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The dirty little secret to tackling climate change

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Climate Change Updates April 19, 2013

 

  • World Bank President: Climate Change Is Urgent ‘Today’ Problem http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/04/world-bank-president-climate-change-is-urgent-today-problem.html “If we have any hope of keeping climate change below two degrees celsius, the peak year of carbon emission has to be 2016,” said Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank. “So the challenge is right in front of us.” Thursday on the NewsHour, Kim speaks with Jeffrey Brown about a new initiative to address extreme poverty around the world. In an extended conversation, Kim also addressed the urgency of climate change and how World Bank is working to combat its effects. He says they must increase financial resources for sustainable energy, use innovative agriculture and partner with major cities to reduce their carbon footprint. But getting different international powers to agree on things like the price of carbon has been one of the challenges in the effort to curb climate change. Kim said once that is decided, the market forces will kick in and regulate emission.

  • Climate Change Fundamental Threat To Economic Devt– World Bank http://leadership.ng/nga/articles/52399/2013/04/19/climate_change_fundamental_threat_economic_devt_world_bank.html                                                                                        Climate change is not just an environmental challenge but a fundamental threat to economic development. Unless the world takes bold action now, a disastrously warming planet threatens to put prosperity out of reach of millions and roll back decades of development. These were the words of the president of the World Bank, Mr. Jim Yong Kim, while addressing delegates yesterday at the ongoing Spring Meetings of the IMF/World Bank taking place at the Secretariat of the global bank in Washington, DC. In his speech yesterday, Mr Jim Yong Kim, who sees climate change as a major threat to economic development said: “As we move ahead, we also must address climate change with a plan that matches the scope of the problem. “At the World Bank Group, we are stepping up our mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk management work. Some 130 countries have asked the World Bank for assistance in climate-related work.  “Also, as we move toward these poverty goals, we also must be far more effective in fragile and conflict affected states.

  • South Florida assessing impact of climate change on roads, bridges, railroads, airports                                                                                             http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/palm-beach/fl-climate-change-transportation-20130418,0,1015294.story                                                                                                            In August, Tropical Storm Isaac flooded neighborhood roads in central and western Palm Beach County, dumping a historic 15 inches of rain in a few hours. In November, Hurricane Sandy washed out a portion of State Road A1A in Fort Lauderdale. South Florida transportation planners think these examples are the beginning of the impact that rising sea levels, strong storm surges and flooding are going to have on the region’s transportation infrastructure. “It’s going to happen more often,” said Roger Del Rio, a project coordinator with the Broward Metropolitan Planning Organization.

  • Getting Chummy on Climate Change http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/04/climate-change.html Lost amid the high power diplomacy over North Korea’s nuclear threats, but perhaps provoked by the more immediate risks to Chinese citizens breathing dangerously foul air, the United States and China have agreed to step up their cooperation on climate change. Emerging from Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to Beijing last weekend, but mostly unreported, the world’s two biggest energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters and both non-ratifiers of the Kyoto protocol decided to add climate change to their Strategic and Economic Dialogue. That’s the highest level exchange between U.S. and Chinese officials short of presidential summits. Placing such a priority on climate change “would have been unimaginable two years ago,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, who handled China issues in the Clinton White House and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. A joint communique issued April 13 during Kerry’s visit to Beijing said, “Both sides recognize that, given the latest scientific understanding of accelerating climate change and the urgent need to intensify global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, forceful, nationally appropriate action by the United States and China — including large scale cooperative action — is more critical than ever.”

  • With Climate Change Science Unsettled, a Carbon Tax is Even More Useless http://blog.heritage.org/2013/04/18/with-climate-change-science-unsettled-a-carbon-tax-is-even-more-useless/                                                                                                                 Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

  • This Earth Day, share the many faces of climate change http://www.treehugger.com/culture/many-faces-climate-change.html It is almost time for Earth Day, Monday, April 22, and this year’s theme is The Face of Climate Change. To help put a human face on the challenge of climate change, the Earth Day Network is collecting images of people, animals and places affected by climate change, as well as images of people working to find solutions.

 

  • Notre Dame to be new home of climate change index http://www.southbendtribune.com/news/sbt-notre-dame-to-be-new-home-of-climate-change-index-20130418,0,4605244.story                                                                                                          SOUTH BEND — The University of Notre Dame will become the new home base of the Global Adaptation Index, a tool showing which countries are best prepared to deal with droughts, storms and other natural disasters that may be caused by climate change. Known as GAIN, the index ranks countries annually based on how vulnerable they are to climate change and how prepared they are to adapt. For details, visit: index.gain.org. The move was scheduled to be announced at a news conference at noon today in Washington, D.C. The founders were looking to take the index to a new level and wanted a university partner, said Jessica Hellmann, a Notre Dame biological sciences professor who specializes in the study of climate and directs the university’s Environmental Change Initiative’s Climate Adaptation Program.

  • S., Japan, G8 Commit to Climate Change Action                      http://ens-newswire.com/2013/04/18/u-s-japan-g8-commit-to-climate-change-action/ WASHINGTON, DC, April 18, 2013 (ENS) – Support for global action to curb climate change is growing stronger within the G8 group of the world’s largest industrial democracies, which includes the United States and Japan. During an April 14 meeting in Tokyo, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida expressed “serious concern about anthropogenic climate change and its worsening impacts.”

 

  • Is climate Change taking a break? http://www.dw.de/is-climate-change-taking-a-break/a-16740391                                                                     The cold start into spring has made people in parts of Europe wonder if the climate is really warming. Global temperatures have not been rising in recent years. Is the earth cooling instead of warming? Looking at the average temperature over five years during the last 15 years, global temperatures might appear to be flattening out. “Over the last decade there has been very little new warming,” says Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. The development is not unexpected, he told DW: “We are confident that human emissions of greenhouse gases have caused a large component of the warming over the last 150 years, but at the same time we do not expect every year to be warmer than the last. There are reasons why temperatures may remain flat for a decade and continue to warm later on.” Hawkins cites periods in the 1960s and 1970s when temperatures were actually cooling. The current flattening out of the temperature curve could be due to natural fluctuation

 

  • First Step’ in Addressing Effects of Climate Change http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130418154417.htm A new report on the potential effects of climate change on NOAA’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary uses existing observations and science-based expectations to identify how climate change could affect habitats, plants and animals within the sanctuary and adjacent coastal areas.  t also outlines new management recommendations for the sanctuary, and sanctuary officials called it the first step toward addressing them. They also said the report issued by the sanctuary, Climate Change and the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary: Interpreting Potential Futures, will provide a foundation of information and identify key issues facing the sanctuary.

  • The dirty little secret to tackling climate change http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/04/18/the-dirty-little-secret-to-tackling-climate-change/?wpmp_switcher=mobile                                                       Forget the carbon price, forget the opposition’s Direct Action climate plan. Australia could probably meet its targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without either, provided we did one thing. But you won’t hear the politicians talk about it. A statistical analysis by Crikey, based on data released this week, indicates that if Australia’s high population growth rate were reined in, the country would already be meeting its targets to cut pollution. In fact, we’d probably be under those targets. The federal government’s data on greenhouse gas emissions for the December quarter points to the major impact the population boom has had on Australia’s emissions. Here’s the Crikey number-crunching that shows why it might be time to talk about the environmental impact of Australia’s growing population. (This is a crude statistical analysis, but you won’t find the government — both major parties support and plan for significant population growth — doing it. So we had a go.) Australia’s per capita emissions actually dropped between 1989 and 2012. But the population increased by 35% during that period, and overall national emissions soared by 32%. That took national greenhouse gas emissions from 418 megatonnes a year in 1990 to 552 megatonnes in 2012 (a megatonne is 1 million tonnes). Australia has a high rate of population growth, caused in part by a relatively high rate of immigration. What would the country’s emissions be if that was not the case? The ABS calculates that in the decade to 2007, the population grew by 3% pa on average, with “just under half from net overseas migration” (the rest comes from births). The proportion of population growth coming from migration increased to more than half at the end of that period; last year the federal government said migration “has in recent years had the largest impact on overall population change”. In 2009, migration provided 65% of population growth. Based on those numbers, if Australia had net zero migration from 1989 to 2012, we can estimate the population would have increased from 16.9 million (1989) to roughly 20.4 million (2012).

  • PM Singh: India To Double Renewable Energy Capacity By 2017 http://www.asianscientist.com/topnews/pm-singh-india-set-double-renewable-energy-capacity-2017/    it was the first time that the Ministerial meeting has been convened in India. The Prime Minister emphasized the urgency to develop clean energy because of the scarcity of fossil fuel based energy and corresponding greenhouse gas emissions. Developing countries account for 82 percent of the world’s population and they use 55 percent of the available global supply of energy, he said. But they could not follow industrialized countries in meeting their energy requirements through fossil fuel based energy, as the impact on the global climate would be simply unsustainable, he said. He asked industrialized countries – on any principle of equity – to bear a large share of the burden, as he said that they are historically responsible for the bulk of the accumulated greenhouse gas emissions and also the most technically advanced.

  • Climate change: lessons in cross-sector collaboration http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development-professionals-network/2013/apr/17/climate-change-collaboration-connect4climate                                                                                                                    Climate change is a pressing issue. Everyone knows that, certainly the development community and they don’t need to be reminded of it. What they do need reminding of is that no one group can possibly solve this problem. Strategic collaborations around climate change issues and action are essential. As World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said recently: “To deliver bold solutions on climate change, we need to listen to and engage broader and more diverse audiences.” This is what theConnect4Climate (C4C) team has set out to do since the programme began in 2011.

 

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1 thought on “The dirty little secret to tackling climate change”

  1. There is no evidence of it bedesis the computer models used by political activists. They have to ignore the historical climate record and the fact that it simply hasn’t warmed in the way they claimed it would. The warming that ended about 15 years ago was perfectly consistent with natural warming. Anything said to the contrary is anti-scientific propaganda and nothing but intentional misinformation. The data has been manipulated and distorted but even with that, the amount of actual warming is less than a degree in century. We are cooler than the Earth was a thousand years ago and much cooler than during the Holocene optimum about 5 thousand years ago. The warm times are times of prosperity. Alarmists have no basis for their propaganda and in spite of their claims of cause and effect, there is no significant and certainly not harmful effect. With no actual significant warming, their agenda is meaningless speculation.I really feel sorry for you kids who don’t understand how the propaganda your being taught in the public school system these days are going to lead to the extinction of your freedoms in the future. What you need to be doing is exploring the natural cycles of the earths climate. You’d be surprised to know that in the 70 s the same politicians were trying to convince the world that we were heading for another ice age. If they ever convince you, the younger generation, that global warming is your fault then you’ll never question the constitutionality of them taxing you for something nature does naturally. The same applies to social reform. Don’t let them convince you that it is your obligation to provide the same standard of living to a person who won’t work that you’ve labored feverishly to achieve.

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