Climate Change

In the U.S., any discussion involving climate change tends to deteriorate into an argument between two factions—those who feel that climate change is a very real threat to the planet, and those who say it is nothing but a scare tactic.

China may be on its way to being a hybrid leader that can avoid overseas adventurism as it tries to rapidly abandon fossil fuels and modernize its unstable neighbors’ economies.

The countries of the European Union tend to be viewed as the main advocates at the national level for developing a more comprehensive and binding global plan to tackle climate change. As the EU pushes forward, other nations have been stuck in neutral or have been retrenching. With the European economy continuously struggling to pick […]

Why the Slow Moving Emergency is Resetting the U.S. National Security Conversation Has climate destabilization already hijacked the national security conversation? Well, not yet – but it should and it will.  To help make my point for dramatic change in national security thought, let’s recall the old frog in boiling water ancedote. If you put […]

As immigration legislation is prodded through the U.S. Senate then likely to collect mothballs in the U.S. House of Representatives, and major Supreme Court decisions are announced, the executive branch has garnered a portion of the headlines. Ready to take on another challenge, President Obama laid out his plan to combat Climate Change – a […]

As COP 18 in Doha seems to have failed (as of writing) to reach a consensus on how to further climate change action for the future, Malaysia proves to be one developing country with a plan for internal action. The country has set ambitious emission reduction targets: by 2020 it has committed to cut it […]

The United Nations climate change negotiations, or the long form: the 18th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 8th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (CMP) to the Kyoto Protocol, got underway today […]

It is abundantly clear that if we are going to conquer our climate change demons, then we’ve got to radically reduce the burning of coal on our splendid but increasingly stressed planet.  Carbon dioxide is still the primary driver of warming and coal is still the primary source of carbon dioxide from fuel combustion. Of […]

     I went to a very interesting presentation a couple of weeks ago:  The good folks at the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes and their partners at SAM, a Zurich-based group focused on sustainability investing, took the time to enlighten several of us ink-stained wretches of the press (if I can still characterize myself as such […]

The 350.org folks and all their thousands of friends all over the world had a big event on May 5.   Here’s the video:

Here’s a look at how the Arctic has been melting.  (Click on the image to go to NASA for a full explanation of what you’re seeing here.) What we’re seeing all over the world is an accelerating rate of the thawing of permafrost, and the melting of sea ice and glaciers.  I’ve written about this […]

I wrote the other day about how people are increasingly perceiving the connection between extreme weather and climate change.  They are, in the words of the very good folks at 350.org, “connecting the dots.”  In fact, 350.org is yet again marshaling its extraordinary powers of event planning and persuasion to get people all over the […]