25 June 2012

Climate News

Week ending 24 June 2012



PICKS OF THE WEEK

Campaigners demand an end to $1tn fossil fuel subsidies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jun/18/campaigners-end-fossil-fuel-subsidies
Guardian, 18 June 2012
Twitterstorm calls for an end to fossil fuel subsidies as a new report says oil, coal and gas companies could be getting $1 trillion of government support.

18 June 2012

Climate News

Week ending 17 June 2012
The Northern Hemisphere land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2012 was the all-time warmest May on record, at 0.85°C (1.53°F) above average: State of the Climate Global Analysis” May 2012

10 June 2012

Climate News

For week ending 10 June 2012

Difference between the number of melt days in 2011 and the average number of melt days during the period 1979 - 2010. Large sections of the island experienced twenty more days with melting conditions than average. Image credit: Arctic Report Card
Unprecedented May heat in Greenland, new May record just 0.7C below hottest ever recorded
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2110
Jeff Masters, Wunderblog,  May 31, 2012
The record books for Greenland's climate were re-written on Tuesday, when the mercury hit 24.8°C (76.6°F) at Narsarsuaq, Greenland, on the southern coast. According to weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, this is the hottest temperature on record in Greenland for May, and is just 0.7°C (1.3°F) below the hottest temperature ever measured in Greenland

06 June 2012

End game for the climate policy paradigm

Note: Next week, this site will start a short series on the state of climate politics in Australia, with some emphasis on the future of the community activist and non-for-profit sectors. In part, it will be  a follow-up to the Bright-siding series, plus also sober assessment of our present circumstances, how we got here and a few thoughts on what to do. But there is no better place that this piece by the US environmentalist Ken Ward, first published in 2008. It remains fresh for our circumstances today which, if anything, have deteriorated in the last four years. This could be Australia today:
Why so? Because we think that if we hit upon just the right formula – the perfect blend of incentives, quasi-free markets trappings, tax breaks and so on – we can accomplish the political equivalent of changing lead into gold, and pass effective climate legislation without major opposition. But political power is immutable and we are not alchemists. Policy – a plan of governmental action – is an outcome of power, not a means of achieving it. We do not have enough power to win functional climate policy in the US,  and until we do so, there will be no global climate solution.

04 June 2012

Climate News

Week ending 3 June 2012
Courtesy Climate Spectator
PICKS OF THE WEEK

The biggest climate victory you never heard of
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/201252614334480622.html#.T8MIK-S-NrA.facebook
Mark Hertsgaard, Aljazeera, 27 May 2012
Coal is going down in the United States, and that's good news for the Earth's climate. The US Energy Information Administration has announced that coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel, generated only 36 per cent of US electricity in the first quarter of 2012.