I know you’ve all been eagerly waiting for this–don’t worry, I don’t have many more rules. I got sidetracked by last week’s offset hearing.

Offset projects should deliver climate benefits with high confidence — that’s a key reason trees make lousy offsets, especially non-urban, non-tropical trees. An even more dubious source of offsets is geo-engineering, which is “the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment” to counteract the effects of global warming.

As John Holdren, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted in 2006, “The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.”

The only reason for this rule is that a company, Planktos, wants to sell offset credits for carbon that is supposedly sequestered when iron is seeded in the ocean to create algae blooms. Seriously. (This is the same company that is selling trees as offsets to the Vatican.)

This is such a dubious idea that 18 leading experts from 13 countries, who comprise the Scientific Steering Committee of the Surface Ocean–Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS)–a leadin group studying the ocean-atmosphere system–went to the trouble of issuing a “Position Statement on Large-Scale Ocean Fertilisation” last month:

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Here are the interactive graphics from a recent Washington Post article. The original article is here. An online chat about the article/graphics is here.

Nature has published another landmark study showing how the complex interplay of human-generated pollution with natural systems worsens climate change. Their news article (subs. req’d) explains:

Rising levels of ozone pollution over the coming century will erode the ability of plants to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a new climate-modelling study predicts.

Ozone is already known to be a minor greenhouse gas, but the new calculations highlight another, indirect way in which it is likely to influence global warming by 2100. High levels can poison plants and reduce their ability to photosynthesize, says Stephen Sitch of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter.

Note this is actually a new amplifying feedback, since the hotter it gets the more ozone pollution is generated.

Below the fold is the rest of this article — and for you hardcore science types, I’ll end with the abstract of the original journal article.

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Coal’s Doubters Block New Wave Of Power Plants – Wall Street Journal. Finally, some good news on the power front: “From coast to coast, plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants are falling by the wayside as states conclude that conventional coal plants are too dirty to build and the cost of cleaner plants is too high.”

Floods Kill at Least 100 Across China – Reuters. “Severe flooding has hit about half of China” and “More than 1 million people have been evacuated.”

Veteran House Democrat Guards Turf on Energy – New York Times. That would be John Dingell (D-MI), duh.

What are the Dinosaurs of Detroit thinking? – USA Today opinion. “The Big 3 have opposed increased fuel economy standards. Do they know something the rest of us don’t?” They know how to lose market share….

Still more from James Hansen’s email:

Ed Wilson explains that the 21^st century is a “bottleneck” for species, because of extreme stresses they will experience, most of all from climate change. He foresees a potentially brighter future beyond the fossil fuel era, beyond the peak human population will occur if developing countries follow the path of the developed world to lower fertility rates. Air and water can be clean and we will learn to live with other species in a sustainable way, using renewable energy. The question he asks is how many species will survive the tremendous pressure of the 21^st century bottleneck. It is the question that I asked Sophie, how many of the animals?

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