You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong.
In negotiations on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity for either. Trust, as anyone who attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen can attest, is in the shortest of supplies. So, too, is verification.
Seat-of-the-pants estimates won’t be enough to cool the world
Still Pictures: Try counting the trees
The human impact of climate change “is difficult to assess reliably”, say the authors of a new report from the Global Humanitarian Forum, a think-tank run by Kofi Annan, a former United Nations secretary-general, aided by a raft of eminent folk. But they make a stab, reaching the conclusion that 325m people around the world are seriously affected by climate change every year and that this number could more than double, to around 660m, by 2030.
A hitherto unknown way of burying carbon at the bottom of the sea
In 2006 Mario Lebrato and Daniel Jones of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England, were using a remotely operated deep-sea vehicle to study the sea floor near an oil pipeline off Côte d’Ivoire. What they found surprised them. It was a thaliacean graveyard. And its discovery throws into question the received wisdom about one important aspect of climate change, namely how much carbon from the atmosphere ends up at the bottom of the sea.
What’s wrong with policies on waste, and how to get them right
Corbis
At Pope’s creek, on America’s Potomac river, there’s a pre-Columbian rubbish tip of oyster shells covering 30 acres, to an average depth of ten feet. Humanity has always produced waste in vast quantities; but more people, more consumption and the contribution emissions from rubbish make to climate change mean that disposing of the stuff is an increasingly contentious issue.
Home to a green-minded people and government, Norway exports the dirty stuff to the rest of the world. The result is a contradiction
On the shores of a glittering fjord, in the shadow of craggy mountains, right at the heart of Norway, stands a new factory belonging to a firm called NorSun. Inside, blond technicians in goggles tease metres-long crystals out of vats of liquid silicon and slice them into the thinnest of wafers, to be used in solar panels. The power for the factory is as pristine as the surroundings: it comes from a nearby hydroelectric plant. “It’s a nice idea,” says Cecilie Holst, one of the employees, “making solar panels with clean energy.”
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