These seemingly insignificant, poorly understood organisms are essential to the survival of the ecosystems we depend on, yet there is little public interest or grant money to study these organisms. Since our understanding of these vital organisms is minimal, we may fail to detect the serious harm our actions can have on them. Combine this... Continue Reading →

Yesterday I posted about how the oceans are absorbing less CO2 than they were even a decade ago, and implied that this development may increase atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. It has now been confirmed there is good evidence showing that atmospheric levels of CO2 are higher than expected. Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the... Continue Reading →

Prime Minister Harper has officially killed Canada's commitment to Kyoto. At the end of 2005, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions were 33 percent above the Kyoto commitment. It is now widely understood that, because of inaction on greenhouse gases over the last decade, Canada’s emissions cannot be brought to the level required under the Kyoto Protocol... Continue Reading →

There is no magic-bullet fuel crop that can solve our energy woes without harming the environment, says virtually every scientist studying the issue. But most say that algae–single-celled pond scum–comes closer than any other plant because it grows in wastewater, even seawater, requiring little more than sunlight and carbon dioxide to flourish... GreenFuel Technologies, of... Continue Reading →

These costs of inaction are usually not taken into account when new environmental legislation is proposed. Usually opponents of such legislation focus on the costs of new environmental laws on industries, and consumers. Rarely do the benefits of a healthier population (and the costs savings that go along with such regulations) get properly included in... Continue Reading →

First of all Al Gore and the IPCC deserve sincere congratulations for winning the Nobel Peace prize. The IPCC has greatly advanced the scientific knowledge of climate change and its effects on the world, while Al Gore has increased awareness and made the science accessible to everyone. We should all be grateful for their efforts.... Continue Reading →

Any government that is at war with science is bound to failure: During the past seven years of the Bush administration, America has been subject to what can only be called antiscientific governance. Scientists have been ignored, threatened, suppressed, and censored across agencies, across areas of expertise, and across issues. Policies have gone forward repeatedly... Continue Reading →

UPDATE: The original headline of “Judge rules Gore’s Inconvenient Truth requires guidance notes to be shown in UK schools” has been updated to more accurately reflect the outcome of this case. A High Court judge who ruled on whether climate change film, An Inconvenient Truth, could be shown in schools said it contains “nine scientific errors”. Mr Justice... Continue Reading →

A whole range of environmental and social woes have emerged from an ill-informed, incautious rush into biofuels. Humanity's knee jerk reaction has been to seek to replace our dependency upon fossil fuels with a dependency upon living biomass; rather than embracing conservation, efficiency and true renewables. Emerging concerns with biofuels have included well-documented destruction of... Continue Reading →

Scientists and entrepreneurs alike are abuzz over iron fertilization, a controversial technique that uses iron-seeded plankton to sequester atmospheric carbon for centuries deep underwater. Now, a San Francisco-based climate startup called Climos has proposed a code of conduct to address contentious aspects of how experiments are conducted. Some researchers envision the technique as an effective... Continue Reading →

Experts at the Global Footprint Network calculate that 19 December 1987 was the first time that humanity used up a year's allotment of the earth's resources before a year finished. Each year, this date is moving earlier. Today we pass the threshold of the planet's capacity, equalling a need for 1.3 planets to sustainably support... Continue Reading →

The growing U.S. wind power industry is drawing increased scrutiny from states and the federal government over the problem of spinning wind turbines killing birds. The California Energy Commission last week adopted voluntary guidelines to reduce wind energy effects on wildlife, and Washington state, Montana and Texas among other states are reviewing measures. The U.S.... Continue Reading →

Recently on my post about the crackpot scientists who claimed (though naturally not in a peer-reviewed journal) that Mars was warming up and thus climate change here on earth was not caused by humans but rather by the sun, I received a comment claiming that the reason there are no peer-reviewed articles is because any... Continue Reading →

Quirks and Quarks recently aired with a segment Dr. Mark Jaccard, from the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University that covers the sorry state of Canada's climate change plan. Dr. Jaccard seems to agree that taxing polluters is the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that a technological fix,... Continue Reading →

Continuing his recent U-turn on the >environment BC premier Gordon Campbell has just announced a sweeping new plan to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emissions coming from BC. B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell laid out more details of his green plan Friday, including the promise of legislation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 33 per cent below... Continue Reading →

Taxing polluters is a great way to avoid unnecessary and possibly cumbersome environmental regulations and easily account for market failures that result from negative externalities. Many environmental market failures result as a form of the tragedy of the commons; whenever you get a situation where an activity benefits one person, but the costs of that... Continue Reading →

[Finally, after almost a decade] President Bush assured the rest of the world today that he takes climate change seriously and vowed that the United States "will do its part" in crafting "a new international approach" to reduce the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. However, he proposed no new initiatives to do so.... Continue Reading →

The entertainment industry's attempts to eliminate (think DRM) and whittle away (think PERFORM Act) your fair use rights are jeopardizing more than just free speech. It also threatens the U.S. economy, as an extensive study released today by the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) demonstrates. Based on methodology created by the World Intellectual Property... Continue Reading →

Prime Minister Harper’s talk at the recent UN climate conference echoed Bush's focus on a technological miracle as the solution to the world’s climate change problems. Other leaders have promised the same thing when pledging to reduce emissions intensity; they are promising new technology that will increase efficiency but will do nothing to reduce the... Continue Reading →

While it may be tpo late to achieve the 2012 Kyoto targets, there is no excuse for the fact that Canada continues to demand a "flexible" (read: infective intensity based targets) emission reduction plan. To make matters wore Harper used this meeting to announce his government's plan to join the meaningless and deceptive Asia-pacific climate... Continue Reading →

All the more reason to take action on climate change and cur CO2 emissions The focus of the public's concern over carbon emissions has been overwhelmingly fixated on the potential for future temperature increases. Accordingly, the legal wrangling has focused there as well, with lawsuits flying over states' ability to regulate automotive CO2 output and... Continue Reading →

Here is a timeline of President George W. Bush's evolving policy on global warming since 2001: March 28, 2001 - Stating his opposition to the 1997 Kyoto treaty on global warming, Bush says it is against US economic interests and unfair as big developing countries like China and India escape binding emissions pledges. June 11,... Continue Reading →

Biodiversity loss is an even greater problem than climate change, yet it is even less understood by the general public, and therefore has received very little attention by anyone other than biologists, who have called the current extinction crisis the sixth mass extinction event. We are currently loosing 30,000 species per year or about 3... Continue Reading →

I don’t know enough about this subject to argue one way or another but I found this very interesting. Questioning the presumptive link between GDP and happiness is really important, because growth in GDP generally requires growth in use of the planet’s dwindling resources and in pumping its overburdened atmosphere full of greenhouse gas. As... Continue Reading →

I guess the thousands thousands of scientists involved in the IPCC process were right, we are causing climate change and not the sun. Who would have guessed it? A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's... Continue Reading →

Mention the concept of a new tax to politicians and most will run screaming out of the room to go vacuum their cars or mow their lawns – anything to avoid talking about an issue that they think could lose votes, no matter how sensible or reasonable the concept may be. But that’s going to... Continue Reading →

Expect this law to be abused and unfairly targeted towards certain ethic minorities. The fact that the city deliberately kept the language vague means that many amateur photographers will be caught by this legislation. This crackdown on on photographers started unofficially without much thought after 9/11 in an attempt to keep terrorists from being able... Continue Reading →

Those cool new green products may not be as green as you think Plastic-handled paint brushes were touted as nature-friendly because they were not made of wood. Wood-handled paint brushes were promoted as better for the planet because they were not made of plastic. An electric chainsaw? Green, because it was not gas-powered. A bug... Continue Reading →

While climate scientists have been clear that the earth is warming and that humans are the cause, the Bush administration has stubbornly refused to believe them, even going so far as censoring government scientists who had data that contradicted the administration's position. the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead... Continue Reading →

The effort to curb Western Canada's pine beetle infestation and salvage dead trees is creating its own problems, according to a study released on Thursday by environmental and labor groups. The infestation has sparked "the forest industry equivalent of a gold rush" as producers scramble to salvage millions of dead trees before they degrade and... Continue Reading →

Drifting icebergs are "ecological hotspots" that enable the surrounding waters to absorb an increased volume of carbon dioxide, a study suggests. US scientists found that minerals released from the melting ice triggered blooms of CO2-absorbing phytoplankton. These microscopic plants were then eaten by krill (shrimp-like organisms), whose waste material containing the carbon sank to the... Continue Reading →