Nothing is agreed until everything else is agreed

By Dr Stephen Peake Over the past week or so, a great deal of routine housekeeping work has been achieved on various agenda items under the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol. The texts of most of this work are now, as is customary, bracketed (this is how Governments signal discontent with the texts) and being [...]

Release more climate research data, urges academic

In the wake of hacked files from the Climate Research Unit, Darrel Ince, Professor of Computing at The Open University, says that scientists should release the program code used for computer simulations: “Software is notoriously difficult to make error-free— particularly scientific software.  Even software that has been produced by systems development companies with the highest [...]

Global agreements – a false sense of security?

by Dr Stephen Peake COP15 will be our third big global punch up on climate change. The first was the establishment of the UNFCCC at the Earth Summit in 1992. The second was in Kyoto in 1997. It’s ten years since I left the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in [...]

Forests: Seeing REDD at Copenhagen

David Humphreys talks about the REDD scheme, and why carbon emission credits are such a big issue in forestation terms

Climate change – the why, what and how

By Dr Stephen Peake, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Technologies Avoiding dangerous climate change: the why, the what, but HOW? The reasons why we need to avoid dangerous climate change have been clearly articulated. So too has the scale of the challenge we face. Governments around the world have adopted the target of reducing global greenhouse [...]