To a casual observer of the latest round of United Nations climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, last week, it was a battle between Polish coal miners determined to hang on to their jobs, and the people of the Philippines, who would rather not lose their lives to the tempests likely unleashed by climate change. In the corridors, the talks looked different: another stage in the agonisingly slow crawl towards a deal on carbon emission that diplomats hope to seal in 2015.
For the last 100 years we have used cheap fuels to multiply the number of energy slaves that do work for us. These inanimate slaves, from cars to iPods, have played a profound yet often unrecognized role in the transformation of human culture and gender roles. With the advent of extreme hydrocarbons, will North Americans willingly give up some of their energy slaves? And just what may the future look like in an energy constrained world?
"The smell of inaction" is how Dipti Bhatnagar, Friends of the Earth Mozambique's international program director for climate justice and energy, summed up the atmosphere inside the giant Narodowy Stadium after the first week of the latest round of international climate negotiations, Conference of the Parties, otherwise known as COP 19, taking place Nov 11-22, 2013, in Warsaw.
It’s been nearly two weeks since Typhoon Haiyan devastated a portion of the Philippines on November 8. A collection of islands in the south of the country that is populated by about four million people took a direct hit. The death toll now stands at more than 5,000. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes and their belongings. More disaster looms if emergency shelter, medical aid and food and water provision does not arrive quickly and in greater quantity.
By the time cabinet minister Bill Bennett stepped into the legislature press theatre Tuesday to announce the pending doom of the Pacific Carbon Trust, the agency was pretty much orphaned in terms of support. School districts had denounced it. The auditor general had exposed it. Media coverage - for instance Gordon Hoekstra's stories in The Vancouver Sun 19 months ago - had thoroughly discredited it. Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation was on the cost-cutter equivalent of a mission from God to get rid of it.
A pair of climate scientists are calling for what some may view as a shocking solution to the global warming crisis: a rethinking of the economic order in the United States and other industrialized nations. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the influential Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in England say many of the solutions proposed by world leaders to prevent "runaway global warming" will not be enough to address the scale of the crisis.
The trend in annual damages from global disasters is rising and almost broke $200 billion in 2012, according to World Bank figures released Monday. And three-fourths of the losses are due to extreme weather. The report, which makes the case for greater global investment in climate resiliency and disaster risk management, found that worldwide losses from such events have been steadily rising since at least 1980.
It’s hard to imagine anyone who has done more to further our understanding of the impacts of climate change than Dr. James Hansen. After 46 years working a scientist and climatogolist for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen wasn’t content to simply catalog the dangers facing humanity and our planet — he has been ringing the alarm bell. “On a blistering June day in 1988 he was called before a Congressional committee and testified that human-induced global warming had begun,” the New York Times wrote in a recent story about Hansen.
Looks like Fox News and Congress are becoming ever more intellectually isolated from the American people, perched together on a sinking island of climate denialism. Stanford University Professor Jon Krosnick led analysis of more than a decade’s worth of poll results for 46 states.
WARSAW, Poland — UN climate talks head into a tense final week Monday after the diplomatic effort to reduce global warming gases was hit by a series of setbacks, including Japan’s decision to ditch its voluntary emissions target. The two-decade-old negotiations have so far failed to achieve their goal of slashing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that scientists say are warming the planet. They don’t seem to be getting any closer after a tumultuous first week at this year’s session in Warsaw.
