ClimatePolicy

Science, Belief and the Volcano:

In January 2008 there was an article in the National Geographic called the The Gods Must Be Restless. The author, Andrew Marshall, describes Mbah Marijan, who has the job of satisfying the ogre that inhabits the volcano Merapi in Indonesia. The volcano is about to explode, the government has ordered an evacuation and Marijan is not convinced. Quoting the article:

“The alerts are merely guesses by men at far remove from the spirit of the volcano. The lava dome collapse? ‘That’s what the experts say,’ he (Marijan) says, smiling. ‘But an idiot like me can’t see any change from yesterday.’ ” (more…)

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The 2007 UN-sponsored climate change negotiations opened in Bali, Indonesia this week. By the end of the conference on December 14, the world community may agree to a two-year “roadmap,” as called for by the UN Secretary-General, for negotiating an agreement to guide climate change mitigation efforts after the end of the Kyoto Protocol’s 2008-2012 commitment period. A number of academics, analysts, nongovernmental organizations and related processes have proposed various ways of moving forward with international climate change policy, including the Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s Dialogue at Pocantico, the UN Foundation and the Club of Madrid’s Global Leadership for Climate Action, and the Centre for Global Studies’ L20 concept of engaging the most important developed and developing countries on this issue, which is similar to the Bush Administration’s Big Economies process. (more…)

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Summer reading opportunities abound for anyone interested climate change. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report includes recently released contributions from Working Group I on the science of climate change (with a Summary for Policy Makers, Technical Summary, and individual chapters now available), from Working Group II on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (WG-II SPM), and from Working Group III on climate change mitigation (WG-III SPM).

For anyone looking for an engaging overview of climate change, I’d strongly recommend The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2006) by Andrew Dessler and Edward Parson. I recently reviewed the book for BAMS (you can download my review here) and found it to be one of the most readable overviews that I’ve seen.

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