Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Betting on climate change
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired. This piece was produced by the Climate Desk collaboration.
Last year, Beluga Shipping discovered that there’s money in global warming.
Beluga is a German firm that specializes in “super heavy lift” transport. Its vessels are equipped with massive cranes, allowing it to load and unload massive objects, like multi-ton propeller blades for wind turbines. It is an enormously expensive business, but last summer, Beluga executives hit upon an interesting way to save money: Shipping freight over a melting Arctic.
Beluga had received contracts to send materials on a sprawling trip that would begin in Ulsan, South Korea, head north and west to the Russian port city of Archangelsk—located near the border with Finland—and wind up in Nigeria.
“Transparency” too controversial at U.N. climate talks
Can you object to a proposal for U.N. climate negotiators to “continue to work in a transparent and inclusive manner in accordance with the principles of the United Nations”?
If your answer is a bemused ”No”, you definitely aren’t a negotiator.
Turn out the lights for climate change (and polar bears)?
Lights will go out around the world on Saturday from Beijing’s Forbidden City to a village in the Arctic where they usually keep street lights blazing to ward off polar bears.
The “Earth Hour” — when everyone is asked to turn off lights for an hour from 8.30 p.m. local time — is meant as a show of support for tougher action to confront climate change.
Too few women in U.N. climate jobs? Ban names 19-man panel
A women’s group is criticising the United Nations for appointing only men to a 19-strong panel of experts to work out how to raise billions of dollars to fight climate change.
“A planet of men? Since when?” asks the German-based Gender CC — Women for Climate Justice in a statement. (An update — since the list was announced, U.N. officials say that a woman has been added — French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde)
Flood drowns Taipei in cinematic wake-up call
American sci-fi blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow warned global audiences about climate change as it showed New York smothered by ice as temperatures plunged worldwide. But the 2004 movie evidently made little impact on growth-crazy Asia, which has gone ahead spewing pollutants without imagining risks that they might disrupt the climate.
This year a group of filmmakers in newly modernised, consumption-happy Taiwan is going to the densely populated western Pacific island’s public with an hour-long alarmist movie showing the world’s second-tallest building Taipei 101 as an island in a flood that has drowned the capital after a reservoir collapses in a freak super-strength typhoon.
from UK News:
Are you losing faith in climate science?
While attending a meeting of prominent climate sceptics during the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December (an anti-COP15, if you will), I listened to each of the speakers put forward their theory on why conventional evidence on the primary causes of climate change should be dismissed as, for lack of a better phrase, complete hokum.
Among their denunciations of widely-accepted truths regarding global warming, greenhouse gases, melting glaciers and rising sea levels was the assertion that a change in attitude was afoot; the public may have been duped into believing the mainstream scientific assessment of climate change, but not for long.
from Tales from the Trail:
Amidst the shivering in Washington, the case for global warming
OK, it's cold in Washington. It's really cold. And snowy. And blizzardy. It's hard to recall that long-ago moment -- what was it, six days ago? -- when you could go for a walk without cross-country skis and a flask of brandy. But just because it's winter doesn't mean global warming is a myth.
But the storms gave conservatives fresh fodder for mocking former Vice President Al Gore and his efforts on global climate change. Senator Jim DeMint tweeted "It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries 'uncle'," Politico reported.
from UK News:
Climate scientists seek to calm storm of doubt
If the scientific evidence for manmade global warming is so compelling, why do so many people still have their doubts?
Why do politicians and the media often discuss global warming with such certainty, ignoring the scientists' carefully worded caveats?
from The Great Debate UK:
Good eco-sense is good business sense too
- Juliet Davenport is founder and CEO of Good Energy, a renewable electricity supplier. She is unique in being the only female founder in the UK of an energy supply business, traditionally a male-dominated sector. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters will host a "follow-the-sun" live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women's Day. Please tune in. -
Regardless of their views on climate change and man’s contribution to it, most business leaders agree on one point – as fossil fuels get scarcer and the UK decarbonises our economy, our energy prices will continue to rise.
New world wines: now from the north
This article by Paul Ames originally appeared in GlobalPost.
The terrace of the elegant 18th-century chateau offers views over the formal French garden and fields filled with neat rows of vines.
This idyllic scene could be reminiscent of Bordeaux or the Cotes du Rhone … were it not for all the snow.
