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Entries tagged with: Global Warming

25 result(s) displayed (1 - 25 of 37):

Not-So-Distant Early Warnings

In the middle of prepping for IFTF's 2012 Ten-Year Forecast event at the end of April, then traveling to Kazakhstan in late May. In the meantime... US Experienced warmest March ever. Average temperature in the lower 48 states was 8.6...

Got the Time

I've been mulling something of late, and it hasn't left me in a tremendously good mood. Take a look at these two sets of graphs: The first one is from the US Energy Information Administration, a group within the US...

Cold War Over Warming Already Underway?

Seems like it. Mark Lynas, who worked with the Maldives group at COP15, was literally in the room when the final negotiations took place, and wrote about it for The Guardian. The key section: To those who would blame Obama...

A Cold War Over Warming

What happens if global efforts to set and abide by strong carbon emissions cuts fail? The standard answer to a question like this is that "we all suffer." While that's probably true, it misses the point -- we may...

Blasphemy

Superfreakonomics author Steven Levitt has been fighting against the myriad critics going after him for the many, many mistakes in (at least) the global warming section of the book. Interestingly, a phrase that keeps coming up in his rebuttals is...

Topsight, May 26, 2009

Because this blog isn't just links to stuff I've done elsewhere. Honest! • The Participatory Panopticon In Action Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire From The Onion, of course. As tongue-in-cheek as this...

The Sea Level Rise Mystery

Twenty inches per decade -- that's the estimate of how rapidly the oceans rose in the last interglacial period about 121,000 years ago, in research appearing in Nature. That's eight feet over 50 years, in a world just 2°C warmer...

Climate Lawsuits Ahoy

The combination of science & liability may end up getting a lot of press in the Carbondämmerung era. The parallel of big tobacco and big carbon has always been compelling to me, but the Guardian reports that Oxford University physicists...

More Quick Links

Tired & busy with Superstruct. But check these out: • We're Doomed! DOOOOOMED! Hey, want to see six seven (see comments) middle-aged white guys talk about the end of the world? You're in luck! GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISKS: Building A Resilient...

Long-Run vs. Long-Lag

All distant problems are not created equally. By definition, distant (long-term) problems are those that show their real impact at some point in the not-near future; arbitrarily, we can say five or more years, but many of them won't have...

Methane: It's Not Just From Your Cheeseburger

I noted at the end of August reports of methane "leaks" in the Arctic circle. The Independent has another report, offering more detail on the findings. Alex at Worldchanging put up a piece about it today, bringing a lot more...

Methane Trigger for Geo & Bio Engineering

Methane (CH4) is 20-25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2). We're quite familiar with one source of atmospheric methane -- enteric fermentation in cattle (see my innumerable posts about cheeseburger carbon footprints). But there's another...

More Geoengineering Coverage

It's fascinating to watch the evolution of the mainstream media coverage of the geoengineering concept. I'm actually pretty pleasantly surprised: most of the articles I've seen have had an overall tone of caution about the proposals, even while recognizing that...

Melting Icecaps and the Global Ocean (Updated)

We're doooooomed, doooo-- wait a minute. If the Greenland icecap sees an even-more-significant melt, how soon do you need to pack your bags and head for the high country? Unless you live along the Atlantic coastlines of North America...

The Big Picture: Collapse, Transcendence, or Muddling Through

I'll start this essay by leading with my conclusion: do we make it through this century? Yeah, but not all of us, and it's neither as spectacular nor as horrific as many people imagine. Techno-utopianism is heady and seductive. Looking...

A Biking Dilemma

Okay, it's a standard presumption that global warming is going to make major heat waves more likely, in more places, lasting longer. Moreover, because of thermal inertia and climate commitment (not to mention how stubborn traditional politics seems to be...

Peak Oil vs. Global Warming

Could we avoid the worst ravages of global warming because we run out of oil? Not since King Kong vs. Godzilla have we seen a monster fight of this magnitude. Disaster vs. Disaster! Things Fall Apart vs. The Center Cannot...

The Big Picture: Climate Chaos

Thermal Inertia. Get used to that term, as it drives the relationship between climate disruption and human civilization, now and over the next twenty years. Its meaning is simple: even if we were to stop all greenhouse gas emissions immediately,...

Notes for "Battlefield Earth"

Foreign Policy has just published a substantially updated version of my article "Terraforming War," on the potential strategic/military use of geoengineering, under the title "Battlefield Earth." As it is not FP policy to put links in articles, I thought I'd...

Reversing Gandhi

The web is full of references to a Mahatma Gandhi quote: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. This line gives solace to people working on obscure or seemingly hopeless endeavors,...

Solving the Climate Crisis

With Al Gore and the IPCC wining the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lots of people are talking about global warming. The remaining holdouts and dead-enders continue to bray about hoaxes and imaginary disputes, but by and large the dominant focus...

Crimes Against the Future

This week's Newsweek contains an article ("The Truth About Denial") that, on the surface, offers a good look at the politics of global warming pseudo-skepticism. When you read between the lines, however, it becomes increasingly clear that we've hit a...

F in Citizenship

Foreign Policy magazine has come out with its annual listing of "Failed States. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the media attention to this list has focused on Iraq being #2 on the list, behind Sudan. Of greater interest to me,...

Micro-Offsets

The argument isn't over about the utility of carbon offsets (although the various argumentative parties have since wandered off to other subjects), but my take is that, on balance, they do a little bit of good and -- more importantly...

The Lost Hegemon (pt 1)

Rolling Stone assembled a round-table discussion with Richard Clarke, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bob Graham, Juan Cole and others (from the military, diplomatic and intelligence services) about three scenarios for the end of the US involvement in the Iraq conflict (note I...

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