An Open Letter to all Airline Customers” apparently the CEOs of twelve U.S. airlines didn’t get the memo.

You may have gotten the same email as I did from Delta Airlines, but for those you didn’t here are the choice parts:

Since high oil prices are partly a response to normal market forces, the nation needs to focus...

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Though it may be a bit premature to heap too much praise upon duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) -- after all, relatively little is still known about its properties -- the early signs, at least according to a team of Rutgers scientists, seem very promising. A team of plant biologists from Rutgers' Waksman Institute of Microbiology have convinced the DOE to focus resources on the genomic sequencing of the diminutive aquatic plant, claiming it holds immeasurable potential for f...

photo by Craig Forrester

In the ongoing effort to decrease greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector, the airline industry has been the focus of a good deal of criticism. Some airlines themselves have announced plans to reduce their environmental impact—Lufthansa, JAL, and Virgin Atlantic have all taken steps in this direction. Now comes word from the EU that...

Image from Wikimedia

There really is no respite for our battered coral reefs. As much as I'd like to say that there has been some good news on this front, the latest headlines have been growing bleaker by the week. Now a new report released by NOAA, hardly your alarmist types, has revealed that close to half of all U.S. coral reefs are in "poor" or "fair" condition -- a direct result of anthropogenic activities such as coastal development and overfishing and climate-influenced ef...

Rupert Murdoch's first speech to the Wall Street Journal Staff

A year ago Justin wrote "Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation, has announced that he is becoming a green campaigner. He is making the whole of his worldwide operations carbon neutral and setting out to "educate and engage" his readers and viewers about global warming". According to Mark Bowden in this month's Atlantic, Murdoch "has announced his intention for the remade Journal not just to supplant The New York Times as the nation’s preemine...

photo by Stig Nygaard

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Monday that the city would spend $2.3 billion to cut greenhouse gas emissions from municipal buildings and operations. The goal is to reduce CO2 emissions 1.68 million tonnes a year from 2006 levels by 2017.

These reductions will be accomplished through improvements to the heating, cooling and ventilation systems of municipal buildings. Repairs to firehouses, police precincts, city offices and courthouses, along with purchases of more fuel efficient vehicles will also help reduce emissions
...

Image from suburbanbloke

The conclusions of a new report written by Australia's top climate scientists are grim: Heatwaves are expected to increase 10-fold while droughts will almost double in number and become more widespread -- possibly impacting an area twice as large as now. Rainfall is also projected to continue its long decline throughout the country.

The report's release prompted agriculture minister Tony Burke to compare the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO's (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) findings to "a disaster novel," according to <...

To keep apace with our quickly changing world, we are constantly looking for ways to describe how change is happening and how we feel about it. By creating new words, like tipping points, NIMBYs and McMansions, we can explain new phenomena and relate it to others.

As gas prices climb and climate zones change, we will only continue to see people invent new words to explain their feelings, ideas, tools and solutions to each other. Many of these words have already left the jargon arena of sustainability geeks and bourgeois bohemians and have entered into the daily lexicon of everyday citizens. But here’s a sample of some (possibly) new sustainability-related words, for your repartee:

COWPOOLING

(Picture: Santa Cruz tourism office via La Nacion newspaper.) The Perito Moreno is one in a group of 48 glaciers located in the Andes, near the limits between Santa Cruz province and the Chilean frontier. Its break is a periodic event caused by the glacier's advance on the lake where it's located, and so far it had only happened during the summer, when the ice is weaker. This year, the process began last Friday and the glacier is abou...