23 June 2015, Common Dreams, ‘A Great Day for Corporate America’: US Senate Passes Fast Track. ‘Shameful’ vote all but ensures approval of mammoth trade deals like the TransPacific Partnership. In a win for multinational corporations and the global one percent, the U.S. Senate on Tuesday narrowly advanced Fast Track, or Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) —ensuring for all practical purposes the continued rubber-stamping of clandestine trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The cloture motion to end debate needed 60 votes and it got just that, passing the chamber60-37. The full roll call is here. A final vote will come on Wednesday. Having overcome the biggest hurdle, the legislation is expected to pass, and will then be sent to President Barack Obama’s desk to become law. Read More here
Monthly Archives: June 2015
23 June 2015, The Lancet, Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health: The 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change maps out the impacts of climate change, and the necessary policy responses, to ensure the highest attainable standards of health for populations worldwide. This Commission is multidisciplinary and international, with strong collaboration between academic centres in Europe and China. The central finding from the Commission is that tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century. Read More here
23 June 2015, The Carbon Brief, Solar minimum could bring cold winters to Europe and US, but would not hold off climate change. Over the past few decades, our Sun has been relatively active, giving off high levels of the solar radiation that warms the Earth. However, in recent years this peak activity has tailed off, prompting scientists to wonder if the Sun is heading into a period of lower output. A new study says even if the Sun’s activity did drop off for a while, it wouldn’t have much impact on rising global temperatures. But it could mean a higher chance of a chilly winter in Europe and the US, the researchers say.
The Sun’s activity rises and falls on an approximately 11-year cycle, but it can experience longer variations from one century to another. Over the past 10,000 years, the Sun has hit around 30 periods of very high or very low activity – called ‘grand maxima’ and ‘grand minima’. One of these occurred between 1645 and 1715, when the Sun went through a prolonged spell of low solar activity, known as the Maunder Minimum. This didn’t have much of an effect on global climate, but it was linked to a number of very cold winters in Europe. In 2010, scientists predicted an 8% chance that we could return to Maunder Minimum conditions within the next 40 years.
But since that study was published, solar activity has declined further, and this likelihood has increased to 15 or 20%, says new research published today in open-access journal Nature Communications. In fact, the Sun’s output has declined faster than any time in our 9,300-year record, say the researchers. And so they set out to analyse what this could mean for global and regional climate. The researchers used a climate model to run two scenarios where solar activity declines to a grand minimum. They then compared the results with a control scenario where the Sun continues on its regular cycle. For all model runs they used the RCP8.5 scenario to account for future climate change – this is the scenario with the highest greenhouse gas emissions of those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC). Global emissions are currently tracking just above this scenario. Read More here
22 June 2015, The Carbon Brief, Climate change attribution studies are asking the wrong questions, study says. Scientists are calling for a rethink in the way we seek to understand how climate change affects extreme weather. The latest in so-called attribution studies is to study each individual event by itself, looking for how climate change may have made it stronger or more likely. But a new paper says the methods used in many of these studies underestimate the influence of climate change, and suggests a new approach to identify the “true likelihood of human influence”.
One of the first studies to attribute a single extreme weather event to climate change was published just over a decade ago. Researchers showed that climate change had doubled the chances of the record heatwave Europe experienced in 2003. In the years that followed, many more studies have aimed to provide answers on how climate change is affecting our most brutal weather. But while scientists have been able to attribute events caused by temperature extremes, linking other extreme events like storms and heavy rainfall events has proved more difficult, says a new paper in Nature Climate Change. Read More here