– IIASA News Release

Limiting climate change to target levels will become much more difficult to achieve, and more expensive, if action is not taken soon, according to a new analysis from IIASA, ETH Zurich, and NCAR.

by Auden Schendler

After my high school Biology teacher saw what I did with the cat dissection, she said: “Had I known how you’d butcher that thing I wouldn’t have given you an ‘A.’” But it was too late: I was a senior and the grades were in, and the cat was a casualty of my drifting mind and my aspirations.

In my desk was a copy of Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece, On the Road, (just out in movie form) and it wasn’t long before I was putting myself as far out as I possibly could, hitchhiking through the West without clear destination and landing without definite plans. I slept in wheat fields beside truck stops, and next to hurricane-wire fences in industrial wastelands on the outskirts of cities. And all the while I was thinking about Kerouac’s characters Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise who most famously said: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

In the 20 years since, things happened to me that happen to us all, in some form or another. I got married. I had two children, a boy and a girl. I surprised myself by landing in my 40s. I became acquainted, as we all do, with loss, which can manifest in both the preciousness of the living and the stunningly thin line to oblivion. I understood why some people were religious, even if I was not.

In the last decade, I got very involved in important work: trying to stop climate change, which threatens everything I care about. And I began to realize that the problem might well be too big and messy to solve. As I myself failed, I realized everyone else was failing too: nonprofits, governments, activist groups, corporations. Even after ice melted and storms grew bigger as expected and fire and flood increased, people still didn’t believe, or didn’t act.

I am a resilient person, and yet I felt beaten down. I had lost Kerouac’s gift: a great, striving, eager, overwhelming craziness: “No matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.” Kerouac meant mad in a good way, like staying “up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee… talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets…”

What happened to me, and to others in the climate struggle, is best described by another Kerouac heir, Bruce Springsteen, who said: “With countries, just like people,” (and I’d add movements) “it’s easy to let the best of yourself slip away.”

My friend the climate blogger Joe Romm, a great optimist, leaked a similar note of despair when he testified to Congress about climate change in July:

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by Douglas Fischer, via the Daily Climate

Widespread drought, Superstorm Sandy, and a melting ice cap failed to revive the media’s interest in climate change in 2012, with worldwide coverage continuing its three-year slide, according to a media database maintained by the nonprofit journalism site The Daily Climate.

The decline in the number of stories published on the topic – 2.4 percent fewer than 2011 – was the smallest since the United Nations climate talks collapsed in Copenhagen in 2009.

Coverage of climate impacts – extreme weather, melting glaciers and Arctic ice, warming temperatures and more – dominated climate news, accounting for almost one of every three stories written on the topic in 2012. That is the highest proportion in the five years that the website has been tracking coverage.

And coverage rebounded in some areas, particularly by the editorial boards of the world’s newspapers.

Start of a trend?

Separate analyses by other media watchers even showed an uptick in some climate-related reporting. Whether this represents a one-year blip or the start of a trend remains unclear, journalists and media researchers say.

“I ask myself, ‘In 20 years, what will we be proudest that we addressed, and where will we scratch our head and say why didn’t we focus more on that?’” said Glenn Kramon, assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

The Times published the most stories on climate change and had the biggest increase in coverage among the five largest U.S. daily papers, according to media trackers at the University of Colorado.

“Climate change is one of the few subjects so important that we need to be oblivious to cycles and just cover it as hard as we can all the time,” Kramon said.

Last year 7,194 reporters and commentators filed 18,546 stories, compared to  7,166 reporters who filed 18,995 stories in 2011, according to The Daily Climate.

The numbers remain far from 2009′s peak, when roughly 11,000 reporters and commentators published 32,400 items on climate change, based on the news site’s archive.

Some surprises

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by Bob Berwyn, via Summit County Citizens Voice

Recognizing that the best available science suggests a significant loss of Arctic sea ice in the next few decades, federal biologists last week finalized Endangered Species Act protection for two species of ice-dependent seals.

NOAA will list as threatened the Beringia and Okhotsk populations of bearded seals, and the Arctic, Okhotsk, and Baltic subspecies of ringed seals. The Ladoga subspecies of ringed seals will be listed as endangered. The species that exist in U.S. waters (Arctic ringed seals and the Beringia population of bearded seals) are already protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

“Our scientists undertook an extensive review of the best scientific and commercial data. They concluded that a significant decrease in sea ice is probable later this century and that these changes will likely cause these seal populations to decline,” said Jon Kurland, protected resources director for NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska region. “We look forward to working with the State of Alaska, our Alaska Native co-management partners, and the public as we work toward designating critical habitat for these seals.”

Ringed seals and bearded seals, found in the waters off Alaska, are the first species since polar bears to be protected primarily because of climate change threats. Federal officials said the listing won’t result in any immediate restrictions on human activities, including the subsistence harvest of ice seals by Alaska Natives, a practice that is central to the traditional culture and nutrition in many Alaskan Native coastal communities. But federal agencies that permit or fund projects that may affect a listed species must consult with NOAA Fisheries to ensure the existence of the species is not jeopardized.

“Arctic animals face a clear danger of extinction from climate change,” said Shaye Wolf, Center for Biological Diversity science director. “The Endangered Species Act offers strong protections for these seals, but we can’t save the Arctic ecosystem without confronting the broader climate crisis. The Obama administration has to take decisive action, right now, against greenhouse gas pollution to preserve a world filled with ice seals, walruses and polar bears.”

The Center for Biological Diversity helped spur the listing with a petition filed in 2008. The National Marine Fisheries Service was under a court-ordered deadline to make a listing decision.

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