Climate Red - News and Views on Climate Change Issues.

Oxford University professor Norman Myers has a message that might help you square your shoulders and face the future. (Click on the quote to get to full story.)

"If you feel you are too small to make a difference then you haven't been in bed with a mosquito," Myers said.

In other words, Myers told a meeting in London on climate change, individual actions really can make a cumulative difference to cutting the carbon emissions that drive climate change just like the tiny mosquito which can keep everyone in the house awake with its ceaseless whine.

Lobby Group Concerned Carbon Trading To Hit Australian LNG

April 28, 2008: 08:11 PM EST


MELBOURNE -(Dow Jones)- Australia's biggest oil and gas lobby group Tuesday voiced fears that Australia's planned carbon trading scheme could hurt liquefied natural gas, or LNG, exports, adding to concerns stated by producers Woodside Petroleum Ltd. (WPL.AU) and Chevron Corp. (CVX).

"While ever Australian emissions-intensive industries are exposed to competition from countries that do not have Kyoto emissions reduction obligations, it is incumbent upon an Australian emissions trading scheme to incorporate a design feature that prevents the undermining of the viability of those industries," Belinda Robinson, Chief Executive of the Australian Petroleum & Exploration Association, or APPEA, said in a statement.

Geoengineering is the deliberate modification of Earth's environment on a large scale "to suit human needs and promote habitability". [2] Others define it more narrowly as focusing only on the mineralogy and hydrology of the Earth.[3] The term geoengineering is distinct from accidental anthropogenic climate change.

When it comes to averting dangerous climate change, an awful lot of people seem to hold out hope that we can blast our way out of the mess we’re in. Nothing so boring as energy conservation, or even replacing coal, oil and natural gas with solar, wind and nuclear: Instead, let’s shoot sulfate particles into the atmosphere to reflect away sunlight! Let’s load up the oceans with iron so plankton will grow like dandelions on my lawn and suck up the heat-trapping carbon dioxide produced when we burn fossil fuels!

Hope springs eternal. This week brought a conference on weather modification, with the emphasis on getting clouds to drop their raindrops. My favorite paper was, alas, withdrawn: it proposed a machine—a ship, actually, with “four torpedo-shaped hulls”—that would “stop hurricanes from wrecking large parts of America.”

President Bush is set to change course and offer up an initiative to combat global warming, the Washington Times reported.

He said: "There has to be a greater synergy between, let's call it our policy leadership in this, which has been focused so much, legitimately, on targets and global architecture, almost reverse-engineered back to the means by which you can quickly deliver outcomes, and on the demand side in our economy we're looking at potential advances in terms of 20 to 25% range if you do this across the board. It all takes cost, but let me tell you it's probably the quickest lever you can pull given the challenges we face."