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Arctic CO2 levels growing at an 'unprecedented rate', say scientists
John Vidal, Guardian
Figures from a measuring station in northern Norway show that CO2 levels are increasing by 2-3 parts per million every year
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The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures released by an internationally regarded measuring station in the Arctic.

The measurements suggest that the main greenhouse gas is continuing to increase in the atmosphere at an alarming rate despite the downturn in dip in the rate of increase of the global economy.
(27 April 2009)

Geoengineering and the New Climate Denialism
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
This is a draft essay, and obviously still rough in patches. I'd appreciate feedback! - Alex

The Idea of Geoengineering is Being Used Dishonestly

Though we spend our time here at Worldchanging focused on solutions to the planet's most pressing problems, sometimes the politics around an issue become so twisted that it's necessary to address the politics before we can have a real discussion about the problems and how to solve them. That's the case with geoengineering.

Some scientists suggest that certain massive projects -- like creating artificial volcanoes to fill the skies with soot, or seeding the oceans with mountains of iron to produce giant algal blooms -- might in the future be able put the brakes on climate change. These "geoengineering" ideas are hardly shovel-ready. The field at this point consists essentially of little more than a bunch of proposals, simulations and small-scale experiments: describing these hypothetical approaches as "back up options" crazily overstates their current state of development. Indeed, almost all of the scientists working on them believe that the best answer to our climate problem would be a quick, massive reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions.

None of this has stopped geoengineering from becoming part of a new attempt to stall those very reductions, though. The same network of think tanks, pundits and lobbying groups that denied climate change for the last 30 years has seized on geoengineering as a chance to undermine new climate regulations and the U.N. climate negotiations to be held at the end of the year in Copenhagen. They're still using scare tactics about the economic costs of change, but now, instead of just denying the greenhouse effect, they've begun trying to convince the rest of us that hacking the planet with giant space-mirrors or artificial volcanoes is so easy that burning a lot more coal and oil really won't be a problem.

Delay is The Carbon Lobby's Strategy

It's a central, yet often forgotten, fact in the climate debate that pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is incredibly profitable. For a small group of giant corporations (the coal, oil and car companies which we can collectively call the Carbon Lobby), business as usual is big bank. The difficulties of addressing climate change have much more to do with the political power of these corporations than with the technical challenges of building a carbon-neutral economy (a carbon-neutral economy being an engineering and design challenge that we already have the capacity to meet).

For the last thirty years, the Carbon Lobby's strategy on climate change has been to delay.
(27 April 2009)

As Climate Warms, Species May Need to Migrate or Perish
Carl Zimmer, Yale Environment 360
With global warming pushing some animals and plants to the brink of extinction, conservation biologists are now saying that the only way to save some species may be to move them.
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... Even if species have clear pathways, they may not have enough time to keep up with the speed of climate change. As they creep toward suitable climates, the warmer end of their range may become uninhabitable. As a result, they will become trapped in smaller areas. In 2001, Willis was one of 15 researchers who surveyed 46 species of butterflies in Great Britain and found that three-quarters of them had declined over the previous 30 years — a result consistent with a loss of range due to a warming climate.

Smaller ranges may put some species at greater risk of extinction. While scientists can’t make precise predictions about global warming’s effects on biodiversity, their rough estimates are chilling. In 2004, 19 researchers published a paper in Nature in which they concluded that if mid-range projections of global warming prove right, climate change would shrink the ranges of 15 to 37 percent of all species so drastically that they would be “committed to extinction.”

A conventional strategy for conserving species — such as setting up a preserve where they live now — may not work against global warming. Trying to save the American pika by protecting mountaintops may be futile if the entire mountain gets too warm for them. So conservation biologists began to wonder if they might have to ship species to new places.

They’d done it before. To bring wolves back to Yellowstone, for example, wildlife managers had imported animals from Canada. But in that case and others like it, animals and plants were returned back where they had once been. Managed relocation would require conservation biologists to move species to places where they might never have dwelled, and that’s never been done before.

Carl Zimmer writes about science for The New York Times and a number of magazines....
(20 April 2009)