NEW ORLEANS – BP says oil has stopped leaking into the Gulf for the first time since April.
BP has been slowly dialing down the flow as part of a test on a new cap. Engineers are now monitoring the pressure to see if the busted well holds.
Valuable food for thought in these difficult times.
The rapid melting of glaciers in the Himalayas threatens the water supply of more than a billion people.
By Bill McKibben
For two weeks we’ve been listening to the story of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia—a media tempest in an English teapot. And all the time the biggest scandal has been directly under our noses.
This afternoon at Copenhagen a document mysteriously leaked from the UN Secretariat. It was first reported from the Guardian, and by the time it was posted online it oddly had my name scrawled all across the top—I don’t know why, because I didn’t leak it.
By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer
NEW YORK – The Copenhagen talks on climate change were convened with a sense of urgency that many ordinary folks don’t share. Why is that? One big reason: It’s hard for people to get excited about a threat that seems far away in space and time, psychologists say.
“It’s not in people’s faces,” said psychologist Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “It is in the media, but not in their everyday experience. That’s quite a different thing.”
by Jennifer Grayson
My father is an extremely intelligent man, and I respect his advice about a lot of things. I’m embarrassed to admit, however, that he’s a global warming denier. I’ve tried to change his mind, but he just doesn’t want to listen. How can I get my father to come around on climate change?
-AJ
Your dad isn’t the only one who’s going to need some serious convincing: The number of Americans who believe global warming is real has fallen from 80 to 72 percent in the past year. This, all before emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were stolen and subsequently leaked, raising questions about the integrity of the scientists’ global warming data. Add to that the ensuing “Climategate” frenzy by the cable news talking heads, who often seem more interested in sound bytes than exploring the nuance of any given issue, and the result is a population divided into believers and deniers.
by Kofi Annan
Copenhagen offers the prospect of a robust political deal, endorsed by the world’s leaders and witnessed by the world’s people, that sets out clear targets and a timeline for translating it into law. To be a truly historic achievement, such a deal must do two things.
First, it must lay the basis for a global regime and subsequent agreements that limit global temperature rise in accordance with the scientific evidence. Second, it must provide clarity on the mobilization and volume of financial resources to support developing countries to adapt to climate change. Read the rest of this entry »
As world leaders convene in Copenhagen for the global climate conference, Former Vice President Al Gore has been making the interview rounds pushing back on “ClimateGate” and promoting his new book , Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.
In a wide-ranging interview with Slate, Gore talks about environmental policy, why the Copenhagen meeting matters, and the hacked climate science emails. The emails, Gore stresses, were “taken wildly out of context” and the uproar surrounding them is “sound and fury signifying nothing.”