The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has announced that it will restore a network of moored buoys in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that serves as an early warning system for periodic and disruptive warming events, known as El Niños. Read more
Building on several years of negotiations, countries inked a major agreement on forest conservation at the United Nations climate talks in Warsaw on 23 November. The deal formally integrates forest conservation into the international climate agenda by enabling wealthy countries to offset their emissions by paying poor tropical countries to protect their forests. Read more
After two weeks of frustration and controversy, negotiators departed the United Nations climate talks in Warsaw Saturday with a landmark agreement on forests and a rough roadmap to the next headline summit in Paris two years hence. Read more
President Barack Obama today nominated Franklin “Lynn” Orr, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, as under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. Orr’s nomination was accompanied by that of Marc Kastner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, to head the department’s office of science. Read more
Negotiations over a proposal to regulate hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer came up short in Bangkok this week. Read more
With no end in sight for the US government shutdown that began on 1 October, the Department of Energy (DOE) is now preparing to shut down the sprawling complex of national laboratories that maintains nuclear weapons and performs a range of basic and applied research. Read more
Following through on President Barack Obama’s climate strategy, the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed greenhouse gas regulations that would effectively ban coal-fired power plants unless they are equipped to capture and sequester a portion of their carbon dioxide emissions. Read more
Shortly after Hurricane Sandy hammered the eastern seaboard last October, more than a dozen scientists on the New York City Panel on Climate Change reconvened to begin work on a new assessment. The results were released today by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and they served as the basis for a $20-billion urban planning initiative that seeks to prepare the city for extreme weather and rising tides in the decades to come. Read more
This week China budged. Depending on one’s perspective, it wasn’t much of a concession. The country agreed, in essence, to do what it and everybody else had already agreed to do back in 2007: accelerate the phase out of a common class of ozone-eating refrigerants that double as powerful greenhouse gases. But rather than haggling over prices each step of the way, China made it simple and cut a single deal – worth up to $385 million – to eliminate hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) between now and 2030. Read more
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has appointed former U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt as editor-in-chief of the its flagship journal, Science. Read more
Recent comments on this blog
Experiments reveal that crabs and lobsters feel pain
US research ethics agency upholds decision on informed consent
Chemistry credit disputes under the spotlight
Chemistry credit disputes under the spotlight
Contamination created controversial ‘acid-induced’ stem cells