Author: John Bruno
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Meet the new Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has replaced their older climate change scenarios with ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs) developed for IPCC AR5 report, scheduled to be published in 2014. Unlike the scenarios they replace (A1, B1, A1F1, etc.), the RCPs are not based on social, technological, and economic storylines. Instead, they are simply plausible…
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Continued coral reef accretion requires vastly reduced CO2 emissions
An important new modeling study (Kennedy et al 2013 download PDF) forecasts the structural decay of Caribbean reefs based on emission scenarios from the new ‘representative concentration pathways’ (RCPs). Excerpted Authors Summary: Coral reefs face multiple anthropogenic threats, from pollution and overfishing to the dual effects of greenhouse gas emissions: rising sea temperature and ocean…
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Debunking National Review’s lies about climate change
In response to Obama’s historic speech and new policy on climate change, the American conservative media has gone, well, predictably bonkers. Check out this editorial from National Review, which starts off with a lie: It is remarkable that when the scientific consensus on global warming is at its weakest state in years, President Barack Obama…
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Obama’s climate action plan
This has been a massive news week. We started off with unrest in Brazil, more unrest in Turkey, more bloodshed and chaos in Syria, Snowden fleeing Hong Kong, the bombshell that the “IRS war on conservatives” was another GOP fantasy, and the SCOTUS overturning portions of the Voting Rights Act. Then yesterday afternoon came Obama’s…
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Marine park connectivity with Josh Drew
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Climate Change and Marine Communities 7: Blue Carbon
This is the 7th installment of my serialization of a new book chapter on “Climate Change and Marine Communities” written with Chris Harley and Mike Burrows. It is for a new book “Marine Community Ecology and Conservation” that I’m co-editing with Mark Bertness, Brian Silliman, and Jay Stachowicz. Blue Carbon To avoid long-term ecological degradation, it is becoming…
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Shrink That Footprint
I’m a sucker for carbon accounting and carbon source graphics and I love this simple one from shrinkthatfootprint.com which came from Lindsay Wilson’s post A short history of carbon emissions and sinks at Skeptical Science.
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The MPA backlash has officially begun
Two new essays on the potential downside of MPAs – especially “super-sized MPAs” – came out this week. Super-sized MPAs and the marginalization of species conservation – by Nick Dulvy in Aquatic Conservation download PDF Environmental cost of conservation victories – by Ray Hilborn in PNAS download PDF For full disclosure, I was once a strong…
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Preprint servers: what are they good for?
Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and colleagues have a nice paper up in PLOS Biology (yes, it is PLOS now and no longer PLoS) The Case for Open Preprints in Biology. See their Box 1 – Preprint Server Roundup – for an excellent overview of the most popular preprint servers. Public preprint servers allow authors to make manuscripts publicly available…
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Where greenhouse gases come from
Ecofys released a new, nice graphic depicting where greenhouse gases come from: It generally seems accurate and they say it is based on 2010 data, although I have not been able to find their methodology. This chart updates an important, earlier one from WRI here. In 2000 18.2 % of emissions were attributed to land use…