I’m going to be on a panel at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh Friday afternoon. Details below:
Energy experts from the Center for American Progress and the Global Climate Network will meet blocks away from this week’s G-20 meetings and discuss the current energy profile of U.S. climate legislation. They will also preview two new reports on U.S.-China cooperation on carbon capture and sequestration and talk about pathways toward an integrated clean energy economy that promotes positive trade relationships instead of using trade only as a threat to ensure emissions reductions.
Who:
Joe Romm, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress and Editor, ClimateProgress.org
Andrew Light, Senior Fellow and Coordinator of International Climate Policy, Center for American Progress
Andrew Pendleton, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Public Policy Research and Secretary of the Global Climate Network
When: Friday, September 25, 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Where: August Wilson Center
G20 Media Center
980 Liberty Ave
Pittsburgh, PA, 15222All press arriving at the Wilson Center will be escorted to the Media Center for the press conference.
Please email Suzi Emmerling at semmerling @ americanprogress.org or call at 202-481-8224 if you plan to attend.
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Right on. Hell as much as I will miss your blogs, I will even give you a few days off to prepare.
Best wishes, Leif
There is a new report by the UN Environmental Program — Climate Change Science Compendium 2009.
The report can be found here; http://www.unep.org/compendium2009/
excerpt from the report:
“One of the most difficult additional factors to include accurately in estimates of radiative forcing at global, regional, and local scales are the effects of aerosols—particles that absorb solar radiation and particles that reflect solar radiation. To complicate matters, the same size particles may do either at different heights within the atmosphere. Aerosol particles come from dust picked up by wind and from myriad anthropogenic sources produced when people burn fuel, use diesel engines, and clear forests. The aerosols that reflect radiation are more common than those that absorb and they serve as a mask that prevents the full effect of GHG radiative forcing to heat the Earth. These aerosols form atmospheric brown clouds at height and cause health problems from their pollution at the Earth’s surface. As they are addressed because of concerns about ground-level pollution, their climate change masking function will dwindle and temperatures will increase (Ramanathan and Carmichael 2008).
With estimations of 1-5 degrees Celsius as the range of GMT increase over 1750 levels as the threshold for tipping elements and 0-5 degrees Celsius over 1990 levels as reasons for concern, some researchers are realizing that we have already committed ourselves to significant environmental changes (Lenton et al. 2008, Smith et al. 2009, Ramanathan and Feng 2008). The observed increase in GHG concentration since 1750 has most likely committed the world to a warming of 1.4-4.3 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial surface temperatures. The equilibrium warming above pre-industrial temperatures that the world will observe is 2.4 degrees Celsius—even if GHG concentrations had been fixed at their 2005 concentration levels and without any other anthropogenic forcing such as the cooling effect of aerosols.
The range of 1.4 to 4.3 degrees Celsius in the committed warming overlaps and surpasses the currently perceived threshold range of 1-3 degrees Celsius for dangerous anthropogenic interference with many of the climate-tipping elements such as the summer Arctic sea ice, Himalayan glaciers, and the Greenland Ice Sheet (Ramanathan and Feng 2008).
Researchers suggest that 0.6 degrees Celsius of the warming we committed to before 2005 has been realized so far. Most of the rest of the 1.6 degrees Celsius total we have committed to will develop in the next 50 years and on through the 21st century. The accompanying sea-level rise can continue for more than several centuries. Lastly, even the most aggressive CO2 mitigation steps as envisioned now can only limit further additions to the committed warming, but not reduce the already committed GHGs warming of 2.4 degrees Celsius (Ramanathan and Feng 2008).”
The Washington Post today posted their blurb on the report today; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092402602.html?hpid=topnews
The article by TWP “should” get a most positive response from JR! — knowing what JR had to contend with recently in TNYT.