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The climate path ahead
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on December 13th, 2015
New York Times: At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 23 years ago, the world’s nations adopted a treaty that pledged, but ultimately failed, to cut the emissions driving global warming. In Paris over the last two weeks, negotiators from around the world met for the 21st time since then in an effort to move from aspiration to action. At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 23 years ago, the world’s nations adopted a treaty that pledged, but ultimately failed, to cut the emissions driving global warming. In Paris...
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In Paris, Managing Humanity’s Relationship with Earth’s Climate Becomes Normal
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on November 30th, 2015
New York Times: The best thing about the Paris climate conference known as COP21, which began today with a round of position-staking and prodding speeches by President Obama and dozens of other world leaders, is that dealing with global warming has become normal, and that’s a good thing. Gone is the “seal the deal” language, aiming for some grand top-down accord, in the months before the failed Copenhagen talks in 2009. I was heartened when President Obama centered his speech on this explanation of what’s being...
A Haunting Film Explores the Perilous Interface Between Tigers and People in the Sundarbans
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on November 17th, 2015
New York Times: Deep in the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove maze where the Ganges and two other great rivers weave their way to the coast in India and Bangladesh, the big-cat conservationist Alan Rabinowitz plays a video clip on his laptop for a cluster of men and women in an impoverished village where tigers — in one of their last big refuges — regularly kill or maim people scouring the shorelines for meager hauls of fish and crabs. They watch, rapt, as residents of another village snare a tiger cornered in a hut...
Prodded by Climate Campaigners and Aided by Cheap Oil, Obama Kills Keystone
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on November 6th, 2015
New York Times: Congratulations are due to Bill McKibben, Jim Hansen and the tens of thousands of other climate campaigners who turned an obscure cross-border pipeline proposal into an effective national political campaign. After years of deliberations, President Obama today said the Keystone XL project was not in the national interest: In 2011, I split with McKibben and others as they were being arrested at the White House. I argued that the pipeline issue was “a distraction from the core issues involving our...
Avoiding a Climate Inferno
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on July 7th, 2015
New York Times: The current issue of Science features a short, but forceful editorial by the journal’s editor in chief, the geophysicist Marcia K. McNutt, calling for humanity, after decades of delay, to get serious about cutting greenhouse-gas emissions linked to global warming. “The time for debate has ended,” she writes. “Action is urgently needed.” McNutt (who was just elected the next president of the National Academy of Sciences) points to studies showing that nations’ emissions-cutting pledges made ahead...
Science Panel Tries to Reinject Reality into Flood Insurance Pricing
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on June 19th, 2015
New York Times: Federal flood insurance in the United States is a mess, with politics continuing to trump data, and taxpayers paying the price. Just track the heroic passage of the Bigger-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act in 2012 and its subsequent gutting as property owners howled. The followup bill in 2014 had a name that perfectly reflects the irrational nature of what transpired: Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act. Will we ever have a Homeowner Taking Responsibility for Building in Flood Zones Act?...
Study Finds Sun Belt Population Growth & Warming Climate Could Quadruple Exposure to Extreme Heat
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on May 18th, 2015
New York Times: A valuable study published this week in Nature Climate Change projects that exposure to extreme heat in the United States is likely to rise enormously by mid century, driven equally by demographic shifts boosting Sun Belt populations and projected changes in heat waves in a warming climate. Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press has written a nice summary of the research, undertaken by a multi-disciplinary team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and the City University...
Riled Herpetologists Press Obama Admin to Protect America’s Salamanders from a Fungal Threat
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on March 21st, 2015
New York Times: The herpetologists I’ve met over the decades tend to be a retiring lot. Explore the website of the Herpetologists’ League to get the idea. They hunker down and probe under rotting logs and leaf litter for salamanders or prowl deserts to study tortoises and lizards. Some study ancient specimens in dusty jars. That was the case with the first herpetologist I got to know, during a junior semester abroad in London in 1977. I approached Garth Underwood (yes), at London’s Natural History Museum about undertaking...
On Path Past 9 Billion, Little Crosstalk U.N. Sessions Population & Global Warming
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on September 20th, 2014
New York Times: The United Nations and the streets of Manhattan are going into global warming saturation mode, from Sunday’s People’s Climate March through the Tuesday climate change summit convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and on through an annual green-energy event called Climate Week. Largely missed in much of this, as always seems the case with climate change discussions, is the role of population growth in contributing both to rising emissions of greenhouse gases and rising vulnerability to climate...
How Conservation & Groundwater Management Can Gird California for Drier Era
Posted by New York Times: Andrew C. Revkin on August 1st, 2014
New York Times: It’s way past time for California to come to grips with the possibility that its extraordinary water woes are the new normal — and essentially the return of the old normal given the state’s climate history, in which drought has been the rule and the verdant 20th century the exception. In the weekly update to the U.S. Drought Monitor site yesterday, nearly 80 percent of the state was in extreme or exceptional drought conditions. It could well be that atmospheric circulation will shift and the drought,...