Temperature records continue to fall across the country. In Washington D.C., which experienced it’s warmest June on record, Senators are picking up the debate on the climate change bill. While temperatures warm, glaciers melt, and sea level rises, there is little hope of that the bill will receive the necessary votes to prevent it from being stalled.
Here’s a novel approach to reducing man’s energy footprint and thereby limiting climate warming. Let’s hope, however, that Mumbai isn’t air conditioned anytime soon.
This death notice could give people an idea of what climatologists actually do, thereby taking some of the mystery out of what is to many an arcane, unknown world.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times asks why the climate bill died. His answer: few legitimate doubts about the science remain, and the scientists and the economics weren’t to blame. Rather, greed and cowardice killed action on the climate change legislation. The whole world, he warns, will pay the price.
Writing in the New York Times, Lee Wasserman, the Rockefeller Family Fund head, ascribes failure of the cimate bill to four threads: focussing on green jobs rather than the climate; devising a bill for polluters, not the American people; making it too complicated; and failing to win people’s support for it.
Here are the last of the myths in the series from Fortune. We hope that you have enjoyed following the series and have learned more about climate change.
#20 – Winter mornings
#21 – Electric cars
#22 – Distance ratings
#23 – AC on?
#24 – Hybrids
Was the heat wave experienced by the east coast earlier this month the result of climate change? It’s impossible to say since climate change isn’t defined by single events, but rather long term (thirty years or more) averages and frequencies. What we can say is that conditions experienced during the heat wave may be a taste of summers to come if the frequency of days with high temperatures around 100 °F increases, as is expected to happen with increasing average global temperatures.
There is general agreement among scientists that man has a role in global warming. This impact began, if the research reported here is correct, not with the industrial revolution or even the advent of slash and burn agriculture, but rather seven millennia ago with the killing of the mammoths. Fewer mammoths would have meant more deciduous trees, whose darker leaves would have led to more sunlight being absorbed, and a slightly warmer climate.
Is this a manifestation of global warming or just a “normal” drought? Does it matter? Either way it’s a human disaster.
Here is the next group in the series from Fortune.
#16 and #18 – Offsetting carbon dioxide, Carbon offsets
#17 – Global warming?
#19 – Snowfall
#20 – Winter morning warm-ups