The UK Information Commissioner’s Office recently confirmed that the disclosure of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit revealed that some of the scientists violated the UK’s Freedom of Information law by failing to respond to legitimate document requests from other researchers. I blogged on this development here. Initial […]
Archive | Climate Change
The IPCC Under Siege
2010 has not been kind to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This U.N. sanctioned body is supposed to issue periodic reports that summarize the state of the science of global climate change based upon a comprehensive review and synthesis of the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature. In the past few weeks, however, it has […]
ClimateGate Scientists’ Conduct: Unethical and Illegal
The UK Daily Mail reports: Scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled. The Information Commissioner’s office said University of East Anglia researchers breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests from climate change sceptics. […]
A Real Eco-Terrorist
The AP reports: Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate […]
The SEC Calls for Climate-Related Disclosures
The Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-2 to issue an interpretive guidance to publicly traded companies on when they should disclose information to investors on the potential impact of business or legal developments relating to the issue of climate change. According to the Washington Post, the vote was along party lines, and the Republican commissioners […]
Bay Area Air Rule Could Backfire
The NYT reports on a potential environmental backlash against proposed greenhouse gas regulations designed to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings in the San Francisco Bay area. some environmentalists and city planners fear that the new set of guidelines being considered by the region’s air quality regulators could have an unintended consequence, making it more […]
Do We Need Global Governance To Combat Global Warming?
By Ilya Somin on December 21, 2009 8:11 pm in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, Global Governance/World Government, International Law
The recent Copenhagen Conference on global warming has led to renewed claims that we cannot effectively combat global warming without “global governance,” or perhaps even a full-fledged world government. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon recently claimed that “A [climate change] deal must include an equitable global governance structure” and many other political leaders and environmental […]
The Politicization of Peer Review
Among other things, the release of e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has laid bare the efforts of a handful of climate scientists to manipulate how the peer review process handled research that could undermine claims of a climate science “consensus.” As climate scientists David Douglass and John Christy […]
AsteroidGate – For Real?
From Wired: Any number of undiscovered near-Earth objects could one day careen into the Earth, and there is a lot of talk here at the American Geophysical Union meeting about tracking them. So far, though, only one discovered object has seemed even mildly likely to hit our planet.That asteroid is Apophis, a 900-foot asteroid. Calculations […]
The Copenhagen Debacle
The agreement-to-agree did three things. It established that a critical mass of developed and highly industrialized developing countries such as China agree that climate change is a significant problem, and that these countries need to reduce their emissions. It provided that countries will have to submit to a monitoring system. And it suggested that rich […]
Copenhagen as UN Politics, Not Climate Change Substance
By Kenneth Anderson on December 19, 2009 2:42 pm in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, International Law, Legal Scholarship
(Updated below … Give me global oligopoly or give me climate death!) I Post-Copenhagen. At bottom, the question is legitimacy. The global New Class met in Copenhagen, convinced, as ever, that it had legitimacy to act as it proposed to act, with the UN as its vehicle, because legitimacy was conferred by “expertise.” The UN […]
Shorting Climate Change?
Okay, I’ll bite on Fen’s comment in my previous post on opinion polls and climate change. Suppose that you wanted, at the retail investor level, the cheapest and most efficient ways to go short on climate change policies, carbon regimes, whatever you think is relevant. (In general, I’m a believer in sort-of efficient markets, despite […]
Washington Post-ABC Poll re Obama and Climate Change
This Washington Post article sums up pretty well, I think, the results of the ABC-WP opinion poll looking at American views of climate change, science and scientists involved in climatology, Copenhagen, President Obama’s role and that of the administration, and the idea of spending US tax money on the climate change fund. The President’s approval […]
Copenhagen’s Carbon Footprint
It takes a lot of energy to hold a UN climate conference — and lots more for delegates, activists, journalists and others to get there. That means a lot of carbon emissions. Reuters reports: “Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference’s carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created […]
The Climate Change Fund as the New Millennium Development Goals?
By Kenneth Anderson on December 16, 2009 10:13 pm in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, International Law
Ever since the Copenhagen conference got going, and rapidly turned into an argument over wealth transfer from the rich world to the poor world, it has seemed to me that the exercise is best understood not as an argument about climate change, but instead about internaitonal economic development policy. That is, the basic problem with […]