Climate 411

Supreme Court Reverberations

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling on Massachusetts versus EPA was a landmark victory for Planet Earth, but there’s still much work to be done. The ruling doesn’t demand any specific action – it just sets the stage for future rulings. Case in point: California’s petition to EPA to use its own, stricter emissions standards rather than federal emissions standards.

In light of this ruling, will the EPA grant California’s petition? On April 5th, a couple of news outlets reported that EPA had approved California’s request. Unfortunately, they got it wrong. EPA simply agreed to take the next to step in considering the California waiver – holding public hearings. We won’t know for months how EPA will rule.

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Posted in Cars and Pollution, Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Read 4 Responses

Tune In…

Tomorrow (Tuesday, April 10th) from 8:00-9:00am EDT, I will be on the Michael Smerconish Show. If you live in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or Delaware area, you can listen to it on AM 1210. It will also be available on the web.

Listeners will be calling in with questions – here’s a sampling of what I’ll be talking about [MP3]. It should be interesting!

Posted in News / Read 1 Response

Quote of the Week

“EPA has refused to comply with this clear statutory command. Instead, it has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate.”

From Supreme Court ruling [PDF] on Massachusetts vs. EPA, Opinion of the Court, page 31.

Posted in What Others are Saying / Comments are closed

Part 1 of 5: More Acidic Oceans

The second installment of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment on Climate Change, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, will be released on April 6, 2007. In recognition of this report, I’m doing a weekly series called “Climate Dangers You May Not Know About“.

1. More Acidic Oceans
2. Drinking Water and Disease
3. Shifts in Lifecycle Timing
4. Drought and Violence
5. Melting of the North Pole


Everyone knows that carbon dioxide (CO2) warms the globe. But many people don’t know about its other dangerous effect. The build-up of CO2 is undermining ocean life through “ocean acidification”. I’ll start by explaining why our oceans are becoming more acidic, and then illustrate why this is so dangerous to ocean life and our entire food chain.

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Posted in Oceans / Read 5 Responses

Can We Engineer Our Way Out?

Yesterday I talked about the phenomenon of "global dimming", where pollution particles suspended in the atmosphere reflect sunlight back into space. Because they cause less sunlight to hit the Earth, these particles also cool the planet.

So here’s an idea for fighting global warming. Instead of trying to reduce greenhouse gas pollution – the root cause of the problem – why not use technology to counteract the effect of the pollution? For example, we could artificially add to the planet’s reflectivity so that the warming is cancelled by the cooling.

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Posted in Geoengineering / Read 5 Responses

What's Global Dimming?

Last week, Vic asked about the phenomenon of "global dimming" and its effect on global warming. Good question. Here’s the answer.

"Dimming of the sun" or "global dimming" is not due to anything happening to the sun. It’s due to something happening on Earth that blocks the sun’s rays. Global dimming is important from a climate standpoint because less sunlight reaching the Earth creates a cooling effect.

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Posted in News / Read 4 Responses