ScienceInsider

The new idea of a scaled-back climate bill to focus just on the power sector is a bad idea, said White House climate czar Carol Browner.

A historic two-story building at Los Alamos National Laboratory that was part of the Manhattan Project will be demolished on Tuesday.

Astronauts on space shuttle Atlantis have had their sleep disrupted by false alarms as they orbit Earth. The Space Exploration Alliance, meanwhile, has announced a lobbying blitz in February.

The Ocean, Coastal, and Watershed Education Act, which authorizes NOAA to expand its education programs, has passed committee and is moving on to the House floor, though no date is set for a vote.

by Eli Kintisch

Hackers who breached East Anglia's Climate Research Unit servers have provided explosive new fuel in the climate data wars. The data exposed in hundreds of megabytes stolen from the research center include more than a thousand e-mails among climate scientists, many of them prominent, and dozens of files. The information has inspired a feeding frenzy among bloggers who oppose the standard line on climate change.

Top scientists who are quoted include Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and Kevin Trenberth and Tom Wigley of NCAR. The discussions in them—likely released with timing aimed to undermine the process in Copenhagen—include debates over the inadequacy of scientific reviews, efforts to interpret climate data, and discussions on deleting e-mails after receiving Freedom of Information Act requests that could conceivably get some of the scientists in trouble.

RealClimate's take is here. 

Paul Alivisatos has been named director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Experts told a congressional panel today that the United States is losing its lead in spaceflight.

The Senate Energy Committee will explore the economics of the climate bill next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Navy prepares for global warming by envisioning an ice-free Arctic.

Did a classification error doom a fish called a slapper skate to near extinction?

Students at the University of California, Los Angeles protested ahead of a vote in which the Regents approved fee hikes.

Americans polled say they believe a cure for cancer will be found and aliens discovered before peace in the Middle East is reached.

by Eli Kintisch

On 18 December, the last day of the Copenhagen climate meeting, what will President Barack Obama tell the world that the United States is prepared to do?

With a month to go, that's the challenge. We already know Copenhagen won't have legally binding agreements, but how the nations of the world use the meeting to tee up negotiations in 2010 will determine whether the event will be deemed a barely marginal success or a total repudiation of the U.N. approach.

Today Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao raised the stakes in a Joint Agreement they signed. And they put a big onus on the U.S. Senate to come up with numbers for its emissions cuts goals. Hu and Obama said in their statement that "an agreed outcome in Copenhagen" should:

include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries.

The word "targets" on 18 December would mean actual commitments to emissions cuts. Getting them would be a pretty good accomplishment for the meeting, especially with organizers lowering expectations by the day. The hope was that the U.S. Senate would have passed its version of the climate bill by then, so Obama's negotiators could have real legislated targets to bring to the table in December.

That's not going to happen. The next best thing is Obama's challenge: coming up with a number from Congress with some credibility, with a month to go. Here's how it might go down.

by Eli Kintisch

Nations have now officially decided that the Copenhagen meeting will yield little more than a few political promises and they are now looking for a comprehensive deal in Bonn in June next year or a later 2010 meeting. So Democratic leaders in the Senate have scaled back hopes to get a floor vote the Senate climate bill, which passed committee amidst rancor and controversy earlier this month. 

Senator John Kerry (D–MA) told reporters late yesterday that he won't try to bring the Senate climate bill to the floor before Copenhagen, which begins in 19 days.

by Antonio Regalado

In a potential boost to climate negotiators meeting next month in Copenhagen, Brazil’s government today said it would aggressively cut the pace of growth of its greenhouse-gas emissions.

Brazil’s plan, announced in Brasilia by chief minister Dilma Rousseff and environmental chief Carlos Minc, would lower the country’s greenhouse emissions by 36% to 39% in 2020 compared with levels under a “do nothing” scenario. Under the plan, which Brazil's negotiators will present at the Copenhagen talks, about half of Brazil’s greenhouse gains would come by putting the brakes on clear-cutting in the Amazon forest. This week, the government said deforestation had hit a 21 year low, citing satellite surveys.

Though voluntary and not binding, Brazil’s economy-wide targets are the most aggressive proposal yet by a major emerging economy. It’s something “no other developing nation has done” or even publicly discussed, said Stephan Schwartzman, director for tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, D.C.

Brazil’s move could turn up the heat on U.S. and Chinese negotiators at the United Nations climate summit starting December 7th in Copenhagen. China and the United States are the world’s two largest emitters, but neither has been willing to agree to binding limits. “Politically, as long as the U.S. won't put numbers on the table, either for targets or finance, the big developing countries won't commit to anything,” said Schwartzman.

by Achintya Rao

Without drastic measures, the United Kingdom will fail to meet its carbon dioxide reduction targets for 2050 until the next century, says a new report from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. The authors recommend forming a new Department of Energy and Climate Security to accelerate efforts toward cutting emissions by 80% by 2050.

That goal was laid out in the Climate Change Act in 2008, which the report says was a good first step. But the Act does not provide any penalties for failing to reach the target, and that's a problem, say the authors. They predict that by 2050, the United Kingdom will exceed the desired limit by 330 megatons—a three-fold margin.

The report calls for a three-pronged approach: mitigation, adaptation and geo-engineering (MAG). That involves transitioning from a high-carbon to a low-carbon society, preparing to defend society from the likely ravages of climate change, and actively slowing down the increase in temperatures through large-scale engineering initiatives.

by Eli Kintisch

Activists in polar bear suits or protesters standing outside of coal plants might get the public message on climate change across, but might there be more personal choices that activists can make to convey their point? Say, instead of protesting the use of coal power, why not refuse to use it?

The newest wrinkle in the grassroots climate change movement is out of Boston, where students in a group calling itself the Leadership Campaign have pledged to regularly hold "sleepouts" in tents instead of sleeping inside dorms whose electricity comes from coal plants. Last night, students and NASA scientist James Hansen were among several dozen roused from tents they had illegally pitched on the Boston Common, the park which sits in the center of the city. The Campaign explains its action:

Beginning October 25, students, religious leaders and community members from across the Commonwealth will refuse to sleep in their homes and dorms powered by dirty energy until the state adopts a policy to Repower Massachusetts with 100% Clean Electricity in the next 10 years, transforming our economy and eliminating dirty fossil fuels.

by Eli Kintisch

A petition submitted earlier this year to the American Physical Society's leadership council to change the society's official statement in 2007 on climate change has gone down in (carbon neutral) flames:

The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society’s 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming.

The Council’s vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members. The petition had requested that APS remove and replace the Society’s current statement. The committee recommended that the Council reject the petition.

The 2007 statement warned that "If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur."

The petition had been bolstered by an official motion to APS's council to replace the existing statement with a new one that said that "21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent." 

by Eli Kintisch

Scientists and policy experts will meet in March next year for a 5 day meeting to hash out rules for conducting field experiments on the controversial topic of geoengineering, ScienceInsider has learned. Styled after the landmark 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, the conference has drawn support from top climate scientists and environmental groups. But it also faces questions and criticism about its openness and the backgrounds of some of the organizers.

Yesterday’s hearing by the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee—the first by Congress on the topic—underscores the accelerating interest in geoengineering, the deliberate tinkering with the environment to reverse global warming. The March meeting aims to be a forum for “scientists with expertise in climate engineering together with experts on risk management, governance, and ethics," said marine biologist Margaret Leinen, president of the Climate Response Fund, a new nonprofit set up to support geoengineering research. The Response Fund has partnered with Nobel Prize-winning biologist Paul Berg, who organized the 1975 event at the Asilomar conference center grounds in northern California, where the March event will also be held.

Many scientists believe that small or medium scale field trials may be needed to understand the risks of large-scale geoengineering projects. "There's a very legitimate concern about whether there would be risks associated with the research itself," said Leinen. Starting on 22 March, she hopes to convene 150 experts to examine the risks of a variety of different geoengineering methods, ranging from growing algae blooms at sea to sucking carbon dioxide or dimming the sun with particles sprayed into the upper atmosphere.