Dec 11 2009

Climate Changes

Posted by: Kory Raftery

Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:

Stolen emails have fueled the fire for global warming cynics who claim scientists staged a cover-up but those who study climate data feel the numbers on the thermometer over the past ten years cannot be masked. This week at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Britain's Meteorological Office and the United Nations World Meteorological Organization testified that the last decade has been the warmest since records began 160 years ago.

A bipartisan group of senators has agreed on the framework for climate change legislation and sent it to President Obama ahead of his trip to Denmark. The lawmakers assert that the bill will create millions of jobs while simultaneously cutting greenhouse gas emissions and making America more energy independent.

Google announced it has developed a non-profit product that will allow us to see the effects of deforestation in real time. The company is combining satellite images from Google Earth with heavy computational analysis in the cloud. Google plans to give scientists access to it for free as it is classified as not-for-profit. Last week, the company unveiled a tool that has the ability to forecast the damaging effects of global warming on the state of California.

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