The Endocrine Disruption Exchange – TEDX

http://endocrinedisruption.org/

Endocrine Disruption: Widening the Scope

Please join us January 8^th at 1:00 EST for a presentation by Dr. Rodney Dietert titled Endocrine Disruption and Immune Dysfunction.

This half-hour teleconference call is the first in a monthly series sponsored by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment’s EDC Strategies Group, co-chaired by Carol Kwiatkowski (TEDX) and Sharyle Patton (Commonweal). Invited speakers will present the latest research on endocrine disruption and the immune system, the metabolic system, the brain, behavior and more.

Sign up here for January 8^th with Dr. Dietert and mark your calendars for February 19^th featuring Dr. Jamie DeWitt presenting Endocrine Disruption of the Neuro-immune Interface.

Or follow this link for more information on the presentations, speakers, and to register: http://www.healthandenvironment.org/partnership_calls/13389

Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120
Food-Matters http://Food-Matters.TV

GLENN GREENWALD vs RUTH MARCUS “Ruth Marcus Argument Exemplifies Everything Horrible About DC Media”

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2013 was hottest year on record in Australia

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Van Jones Says DNI Clapper Lying To Congress Is More Dangerous To The Future Of U.S. Than Snowden

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Ring of Fire 12/22/13

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Climate Action? Warsaw 2013 to Paris 2015 – Comment

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2200973/climate_action_warsaw_2013_to_paris_2015.html

Assaad W. Razzouk

21st December 2014
The Warsaw ‘COP-19’ climate negotiations were a widely acknowledged failure. But Assaad Razzouk sees a small silver lining among the dark clouds. There is a real prospect of effective action on climate in the run up to COP20 in Paris, 2015.

The response from Governments seems to be: ‘how do I negotiate the biggest slice of atmospheric space for my growing economy?’

There was precious little to celebrate at the 19th Conference of the Parties in Warsaw (‘COP 19’) in November 2013, where some 200 countries met over two weeks for the annual UN climate talks carnival.

In what is now a tradition, the talks concluded by kicking all substantive issues down the road to the next annual meeting and beyond to Paris in November 2015.

In another tradition, everyone agreed that we needed to do more and that next year will be different – even though “next year” is never any different and that in the meanwhile, the climate catastrophe is upon us.

Key non-outcomes at COP 19 included first, the establishment of an aspirational ‘Loss and Damage mechanism’ to help developing countries, and particularly small islands, cope with climate change, though this mechanism somehow omitted mentioning finance.

Second, the source of funding for the Green Climate Fund remained undefined, despite the pressing need for multilateral commitments. Third, the work program on long-term finance continued with little progress towards reaching the $100 billion per year promised in the Copenhagen UN Climate Talks in 2009.

The last two of these ‘non-outcomes’ are linked to the Green Climate Fund (or GCF), conceived in Copenhagen in 2009 and established in Cancun in 2010.

….(read more).

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120

Susan George: austerity means socialising losses and privatising profits

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Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7481/full/nature12829.html

Equilibrium climate sensitivity refers to the ultimate change in global mean temperature in response to a change in external forcing. Despite decades of research attempting to narrow uncertainties, equilibrium climate sensitivity estimates from climate models still span roughly 1.5 to 5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, precluding accurate projections of future climate. The spread arises largely from differences in the feedback from low clouds, for reasons not yet understood. Here we show that differences in the simulated strength of convective mixing between the lower and middle tropical troposphere explain about half of the variance in climate sensitivity estimated by 43 climate models. The apparent mechanism is that such mixing dehydrates the low-cloud layer at a rate that increases as the climate warms, and this rate of increase depends on the initial mixing strength, linking the mixing to cloud feedback. The mixing inferred from observations appears to be sufficiently strong to imply a climate sensitivity of more than 3 degrees for a doubling of carbon dioxide. This is significantly higher than the currently accepted lower bound of 1.5 degrees, thereby constraining model projections towards relatively severe future warming.

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120

Climate change models underestimate likely temperature rise, report shows

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/01/climate-change-models-underestimate-likely-temperature-rise-report-shows

Forecasts predicting less global warming fail to properly take into account cloud formation, say scientists

• Oliver Milman
• theguardian.com, Tuesday 31 December 2013 18.05 EST

Understanding cloud formation is key to predicting climate change. Photograph: CBW/Alamy

The Earth’s climate is far more sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than previously thought, heightening the likelihood of a 4C temperature rise by 2100, new Australian-led research of cloud systems has found.

The study, published in Nature, provides new understanding on the role of cloud formation in climate sensitivity – one of the key uncertainties in predictions of climate change.

Report authors Steven Sherwood, Sandrine Bony and Jean-Louis Dufresne found climate models which show a low global temperature response to CO2 emissions do not factor in all the water vapour released into the atmosphere.

Models typically simulate water vapour as rising to 15km and forming clouds, rather than updraughts of water vapour that rise only a few kilometres and pull away the cloud-forming vapour. This prediction of cloud cover is important because clouds reflect sunlight, lessening the impact of global warming.

The report, conducted between the University of New South Wales and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, finds “real world observations” show the accepted models are wrong.

In reality, the study found, water vapour is distributed to different heights in the atmosphere, causing fewer clouds to form as the climate warms.

In turn, this increases the amount of sunlight entering the atmosphere, making the level of warming far more sensitive to heat-trapping gases such as CO2.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120

Bill McKibben on Climate Progress in 2013 and 2014

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