More Links on Global Warming

The UO's Faculty of Security Studies hosts the Apocalypse Project, a multidisciplinary study of theories about the end of the world as we know it. I've already written below about the oil project.

To kick it off, there was a discussion about climate change in January. Here are a number of links I've found. I haven't read enough on this to form any kind of firm personal opinion. I don't trust either the energy industry or campaigners to report the science correctly, and I am not sure if even the current consensus is strong enough to say when and why climate change will occur.

That being said, I doubt that Kyoto, with its big loophole for big emitters i.e. relocate outside the developed countries, would make any difference at all. Given this, I'm expecting some the EU to keep its framework and for some version of Senator McCain's bill for purely domestic cap and trade to make it onto the statute books sometime soon.

U.S. Senate resolution on Kyoto

Senator John Kerry on the negotiation process surrounding the treaty

Guardian op/ed by scientist Diana Liverman, bemoaning the increasing politicisation of climate science.

Letters to the Guardian in response came from from one of the scientists criticised in the article above, another sceptical scientist, Kendra Okonski of the International Policy Network think-tank and Cindy Baxter from the Stop Esso pressure group.

The Guardian links to this draft paper by Bjorn Lomborg, which seems to be a first draft of his extremely long chapter on the subject in "The Sceptical Environmentalist".

This summary article in Nature confirmed my suspicion that apocalyptic anxiety about the climate isn't a recent phenomenon.

My personal view is that a society's ability to adapt and how that is hindered by poverty and political instability, rather than climate change, will be the key issue. Peter Schwartz, the Global Business Network founder and one of the fathers of scenario planning has recently been working on this. His book "Inevitable Surprises" devotes a chapter to the topic of environmental change.

Tom Ley passed on this link to information about the longer-term Milankovitch model linking climate changes to irregularities in Earth's orbit.

Peter 笔德