Now reading (devouring).

Politics and an oversimplified understanding of demographic dynamics have long kept population issues out of serious discussions in the framework of climate negotiations. Within adaptation actions, however, this is beginning to change, and this volume is intended to provide a framework for taking that change forward, towards better, more evidence-based adaptation.

It provides key concepts linking demography and adaptation, data foundations and techniques for analyzing climate vulnerability, as well as case studies where these concepts and analyses illuminate who is vulnerable and how to help build their resilience.

A group of volunteers have given up their time over the last few years to answer the question, once and for all, as to whether the “science is settled”.

People will generally defer to the judgment of experts, and they trust climate scientists on the subject of global warming.

To resolve this question once and for all, we reviewed the abstracts (paragraph-long summaries) of over 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers published between 1991 and 2011 with the keywords “global warming” and “global climate change.” Our team was comprised of a citizen science team of two dozen volunteers from around the world. Team members’ home countries included Australia, USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Germany, Finland, and Italy.

Most of the ratings were done by a dozen team members, who each read more than a thousand abstracts in their spare time over the span of several months. Analysing the data and writing the paper took close to another year after that. We didn’t receive any funding or compensation for our efforts; it was entirely a voluntary effort driven by the desire to settle the issue of scientific climate consensus once and for all.

Nearly 75% of Americans and 68% of Canadians indicated they “support” or “somewhat support” the project, which would carry heavy crude from the Alberta oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast for refining, according to the poll conducted by Ottawa-based Nanos Research.

The poll also asked participants—1,007 Americans and 1,013 Canadians—which was more important: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or having North America free from oil imports? Both a majority of Americans and Canadians, 63% and 55%, respectively, suggested reducing reliance on oil imports trumped environmental policy.

“Energy security, particularly in the U.S., is driving views on energy issues,” said Nik Nanos, president of Nanos Research.

Environmentalists argue that development of the Alberta oil sands for the crude that Keystone would carry will increase emissions of greenhouse gases.

The Nanos poll contacted Americans between March 28 and April 7, and Canadians between April 6 and April 9.

The Obama administration is, for a second time, reviewing TransCanada’s application to build Keystone after rejecting the project in 2012. Keystone faces stiff opposition in the U.S. from environmental groups and key Democratic policy makers.

Nanos Research conducted the poll and they’re pretty legit. Via WSJ.

For background, check out my Keystone XL Pipeline and Oil tags.

Thursday’s report by dozens of scientists from five different federal agencies looked into why forecasters didn’t see the drought coming. The researchers concluded that it was so unusual and unpredictable that it couldn’t have been forecast.

“This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years,” said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event.”

Via AP

Analysis of climate change modelling for past 15 years reveal accurate forecasts of rising global temperatures

The debate around the accuracy of climate modelling and forecasting has been especially intense recently, due to suggestions that forecasts have exaggerated the warming observed so far – and therefore also the level warming that can be expected in the future. But the new research casts serious doubts on these claims, and should give a boost to confidence in scientific predictions of climate change.

The paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.

The forecast, published in 1999 by Myles Allen and colleagues at Oxford University, was one of the first to combine complex computer simulations of the climate system with adjustments based on historical observations to produce both a most likely global mean warming and a range of uncertainty. It predicted that the decade ending in December 2012 would be a quarter of degree warmer than the decade ending in August 1996 – and this proved almost precisely correct.

The study is the first of its kind because reviewing a climate forecast meaningfully requires at least 15 years of observations to compare against. Assessments based on shorter periods are prone to being misleading due to natural short-term variability in the climate.

More at The Guardian

Soon, governments and citizens alike will be able to spot illegal loggers from space. A new tool called Global Forest Watch 2.0 will give anyone with a computer or smartphone the ability to zoom in on forests around the world and spy on illegal cutting operations in near-real time.

“Global Forest Watch 2.0 aims to transform access to information about what’s happening to forests everywhere around the globe,” says Nigel Sizer, the director of the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Initiative in Washington, D.C. “The platform allows people to see those numbers—how much clearing is done year by year in oil concessions in Indonesia, for example, or by a cattle ranch in the Brazilian Amazon—without involving training in technology or science.”

The open-access online monitoring platform, which will include two major data sets when it launches in the first half of 2013, combines satellite technology, data sharing and social networks to combat deforestation.

The first dataset, provided by the NASA MODIS system, is updated every 16 days. Over that same period, algorithms compute the likelihood that any given 250-square-meter patch of forest has been cleared based upon the remote-sensing imagery. Higher spatial resolution data, provided by the University of Maryland, will be added annually. The platform relies upon cloud computing for storing the massive datasets involved in visualizing and processing the maps.

More via txchnologist

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