WunderBlog Archive » Dr. Ricky Rood's Climate Change Blog

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2014 April

The One Page I Will Read – IPCC Working Group II

I want to write a little bit about Working Group II. I know that I am late compared to the press releases and other blogs, but that’s my style. I don’t really have much to add during the big flurry of activity, but if the document is important, then I hope to maybe keep it alive a bit after it has run its news cycle. It’s an awfully long document; just picking one out, Chapter 30 of the Working Group II Report has 138 pages. It does not meet that standard of the one page I will read.

RickyRood, • 4:35 PM GMT on April 29, 2014

What is the right diagnosis?

There is no world in which we live that is uninfluenced by our emissions of many pollutants, including carbon dioxide, and our changes to the land and oceans. We make a mistake if we dismiss human-induced climate change as not influencing the weather each and every day.

RickyRood, • 5:09 AM GMT on April 21, 2014

Energy, Food, Population and Climate

We are therefore even in the best of cases committed to further increases in carbon dioxide emissions, as well as emissions of other greenhouse gases. The ultimate way to limit warming is to reduce emissions, which requires energy sources and food supplies that do not emit greenhouse gases. At this point we are not even offsetting carbon dioxide emissions by our adoption of renewables. It is interesting to note that China, now the world’s largest emitter, is also the world’s largest investor in renewable energy. Also noteworthy, is that China has driven down the price of solar energy. This places China in not only a potential technological advantage, but is also building policy advantage, as China is on a path that might displace coal’s role in energy production.

RickyRood, • 4:51 AM GMT on April 09, 2014