Climate Change & Online Discussion

In the web world, the public conversation about climate change on mainstream discussion and media websites is quite distorted. The comments sections are filled with poorly informed opinions (on all sides of the debate), personal attacks and disinformation.  (It’s widely documented that the fossil fuel industries and other motivated groups are pouring significant amounts of [...]

Joe Romm discusses a plausible worst case scenario for climate change. The UK’s Hadley Centre model was used to look at the effects of continued growth in fossil fuel use, including carbon feedbacks – and the results aren’t pretty. In 10% of the model runs, very high temperatures are seen as soon as 2060, and [...]

Visualizing Carbon Stores

I’ve been busy reading more on transportation and climate change over the last few months. Before I post any more “big” articles, I wanted to take a moment to praise one pair of figures from David MacKay’s great book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. It’s available free online, but I thoroughly recommend buying the [...]

Emissions and the Tar Sands

I’ve been a little baffled by the tar sands’ villainization in the climate literature for some time. While a few photographs can clearly show that the tar sands have dire impacts on the local environment (as a recent National Geographic special showed), I haven’t really understood why the tar sands have been singled out for [...]

5 degrees warmer by 2100 and rising, unless we take action

“In a worst-case scenario, where no action is taken to check the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures would most likely rise by more than 5°C by the end of the century.” —Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change predictions at the UK’s Hadley Centre, Dec. 2008 “Without a change in policy, the world is [...]

Joe Romm on Climate

I’ve finally found the climate change book that I can recommend widely: Hell and High Water by Joseph Romm, 2006. I urge you to read it, as soon as you can. Why do I recommend this particular book? Clear and accessible. A wide audience can appreciate this book: the language is simple, the opening sections [...]

Backcasting: From Climate to Transportation

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about Monbiot’s book on climate change. In that post, I stated that I was interested in long-term emissions targets because they will probably constrain transportation planning over the course of my career. Now that I’m looking at the issue more closely, I’ve found some relevant research: a [...]

Monbiot & Climate Mitigation

I’ve recently finished reading George Monbiot’s Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. It’s an interesting piece from a widely-syndicated journalist, and it left me both alarmed and unsatisfied. I’ve held back on writing about it until I had a chance to read up a bit more on the underlying science and discuss the [...]

Canada in last place

I was startled to see the figure on the right in a recent Economist article. Canada is not only going in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s actually doing worse than the rest of the G8, including the United States. One interesting aspect of Kyoto is that it isn’t [...]