Category Archives: Climate Change & Sustainability

Posts on aspects of climate science, climate action and climate policy & planning.

Cancun looms, ready or not

Climate talks in Tianjin, China have ended. That’s it now until Cancun, Mexico on 29 November-10 December, where the optimists hope than a binding post-Kyoto treaty on climate change might be concluded.

That can’t happen without China and the US patching up their differences. The chances of that approach zero, according to Bloomberg.

The BBC report goes further:

On Saturday, one of the Chinese climate negotiators reportedly accused the US of behaving like a preening pig, complaining about Beijing when Washington had done so little itself.

Reuters explains this reference to Chinese classical literature:

Su likened the U.S. criticism to Zhubajie, a pig in a classic Chinese novel, which in a traditional saying preens itself in a mirror.

“It has no measures or actions to show for itself, and instead it criticizes China, which is actively taking measures and actions,” Su said of the United States.

Continue reading Cancun looms, ready or not

Climate clippings 2

In this post I have included a brief mention of a number of news items relating to climate change. It doesn’t preclude treating any of these topics in a separate post.

It can also serve as an open thread.

The “Big Freeze”, the Younger Dryas, happened in the space of a few months

mg20427344.800-1_300In case you have been feeling hot I thought we’d start with a story about the cold.

William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and colleagues have developed a technique where they use a scalpel to slice off layers of mud 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time.

The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland and found that the Younger Dryas over 12,000 years ago which plunged Europe into Siberian-type weather for about 1300 years, took hold in the space of a few months.

Now Patterson’s mob have built a robot able to shave 0.05 micrometre slivers along the growth lines of fossilised clam shells, giving a resolution of less than a day. “We can get you mid-July temperatures from 400 million years ago,” he says. You just have to work out where in the world the clam was 400 million years ago, and that could just about be anywhere.

Continue reading Climate clippings 2