Costa Rica has produced an animated movie Odyssey 2050 addressing the issues of climate change
Showing posts with label Climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate change. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Costa Rica & France get together to fight Climate Change
Brice Lalone has been appointed by the French Government to lead France's policies in the battle against climate change.
Brice and France's Environment, Energy & Telecommunications Minister Roberto Dobles travelled to Costa Rica last week for discussions with the Costa Rican Government on further cooperation in combating climate change.
Costa Rica and France have agreed to work together on international climate change projects.
Additionally they have discussed a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, under which Nations agreed to a series of measures to reduce the world's green house gases, as this treaty expires in 2012.
In addition to meeting with the Government Lalone also met with business like Dole Fresh Fruits and Tabacon, that have acted to lessen their environmental impacts.
Dole has introduced a series of initiatives including training, low energy refrigerated containers, and reduction of fertiser use.
Tabacón, a resort and spa based around hot springs at the foot of the Arenal Volcano, in northwestern Costa Rica, has compiled an inventory of all the greenhouse gasses emitted from its operations, including the transportation of tourists and company trips and the company is now working to reduce its emissions and compensating the rest through reforestation and conservation of existing forests.
Read the full story in by Leland Baxter-Neal lbaxter@ticotimes.net in the Tico Times here.
Brice and France's Environment, Energy & Telecommunications Minister Roberto Dobles travelled to Costa Rica last week for discussions with the Costa Rican Government on further cooperation in combating climate change.
Costa Rica and France have agreed to work together on international climate change projects.
Additionally they have discussed a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, under which Nations agreed to a series of measures to reduce the world's green house gases, as this treaty expires in 2012.
In addition to meeting with the Government Lalone also met with business like Dole Fresh Fruits and Tabacon, that have acted to lessen their environmental impacts.
Dole has introduced a series of initiatives including training, low energy refrigerated containers, and reduction of fertiser use.
Tabacón, a resort and spa based around hot springs at the foot of the Arenal Volcano, in northwestern Costa Rica, has compiled an inventory of all the greenhouse gasses emitted from its operations, including the transportation of tourists and company trips and the company is now working to reduce its emissions and compensating the rest through reforestation and conservation of existing forests.
Read the full story in by Leland Baxter-Neal lbaxter@ticotimes.net in the Tico Times here.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Is innovation the key to climate change?
The Obama administration has very ambitious plans for confronting climate change: billions of dollars targeted toward energy and climate.
But a sobering analysis shows even the most ambitious aspirations fall far short of what's needed. And that has led some people to suggest that the world needs to take a whole new approach to climate change.
First, the challenge is immense. President Obama has set a goal of slashing our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent between now and the middle of the century. That means phasing out most fossil fuels or going to the vast expense of burying carbon dioxide underground.
An Effective Goal?
Robert Corell at the Heinz Center in Washington, D.C. asks a simple question: What if the United States is able to meet that goal? And what if Europe meets it, too? Corell notes that China isn't planning to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, but it does plan to constrain their growth.
Corell uses a simple laptop computer program, developed by MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, to get quick answers to scenarios like this.
And here's the bad news: Even if the G-8 industrialized nations and developing nations such as China and India all met their climate goals, the planet still warms.
So, what, then would it take to solve the problem?
5 Percent Reduction
One way to achieve this level would be to get the eight leading industrialized countries — as well as China, India, Mexico and South America — to all adopt the same ambitious target.
"And here's what you find: It takes about a 5 percent reduction [by all these nations] per year," Corell says, starting next year and achieving those enormous cuts year after year after year.
"Five percent per year is huge," he says.
"This is sort of a wake-up call mechanism," Corell says. People need to realize, "Oh, this is tougher than I thought. And I probably have to think about it differently."
Finding A Different Path
One person pushing for an intellectual paradigm shift is Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University. It's his view that our only hope is to invent our way out of the problem.
Sarewitz runs an outfit called the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes based at Arizona State University. And he's trying to figure out a better way to change the way the world uses energy.
Using energy "is really the metabolism of modern industrial society," he says. "And changing that system is not about replacing a few technologies or advancing our level of efficiency along certain fronts."
It means creating a whole new basis for the global economy. Sarewitz is skeptical that politicians can deliberately manage a transformation of that scale, either through legislation or through climate treaties. He says, for starters, measures that will ultimately force everyone to pay more for energy are doomed both economically and politically.
"Politically, what you're asking people to do is to pay a huge upfront cost for benefits many decades down the road that they can't even anticipate or predict. And that is politically an extremely difficult sort of situation to manage," Sarewitz says.
It's harder still, considering that Americans rank global warming at the bottom of their worry list, according to a January poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
History Lessons
Despite this gloomy perspective, Sarewitz isn't a naysayer or a cynic. But he has been trying to think of another way to deal with climate change. To do that, he's looked back in history to see how we managed other major transformations.
One example is how America transformed agriculture over the past century. The United States government created a highly successful, century-long effort to make food more abundant and affordable. "And it didn't do so by setting any particular target or timetable. It did so by investing in research and development — and very importantly, in institutions," Sarewitz says.
For example, agricultural extension programs brought together researchers to tackle the big problems, and farmers to put the solutions to work quickly. The key to it all was speeding up innovation. And the good news is none of this required an ugly political or public debate. That's the model Sarewitz would like to use for climate change.
"The idea really is to take the political heat off of climate change and instead move this into the realm of policy wisdom," he says, "where many many small decisions made across many agencies, many types of policies, many domains, set the conditions for moving in the right direction without demanding that people accept that this is the most important problem in the world."
Sarewitz is now hard at work trying to identify what institutions we need to drive that transformation in the coming decades. The ultimate goal is to make renewable energy about as cheap as fossil fuels. Otherwise, there's little hope that the nations of the world will agree to tackle climate change. Sarewitz says he knows the Obama administration won't abandon its current path to craft climate laws and a treaty.
"But there's no reason they can't at the same time… understand that the real action is going to be on the innovation front," Sarewitz says.
And, he adds, there's no time to lose.
You can read the excellent full article by Richard Harris here
But a sobering analysis shows even the most ambitious aspirations fall far short of what's needed. And that has led some people to suggest that the world needs to take a whole new approach to climate change.
First, the challenge is immense. President Obama has set a goal of slashing our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent between now and the middle of the century. That means phasing out most fossil fuels or going to the vast expense of burying carbon dioxide underground.
An Effective Goal?
Robert Corell at the Heinz Center in Washington, D.C. asks a simple question: What if the United States is able to meet that goal? And what if Europe meets it, too? Corell notes that China isn't planning to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, but it does plan to constrain their growth.
Corell uses a simple laptop computer program, developed by MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, to get quick answers to scenarios like this.
And here's the bad news: Even if the G-8 industrialized nations and developing nations such as China and India all met their climate goals, the planet still warms.
So, what, then would it take to solve the problem?
5 Percent Reduction
One way to achieve this level would be to get the eight leading industrialized countries — as well as China, India, Mexico and South America — to all adopt the same ambitious target.
"And here's what you find: It takes about a 5 percent reduction [by all these nations] per year," Corell says, starting next year and achieving those enormous cuts year after year after year.
"Five percent per year is huge," he says.
"This is sort of a wake-up call mechanism," Corell says. People need to realize, "Oh, this is tougher than I thought. And I probably have to think about it differently."
Finding A Different Path
One person pushing for an intellectual paradigm shift is Dan Sarewitz of Arizona State University. It's his view that our only hope is to invent our way out of the problem.
Sarewitz runs an outfit called the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes based at Arizona State University. And he's trying to figure out a better way to change the way the world uses energy.
Using energy "is really the metabolism of modern industrial society," he says. "And changing that system is not about replacing a few technologies or advancing our level of efficiency along certain fronts."
It means creating a whole new basis for the global economy. Sarewitz is skeptical that politicians can deliberately manage a transformation of that scale, either through legislation or through climate treaties. He says, for starters, measures that will ultimately force everyone to pay more for energy are doomed both economically and politically.
"Politically, what you're asking people to do is to pay a huge upfront cost for benefits many decades down the road that they can't even anticipate or predict. And that is politically an extremely difficult sort of situation to manage," Sarewitz says.
It's harder still, considering that Americans rank global warming at the bottom of their worry list, according to a January poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
History Lessons
Despite this gloomy perspective, Sarewitz isn't a naysayer or a cynic. But he has been trying to think of another way to deal with climate change. To do that, he's looked back in history to see how we managed other major transformations.
One example is how America transformed agriculture over the past century. The United States government created a highly successful, century-long effort to make food more abundant and affordable. "And it didn't do so by setting any particular target or timetable. It did so by investing in research and development — and very importantly, in institutions," Sarewitz says.
For example, agricultural extension programs brought together researchers to tackle the big problems, and farmers to put the solutions to work quickly. The key to it all was speeding up innovation. And the good news is none of this required an ugly political or public debate. That's the model Sarewitz would like to use for climate change.
"The idea really is to take the political heat off of climate change and instead move this into the realm of policy wisdom," he says, "where many many small decisions made across many agencies, many types of policies, many domains, set the conditions for moving in the right direction without demanding that people accept that this is the most important problem in the world."
Sarewitz is now hard at work trying to identify what institutions we need to drive that transformation in the coming decades. The ultimate goal is to make renewable energy about as cheap as fossil fuels. Otherwise, there's little hope that the nations of the world will agree to tackle climate change. Sarewitz says he knows the Obama administration won't abandon its current path to craft climate laws and a treaty.
"But there's no reason they can't at the same time… understand that the real action is going to be on the innovation front," Sarewitz says.
And, he adds, there's no time to lose.
You can read the excellent full article by Richard Harris here
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Climate change may threaten Biodiversity in the tropics
Robert Colwell of the University of Conneticut analysed almost 2,000 varied species in Costa Rica and has fouond that a significant number will move from their normal environment to a completetely new area if temperatures increase significantly.
We are all responsible for releasing carbon into the atmosphere, a significant driver of climate change.
If you would like to check your carbon count just click here.
Did you know that 1ha of forestry removes about 3.5 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year. An investment in forestry is not only good for your pocket it is good for the environment too.
The full article titled "Climate change may threaten biodiversity in tropics", By Julie Steenhuysen Reuters, is below:
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Climate change may soon make the tropics too hot for many native species, which will be forced to head for higher ground to escape the heat, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
The study suggests climate change is not only threatening polar bears and other cold-loving species. It is putting heat-loving species at risk as well.
"We know the climate is getting warmer," said Robert Colwell of the University of Connecticut, whose research appears in the journal Science.
"If things continue as projected, there will be a 3 degree Celsius (5.4 degree Fahrenheit) warming in the Costa Rican tropics within the next century," he said.
Colwell and colleagues predict that as the climate in the tropics warms, thermal bands will move up the mountains by about 600 meters (yards) in elevation. "The current climate at 100 meters will be at 700 meters," he said in a telephone interview.
Colwell and colleagues analyzed data on nearly 2,000 species of plants, insects, and fungi in Costa Rica. His team thinks about half of these species would have to move to completely new territory, well beyond the upper ranges on the mountainside.
"If species are stressed by the heat, they will do better in their accustomed climate zone. We expect ranges to move up the mountain as has been documented already in Europe and the United States," he said.
We are all responsible for releasing carbon into the atmosphere, a significant driver of climate change.
If you would like to check your carbon count just click here.
Did you know that 1ha of forestry removes about 3.5 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year. An investment in forestry is not only good for your pocket it is good for the environment too.
The full article titled "Climate change may threaten biodiversity in tropics", By Julie Steenhuysen Reuters, is below:
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Climate change may soon make the tropics too hot for many native species, which will be forced to head for higher ground to escape the heat, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
The study suggests climate change is not only threatening polar bears and other cold-loving species. It is putting heat-loving species at risk as well.
"We know the climate is getting warmer," said Robert Colwell of the University of Connecticut, whose research appears in the journal Science.
"If things continue as projected, there will be a 3 degree Celsius (5.4 degree Fahrenheit) warming in the Costa Rican tropics within the next century," he said.
Colwell and colleagues predict that as the climate in the tropics warms, thermal bands will move up the mountains by about 600 meters (yards) in elevation. "The current climate at 100 meters will be at 700 meters," he said in a telephone interview.
Colwell and colleagues analyzed data on nearly 2,000 species of plants, insects, and fungi in Costa Rica. His team thinks about half of these species would have to move to completely new territory, well beyond the upper ranges on the mountainside.
"If species are stressed by the heat, they will do better in their accustomed climate zone. We expect ranges to move up the mountain as has been documented already in Europe and the United States," he said.
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