Climate change

World CO2 emissions rose by nearly 2% in 2008

We have seen last year that CO2 emissions rose by 3.1 percent in 2007. According to the International Economic Platform for Renewable Energies (IWR) they rose in 2008 by 1.94 percent to reach no less than 31.5 billion metric tons. The document released by this institution in interesting as it provides data by country. This […]

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Could the Sahara desert become green again ?

We have seen it previously, the Amazon Rainforest could become a desert because of deforestation and climate change. As I noted in May a three degrees Celsius increase would destroy it by up to 75 percent. But could global warming help the Sahara region becoming green again ? To National Geographic it could be the

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China is getting ready for Copenhagen

China has been asking developed countries to commit themselves to cut by 40 percent their greenhouse gases emissions by 2020 at the Copenhagen talks in December. We have seen previously that such targets are reachable. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic is increasingly working on slowing its own carbon emissions by using all means, from energy efficiency

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Latest news from the Arctic

It has been a while I haven’t written anything on the Arctic. According to Bloomberg: “A Manhattan-sized chunk of ice may break away from a glacier in northwestern Greenland and fall into the sea within about two months.” Furthermore, to Reuters a US governmental agency released hundreds of highly detailed pictures of the Arctic quickly

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The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan

The United Kingdom may soon become a climate change model for Europe and other developed nations as it plans to cut by 34 percent its greenhouse gases emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels. Yes, over a third less, this is exactly what the IPCC has been advocating in 2007. These brilliant goals will be reached

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The G8 meeting in L’Aquila: a missed opportunity

A few months before the Copenhagen meeting which will decide of the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the countries who met in Italy this week missed another opportunity to agree on climate change mitigation. After Hokkaido in July 2008, this G8 meeting was another failure of our elected representatives to seriously act on the defining

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More evidence on climate change acceleration

As many nations are gathering in Italy to decide of what efforts they will put in climate change mitigation, I thought it would be interesting to present you with a UNEP study showing that climate change is accelerating. According to the Agence France Presse quoting the United Nations Environment Program paper : ” The world

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Russia at risk from climate change

In two days I found in my RSS feeds two articles on Russia. The first one is about a study from the World Bank stating that this large country is seriously at risk because of climate change. Indeed global warming will increase the importance of already large climate phenomena such as storms or heat waves.

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Can we clean up coal ? Is it worth the hassle ?

To a study from the Massachussets Institute of Technology : “There is today no credible pathway towards stringent GHG stabilization targets without CO2 emissions reduction for existing coal power plants.” To me retrofitting coal-fired plants represents a huge detour from going straight to massive plans of energy efficiency and low carbon energy alternatives like wind,

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Is Australia doing enough on climate change ?

To Ecogeek, Australia plans to soon install a 1 gigawatt wind farm and this kind of project is due to be followed by more as the country plans to have 20 percent of its electricity coming from renewables by 2020. This seems to be great but the current discussions at the local Senate are being

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