IPCC flooded by criticism

"Just over two years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the United Nations panel on climate change is undergoing a period of soul-searching." ...
Published online 2 February 2010 Nature 463, 596-597 (2010) doi:10.1038/463596a
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100202/full/463596a.html

Climate Change & Food Monitoring?

From the journal Nature about a study done on maple syrup:

"Human-related carbon emissions may skew isotope analysis for food-quality control."

"We've known that atmospheric carbon isotope values were changing, but nobody was applying this to food science," says geochemist John Valley at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Clearly, food-monitoring studies need to start taking atmospheric isotope data into account."
Published online 5 February 2010 Nature doi:10.1038/news.2010.56
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100205/full/news.2010.56.html 

Greensburg, Kansas: Rebuilding a City

City's Municipal Government:
http://www.greensburgks.org/ 

City's Recovery Plan page:
http://www.greensburgks.org/recovery-planning

Greenburg Greentown:
"Greensburg GreenTown is a charitable, nonprofit organization working in Greensburg, Kansas to rebuild the town following the devastating tornado in May of 2007. The town has made a remarkable comeback, reinventing itself as a model for sustainable building and green living now recognized around the world. GreenTown’s mission is to make green building and living easily understood, appealing and accessible to all."
http://www.greensburggreentown.org/

Greensburg: A Story of a Community Rebuilding
The Discovery Channel serieshttp://planetgreen.discovery.com/tv/greensburg/

Sustainable Communities Public Policy Forum & Roundtables

A Wisconsin Idea Forum

March 25-26, 2010
University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley
Communication Arts Center
1478 Midway Road, Menasha

http://sustainablecommunitiesforum.wisconsin.edu/

"The Sustainable Communities Public Policy Forum is the third in a series of forums designed to focus University of Wisconsin System resources on Wisconsin's most vexing social, environmental, and economic challenges. These forums inform the debate around selected current issues confronting Wisconsin residents by bringing objective, research-based information to the dialogue. Forums utilize experts to cover issues impacting the state of Wisconsin. The targeted audience includes state lawmakers, community leaders, business people, faculty, staff, and students."

Be there, or be square!
Questions about the forum? Contact sustainablecommunities@uwex.uwc.edu 


Six regional Sustainable Communities Roundtables

http://sustainablecommunitiesforum.wisconsin.edu/roundtables/

"The two- to three-hour sessions will open with an overview of sustainability efforts in the state and conclude with a facilitated process to identify sustainability policy issues, barriers, strengths, and possibilities...Roundtables are open to local community development professionals, local government officials, sustainability board members, organizations and grassroots groups, consultants, businesses, community leaders, and faculty and students who have been engaged in local sustainability efforts."

The Northeast Wisconsin one is:
De Pere Roundtable

Date: March 2, 1-3:30 p.m.
Location: Kress Family Library, 333 N. Broadway, De Pere
Contacts: Judith A. Knudsen, judith.knudsen@ces.uwex.edu , 920-391-4651
Catherine Neiswender, catherine.neiswender@ces.uwex.edu , 920-232-1972

The Central Wisconsin one is:
Central Wisconsin Roundtable

Date: Feb. 26, 9 a.m.-noon
Location: Travel Guard, 3300 Business Park Drive, Stevens Point
Contact: Center for Land Use Education, 715-346-3783

Report identifies opportunities to retrain Wisconsin workers for green careers

From COWS and the Apollo Alliance.
"The report, Mapping Green Career Pathways: Job Training Opportunities and Infrastructure in Wisconsin, recommends strengthening Wisconsin’s existing training infrastructure to build workers’ skills for green-collar jobs. Many of these jobs will be in construction and manufacturing, sectors currently in decline but projected to account for the majority of new jobs in clean energy industries. The new study also charts existing training programs - apprenticeship, technical college and community-based pathways - that represent key elements of a greener workforce development system."

http://www.cows.org/pdf/rp-mappingreportWI.pdf

Interactive Climate Change Simulation Tools (on-line)

The Sustainability Institute has online climate simulation tools.
http://www.sustainer.org/?page_id=67

About the Institute:
"A non-profit organization founded in 1996 by the late Donella (Dana) Meadows, the Sustainability Institute applies systems thinking, system dynamics modeling, and organizational learning to economic, environmental and social challenges."
About the climate tools:
"Our primary simulation — the one underneath most of our current work — is the Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator (C-ROADS). The online, 3-region version of C-ROADS is called C-Learn and is available here online. And we also have a dynamic, Climate Momentum Simulation, based on multiple runs of our C-ROADS model. We have two much simpler animated simulations completed and available online — the Climate Bathtub Animation and MIT’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Simulator."

A decent, brief explanation of "cap & Trade"

From the U.S. Energy Information Administration, What is a cap-and-trade program and how does it work? http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energy_in_brief/cap_trade_program.cfm
Thanks for the tip Patrick Walsh.

Wisconsin Resource for Faith Sector

WICEC

Wisconsin Interfaith Climate & Energy Campaign (WICEC)
http://www.wicec.org/

Climate Change Resource for Wisconsin K-7 Through Adult Learners

New to me at least...
Climate Change: A Wisconsin Activity Guide
http://www.dnr.wi.gov/org/caer/ce/eek/teacher/Climateguide/PDF/WisCCGuideALL.pdf

U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review 2010

"Climate change and energy are two key issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment. Although they produce distinct types of challenges, climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked. The actions that the Department takes now can prepare us to respond effectively to these challenges in the near term and in the future." p 107
"Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration." p 108

From Crafting A Strategic Approach to Climate and Energy section of the U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review 2010, 02/2010.
http://www.defense.gov/QDR/QDR%20as%20of%2029JAN10%201600.pdf


Report

New York & Green Building Codes

"The Green Codes Task Force is comprised of over 200 leading local and national industry experts that have worked tirelessly to evaluate New York City's building, zoning, health, consumer affairs, environmental protection, and other codes in order to identify impediments to green building, and propose valuable improvements that would promote more sustainable practices."
The reports are here:
http://www.urbangreencouncil.org/greencodes/

Natural Capital Database Project

"The Natural Capital Project is compiling a database of conservation project case studies from around the world that specifically incorporate the goal of protecting life-support systems. Initially, the database will only contain case studies from WWF and TNC, but eventually it will also include information from projects completed or in progress by other NGOs, governments, and businesses."

http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/database.html

Are you an ArcGIS user? Interested in ecosystem services?

If you are, you might be interested in this tool:
"InVEST, a.k.a. Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs, is a suite of models and software tools under development by the Natural Capital Project. It currently runs in ArcGIS 9.2 service pack 2, ArcGIS 9.2 SP 6 and ArcGIS 9.3 SP 1. InVEST aims to provide a consistent methodology for measuring and comparing the value of multiple ecosystem services across real landscapes. For more information."
http://invest.ecoinformatics.org/
Background info: http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/toolbox.html

Trouble Ahead for AR5?

AR5 (IPCC Assessment Report #5) is due out in the beginning of 2013. The level of research and quantity of new data since AR4 was prepared is expanding significantly. It will be into new areas and finer resolutions. Consequently, some areas will actually have higher "uncertainities". Given the general lack of scientific literacy, it could be rough sledding in the public understanding department.
http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1002/full/climate.2010.06.html

Copenhagen Postmortem

Some bits from a postmortem of the Copenhagen Conference, at The Road From Copenhagen http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1002/full/climate.2010.09.html

"So far, very few people are willing to pay substantial amounts of money to avoid uncertain and distant global warming, and government policy reflects that reality. Governments, to be sure, have made this even worse through their inability to reach even basic effective agreements — as was evident in Copenhagen. But the underlying cause is a basic lack of public interest in addressing the problem."
David G. Victor, Stanford University, California

"Copenhagen was a landmark event for at least two reasons. First, the global policymaking elite assembled there confirmed that the scientific evidence on global warming is the frame of reference for all climate-protection strategies. Second, after almost 20 years of lofty announcements and sustainability kitsch, the meeting made brutally clear how little the respective sovereign states are willing to contribute to the well-being of humankind."
John Schellnhuber, climate advisor to the German government and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, Germany

"It is time to focus much more directly on the decarbonization of the global economy. This means improving energy efficiency and expanding low-carbon energy supply. These actions will result not from treaties but from processes of innovation implemented over many, many decades in a frustrating and incremental process."
Roger Pielke Jr, University of Colorado, Boulder

defossilization

Ran into a neat phrase for the move away from fossil fuels. David King, former chief science advisor to UK used it in a recent interview in  Nature,      defossilizing the economy.

The Real Holes in Climate Science

"Like any other field, research on climate change has some fundamental gaps, although not the ones typically claimed by sceptics. Quirin Schiermeier takes a hard look at some of the biggest problem areas."

The Journal Nature has a brief, but good review of where the research focuses are in climate science as of this date. Do not know if it is open to the public.
Published online 20 January 2010, Nature 463, 284-287 (2010)
Subcriber link: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html
Print version: Nature 463, 284-287 (2010)

China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy -NYT 01/30/2010

" China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year. China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants. These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China." read more at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/energy-environment/31renew.html?ref=science

Implications of incorporating air-quality co-benefits into climate change policymaking

Implications of incorporating air-quality co-benefits into climate change policymaking
G F Nemet1,2, T Holloway1 and P Meier3
1 Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA
2 La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA
3 Energy Institute, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Published 22 January 2010
Online at stacks.  
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1748-9326/5/1/014007/
Abstract:
"We present an analysis of the barriers and opportunities for incorporating air quality co-benefits into climate policy assessments. It is well known that many strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions also decrease emissions of health-damaging air pollutants and precursor species, including particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide. In a survey of previous studies we found a range of estimates for the air quality co-benefits of climate change mitigation of $2-196/tCO2 with a mean of $49/tCO2, and the highest co-benefits found in developing countries. These values, although of a similar order of magnitude to abatement cost estimates, are only rarely included in integrated assessments of climate policy. Full inclusion of these co-benefits would have pervasive implications for climate policy in areas including: optimal policy stringency, overall costs, distributional effects, robustness to discount rates, incentives for international cooperation, and the value of adaptation, forests, and climate engineering relative to mitigation. Under-valuation results in part from uncertainty in climatic damages, valuation inconsistency, and institutional barriers. Because policy debates are framed in terms of cost minimization, policy makers are unlikely to fully value air quality co-benefits unless they can be compared on an equivalent basis with the benefits of avoided climatic damages. While air quality co-benefits have been prominently portrayed as a hedge against uncertainty in the benefits of climate change abatement, this assessment finds that full inclusion of co-benefits depends on—rather than substitutes for—better valuation of climate damages."

Davos Diary 2010, New York Times

01/27-31/2010
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/category/davos-2010/

Tips for Tough Times

Courtesy of Oregon State University Extension, tips for tough times.
"In tough times, managing individual household expenses can be a great concern. For some people, wading through pages of long words to find help can be overwhelming. In response, OSU Extension has developed several 1-page pdf files, each with 10 tips on simple ways to cut back and save money."

Thanks Viviane!
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/tough_times/ten-tips

And, here is a handy set of factsheets ( in PDF format) from University of Wisconsin Extension Managing Between Jobs  http://www.uwex.edu/ces/cty/waupaca/flp/ManagingBetweenJobs.html

'Fear The Boom And Bust'

"A rap video made by George Mason University economist and Planet Money friend, Russ Roberts, and Spike TV executive producer .....In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, ... sing about why there's a "boom and bust" cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it. ...Ke$ha says, "it's legit, it's really good rapping."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/01/watch_fear_the_boom_and_bust.html

AB-649 (Wisconsin, climate, energy)

Wisconsin Legislative Council Description:
http://www.wispolitics.com/1006/091210lege_council_desription.pdf
Full text of bill:
http://www.legis.state.wi.us/2009/data/AB-649.pdf

High Drama

An interesting post re the IPCC process.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/the-ipcc-is-not-infallible-shock/#more-2773

London Calling

"Climate change warming has melted so much Arctic ice that a telecommunication group is moving forward with a project that was unthinkable just a few years ago -- laying underwater fiber-optic cable between Tokyo and London by way of the Northwest Passage.

The proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Asia, said Walt Ebell, CEO of Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co. The route is the shortest underwater path between Tokyo and London."
Read more... http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_14248762

Massachusetts?

The Republican win in Massachusetts is being examined by many. Journalists in the EU are writing that it means the end of Cap & Trade legislation in the U.S. Congress for the time being. Also, that will slow international movement to a post-Kyoto accord.
But U.S. legislative action was already unlikely;
"THE END OF CAP-AND-TRADE
From a purely numerical perspective, the Massachusetts election makes only a marginal difference. With the real division running through the centre of the Democratic Party, rather than between the parties, cap-and-trade was never going to pass on a 60-40 party-line vote. It was always going to need at least some Republican votes. So the loss of one Democrat makes only a small difference. "
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2010/01/20/massachusetts-election-kills-cap-and-trade/

My take;

1. Absent major U.S. government incentives ala what is happening in Korea, Japan, and China (unlikely); the capital flowing into green tech/products manufacturing will continue to go to the Eastern Rim.
When China thinks it will have unstoppable market dominance, it will join the effort for international CO2 regulation, since an international framework would then boost its "green" exports, and its current massive investments in manufacturing green energy tech will be (due to economy of scale) well into domestic deployment.

2. If you are doing education re climate change in the U.S., concentrate mostly on adaptation.

And while I am at it....Rising Tigers?

Climatebiz article about China's mega-investing in green tech: Green China: Friend or Foe? http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/01/12/green-china-friend-or-foe

Here is the report mentioned in the article; Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant
http://www.itif.org/files/2009-rising-tigers.pdf

10 Climate Trends That Will Shape Business in 2010

From the folks at Climatebiz, 10 Climate Trends That Will Shape Business in 2010
http://www.climatebiz.com/blog/2010/01/14/10-climate-trends-will-shape-business-2010?page=0%2C1

Climate Change Adaptation for Land Managers

Check this out; from the site in my last post.
An online course:
http://www.fs.fed.us/ccrc/hjar/

U.S. Forest Service Climate Change site

Here is a very packed resource site re temperate U.S. area forests and climate change:
http://www.fs.fed.us/ccrc/

Something for Eastern U.S. Birders & Foresters

USDA has a nifty little resource, a Climate Change Bird Atlas, and a tree atlas for the Eastern United States.
http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/atlas/

Sustainable Communities Network

Interesting and useful site, Sustainable Communities Network.
http://www.sustainable.org/
A nice personal CC mitigation handout: http://www.sustainable.org/information/ThinkSmart_GlobalWarming_A.pdf

The Psychology of Climate Change Communication

The Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, Columbia University has published The Psychology of Climate Change Communication http://cred.columbia.edu/guide/  . It is a "A Guide for Scientists, Journalists, Educators, Political Aides, and the Interested Public."
Thanks to Diana M. C. Rashash of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service for pointing this one out.

An interesting example of science and foresight

The American Scientist has "reprinted" a classic,
Carbon Dioxide and the Climate by Gilbert N. Plass

A 1956 American Scientist article explores climate change; two contemporary commentaries illuminate its relevance to the present. Gilbert N. Plass, James Rodger Fleming, Gavin Schmidt.
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2010/1/carbon-dioxide-and-the-climate/1

Presentations from 2009 Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council Conference

Presentations from 2009 Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council Conference are posted at:
http://www.bus.wisc.edu/sustainability/presentations/

The price of water?

Perhaps more immediate than climate change adaptation is/will be (depending where you live) adaptation to declining fresh water. Fresh water related business is a definite growth area.
Do you want to keep track of the numbers?
Palisades Indexes http://www.palisadesindexes.com/
Global Water Intelligence (mostly a subscription site): http://www.globalwaterintel.com/
S&P Global Water Index fact sheet http://www2.standardandpoors.com/spf/pdf/index/SP_Global_Water_Index_Factsheet.pdf
Another private site: http://www.water-stocks.com/
A water biz blog: http://waterintel.blogspot.com/
Water the Ultimate Commodity http://www.investopedia.com/articles/06/Water.asp?viewed=1

Documentary on water privatization (an anti-view)
http://www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com/

Green Giant?

Green Giant: Beijing’s crash program for clean energy. by Evan Osnos, New Yorker 12/21/2009.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/21/091221fa_fact_osnos
12/17/2009 Live Chat with author, transcript:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2009/12/questions-for-osnos.html

Future of Ocean Biogeochemistry in a High-CO2 World

Current issue of the Oceanography, the journal of the Oceanography Society is available online. It is a special issue, on the Future of Ocean Biogeochemistry in a High-CO2 World , December 2009 Volume 22, Number 4.
http://tos.org/oceanography/issues/current.html
All contents are free, downloadable PDF format.
Thanks to William Sheftall for the heads up on this.

The Guard Rail Cometh?

A review of Copenhagen, as it limps to a close...

 INNNNNNNNNNNN Song!

What a Day That Was
Nature's Way
Don't Fear The Reaper
1999 (acoustic version)

Climate Change Boot Camp?

An interesting idea...
http://www.eianz.org/aboutus/climate-change-boot-camp

Is the U.S. losing a race it did not know it was in?

"Companies are coming to do clean tech for the same reason they came 25 years ago to make shoes, T-shirts. It's simply cheaper to make things in China.
Charlie McElwee, an energy and environment lawyer in Shanghai."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121512377

"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

-Sun Tzu, the Art of War

American Psychological Association Report

A Report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change
http://www.apa.org/science/about/publications/climate-change.pdf

Climate Change & The Psyche

Australian National Radio show All in the Mind, 11/29/2009
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2009/2746165.htm

Related book:
http://www.amazon.com/Disagree-About-Climate-Change-Understanding/dp/0521727324/ref=rsl_mainw_dpl?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER

The Devaluation Factor

Devaluation: Hoisting oneself on with one's own evolutionary petard

Also known as "hyperbolic discounting" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting )

Climate Change, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Devaluing the Future
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2243

Global Warming & Hyperbolic Discounting
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zh730nc

Climateworks

Climateworks is an alliance of non-profits working cost effective & economy enhancing ways to reduce CO2 emissions.
http://www.climateworks.org/

Energy & Population

Interesting article about energy and population projections in 21st century.
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP/WEAP.html

After the Ice

Pictures from the Arctic
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/the-future-of-the-arctic

Today's Guardian Editorial

Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation


Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

COP15- Copenhagen 12/7-18/2009

Official Site: http://en.cop15.dk/

Webcasts of proceedings: http://www2.cop15.meta-fusion.com/kongresse/cop15/templ/ovw.php?id_kongressmain=1&theme=cop15

Edward Burtynsky does it Again...

landscape of oil by Edward Burtynsky
http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_photographs_the_landscape_of_oil.html

As long as you are at TED

Rachel Pike: The science behind a climate headline
http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_pike_the_science_behind_a_climate_headline.html

Transition Plan B?

An interesting TED presentation on the magic porridge pot running dry, so to speak...
http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_hopkins_transition_to_a_world_without_oil.html
Transition Culture website
http://transitionculture.org /
The Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns

Six Easy Pieces

From the folks @ realclimate

"The CO2 problem in 6 easy steps

@ 6 August 2007


We often get requests to provide an easy-to-understand explanation for why increasing CO2 is a significant problem without relying on climate models and we are generally happy to oblige. The explanation has a number of separate steps which tend to sometimes get confused and so we will try to break it down carefully."
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/the-co2-problem-in-6-easy-steps/

CDP 2010 Questionaires Available

The main one:
https://www.cdproject.net/CDP%20Questionaire%20Documents/CDP_Investor_2010.pdf

Britain's Low Carbon & Industry Strategy

Britain's plan re low carbon intensity & industry:
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file50373.pdf

You might want to see the companion piece: New Industry, New Jobs"
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file51023.pdf

Tech

Posted here, since this area (sometimes called "closed ecology" or closed ecology life support systems) continues to be an idea cookbook for ecological design, industrial ecology, etc.

NASA Space Settlement Design Contest
http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/Contest/

2009 winner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcC0ixQi4B8

google search string for "closed ecology"
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLG_enUS316US316&q=%22closed+ecology%22

New Links-data (raw and processed)

Please note new data  links on the right side of this page.
Global Change Master Directory - Goddard Space Flight Center
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/
Realclimate raw & processed data portal
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Climate Data Sources

The folks at Realclimate have posted a page full of links to actual climate data, raw and processed. They say they will try to keep it updated.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Navy Arctic Roadmap

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2009/11/us-navy-arctic-roadmap-nov-2009.pdf

Climate Science Update from Copenhagen

"The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Climate Science Report

It is more than three years since the drafting of text was completed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). In the meantime, many hundreds of papers have been published on a suite of topics related to human-induced climate change.
The purpose of this report is to synthesize the most policy-relevant climate science published since the close-off of material for the last IPCC report."

http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_HIGH.pdf

Making things

Sustainable Minds
Very interesting product design/prototyping software:
http://www.sustainableminds.com/

One of their partners is another company to watch in the greening of business: Autodesk
http://usa.autodesk.com/company/sustainable-design