I’m a little bit suspicious that we’ve got one of those “underpants gnomes” business models here, but whatever. Keith Johnson reports on some moves by big-time financial players into the carbon market: Merrill Lynch launched a new carbon-market index aimed at giving all sorts of investors access to the carbon markets. Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan said …
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the question of what a “journalist” actually is, and how what I do in print differs from what I do on line, and also how it differs from what others do on line who one might not traditionally think of as journalists, but who are doing things that …
Andy Revkin, on his blog and in the newspaper, has another case study of the distorting effect of Nature and suchlike A-list scientific publications. Let’s say our study suggests climate change is driving some rare and charismatic toad to extinction. We’re in Nature! Journalists will write about us in the New York Times etc. The …
A new paper by Maximilian Auffhammera and Richard T. Carson suggests that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising much more quickly than presumed in the IPCC’s emissions scenarios. A reminder that The IPCC’s “mistakes” don’t all break in one direction. The common rhetorical conception has the IPCC’s errors uniformly overstating the effects of greenhouse emissions …
Water in the Desert Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Took the family (Mom, Dad and Lissa) to the Rio Grande Nature Center to see the new fish channel they dug for the Rio Grande silvery minnow. I went out Monday for the newspaper as they let the first water in, and wanted to go back to …
Concrete is increasingly sounding old school. The idea makes sense: build a concrete channel through your city, to get the water as quickly as possible from the mountains to the sea, minimizing the mischief it can do in the interim. But such engineering efficiency comes with a cost, as the folks in Pasadena, Calif., (where …
Mark suggests an even greener alternative for my riding mower fetish: Some conversion required.
Energy, Water in `Catch-22′
The water-energy interface is a problem area. Energy production requires water. Water production requires energy. We don’t have enough of either, which is the makings of a serious problem. There’s a nice summary of the issue in the March 20 Nature, by Mike Hightower and Suzanne Pierce from Sandia Labs. Nature makes you pay, but …
A story out of Jerusalem about drought in Israel reminds that the place labels change, but the themes remain: Israel’s water problem stems from population growth and an improvement in quality of life that brings a greater desire to water lawns and gardens, Schor said. This winter was the fourth that Israel got less than …