6th Hottest year Ever!
December 14th, 2006 by Carbon CoalitionGlobal warming was a popular topic in today’s headlines. This article in the New York Times reports data released by the British Meteorological Office and the University of East Anglia, determining that 2006 is the 6th hottest year every recorded. This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise considering the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the top 10 warmest years have all occurred in the last 12 years. The article says these results are likely “stoked by global warming linked to human activities.”
But this article from ABC News says it’s not all anthropogenic–you can also blame “cows and pigs. Yes, cows and pigs.” A recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations says “the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems…land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.” Cows give off methane in their digestive process and methane is known to be 23 times more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Fortunately we don’t all need to run out and replace our filets with tofu, the FAO says “major reductions in impact could be achieved at reasonable cost.”
This article from the Washington Post covers a climate change conference held for top Wall Street investors, insurance executives, state treasurers and pension fund managers. Michael Moran, VP of global investment research at Goldman, Sachs & Co., explained that for Wall Street this is the first step: “The first step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem.”
Tackling such issues, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which was released on October 30th, is now being critiqued by two well-known economists. William Nordhaus of Yale University and Sir Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge are concerned that the “social rate of time discount” (whatever that means) that Stern uses to base his calculations on is not appropriate. (Read the entire article from the New York Times here.)
Also, check out the Jay Heinrich’s blog “Figures of Speech Served Fresh” that “rips the innards out of things people say and reveals the rhetorical tricks and pratfalls.” Yesterday Heinrich’s entry “Yo Earth” is about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s question, “When? I mean when is the predicted cataclysm?” Heinrich’s “Snappy Answer: The moment the rising ocean floods your basement.”
And, another nip of maple syrup is up for grabs…what potential presidential candidate said this:
“there’s no evidence to support global warming — none. It’s essentially cultural anthropology.”
