Political Climate Articles
Food waste turns stomachs in environmental circles
The amount of food thrown away and buried in landfills around Europe and the United States is contributing to the global food crisis and adding a new dimension to the climate change debate.
Christmas has become a traditional time for over indulgence in Western countries. The holiday season seems to provide everyone with an excuse to eat and drink to excess. Supermarkets burst with sweet treats and a mind-boggling selection of festive fare.
While most of it will be ingested, more than a third of food in Europe and the United States will grow moldy fur in the back of the fridge, pass its use-by date and land in garbage.
Huge food waste problem developing in Europe
In the United Kingdom, one of Europe's worst food waste offenders, around 6.7 million tons of purchased and edible food, worth 11.2 billion euros, $16.6 billion, are annually discarded. Around 4.1 million tons of this wasted food comes directly from food manufacturers.
"Only 30 to 40 percent of produced in Europe ends up at your table," Henrik Harjula, the principal administrator at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, told Deutsche Welle. "It is already disappearing when it is transported, when it is rotting and when it doesn't meet European standards. On top of this, in many countries in Europe, one third of the food that consumers buy is thrown away and 50 percent of that is thrown away without even being opened."
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'Our children will pay for climate change'
Paris - The first decade of the 21st century dawned with a global strategy to fight climate change, but ended in chaos and the United Nations system in tatters while greenhouse gases spewed with few constraints.
"Future generations will rue the years of inaction," Steve Sawyer, a veteran observer who heads the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), a Brussels green industry association, says grimly.
"Some generations will rue it very much - those that survive."
In 2000, the world placed its faith in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the creation of the famous Rio summit.
But the following year, the vehicle started to shake and its wheels began to rattle when US President George Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol, the sole treaty to set down targets for curbing carbon gases.
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C.I.A. Is Sharing Data With Climate Scientists
The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets - including spy satellites and other classified sensors - to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.
The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.
The trove of images is "really useful," said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.
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Patrick Michaels and Cato keep repeating an egregious falsehood about Michael Mann and the stolen emails
Patrick J. MichaelsOne of the leading anti-science disinformers, Patrick J. Michaels, can't seem to stop spreading the most blatant disinformation. And the Cato Institute, where's he's Senior Fellow, actually seems to encourage this falsification, since they let "research fellow" Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar also repeat the easily fact-checked howler.
Cato needs to issue an apology and multiple retractions.
Cato has published on its website a piece titled, "Climate Scientists Subverted Peer Review." While it rehashes many debunked falsehoods, one in particular is a blatant lie:
In one of the e-mails, Penn State's Michael Mann, long a power player in the production of these reports, said this about some scientific articles he did not like: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
This is pretty serious stuff, because it, and many similar e-mails, paint a picture of IPCC boffins committing science's capital crime: Trying to game the peer-reviewed literature, which is akin to editing what goes in the Bible.
In this case, Mann is actually speculating about keeping contrary information out of the IPCC reports by blacklisting certain professional journals.
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Brazil's Lula turns Copenhagen pledge to cut CO2 emissions into law
Plus a review of the best analyses on the UN climate conference
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a law Tuesday requiring that Brazil cut greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent by 2020, meeting a commitment made at the Copenhagen climate talks.
Brazil announced at the summit a "voluntary commitment" to reduce CO2 emissions by between 36.1 and 38.9 percent in the next 10 years.
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Economists Ponder Human Adaptation to Climate Change
As scientists struggle to predict exactly how global climate change will affect our environment, economists are grappling with another question: How well can humans adapt?
Judging from the history of wheat production in North America, the answer is very well, says Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. In a paper done together with Alan Olmstead of the University of California-Davis, which he presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rhode looks at how wheat production fared between the mid-1800s and the late 1900s, as production moved into parts of North America with harsher climates. The conclusion: Production adapted successfully as farmers introduced new strains that grew well in the new climates.
"We've been there and done that in terms of adjusting wheat production to new climates," he said.
According to the paper, production proved resilient to temperature changes of as much as two to five degrees centigrade - similar to the changes scientists expect to occur over the next 90 years as a result of the proliferation of greenhouse gases.
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Global Warming: Why Branson Wants to Step In
Perhaps it's a case of big business aiming to bail out government, for a change.
The response by government to the threat of global warming has been underwhelming so far, a fact that remains little changed despite the political agreement negotiated at the U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December. But at least one business leader, the British billionaire and founder of the Virgin Group Richard Branson, says he has heard the alarm from scientists and environmentalists about climate change, and believes that the world must not waste time shifting away from oil and other fossil fuels.
"There are some of us who believe that the problem of warming is as bad as the First and Second World Wars combined," Branson told TIME in a recent interview at the climate summit in Copenhagen. "It's that serious, and you know the key is carbon, [but] there's no war room coordinating the attack on carbon."
So, Branson has taken it upon himself - unsurprisingly - to lead the charge against carbon. In 2010, he will officially launch the Carbon War Room, a corporate think tank of sorts, designed to incubate and spread the best ways to cut carbon in corporate sectors ranging from aviation to shipping to construction. It's a global-warming remedy by business for business, and given the paralysis in the international effort to curb climate change, it could be the right idea for the right time. "I think if the government can't deliver, it's up to industries to themselves," says Branson. "We have to make it a win-win for all concerned."
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Energy Policy: DOE's Kidd, Bayer Material Science's Platte discuss efficiency strategies
Today's Event CoverageWhat challenges and opportunities exist for energy efficiency, sustainability and smart grid development in the United States? During today's E&ETV Event Coverage of a National Press Club Newsmaker panel, government and industry leaders discusses strategic approaches to expanding efficiency and new technologies. Panelists include Richard Kidd, program manager in the Federal Energy Management Program at the Department of Energy; Gregory Reed, director and associate professor of the Power and Energy Initiative at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering; Paul Platte, head of the EcoCommercial Building Program, NAFTA, at Bayer MaterialScience LLC; and Paul Cody, vice president and general manager of the Electrical Service and Systems Division at Eaton Corp.
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