'Earth Hour' Is a Joke

Country could be world's leader in clean energy by 2020

(NEWSER) - China is on course to obtain 20% of its energy from wind and solar sources by 2020—a transformation that would make the country the world leader in renewables. Beijing is ramping up its targets for clean energy, helped by the $590 billion stimulus package passed last year, a senior government official told the Guardian. "Due to the impact of global financial crisis, people are all talking about green and sustainable development," he said. More»

High stakes demand high seriousness, not 'cynical careerism': Krugman

(NEWSER) - Climate change deniers aren’t just flouting scientific evidence—they’re flouting morals, writes Paul Krugman in the New York Times . Case in point: Last week, Republicans invited a pair of scientists to testify at a Congressional hearing on climate science. When Berkeley’s Richard Muller, a climate change skeptic, “went off script,” saying his findings supported the global warming hypothesis, the climate-denialist establishment threw him under the bus. More»

Checking global warming requires 'green revolution'

(NEWSER) - Disastrous climate change is inevitable unless the world begins cutting carbon emissions within the next five years, the World Wildlife Fund warns in a new report. Ahead of December's clutch Copenhagen summit, meant to forge a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the fund repeats that global temperature rises could stay below 2°C if greenhouse gas emissions are halved by 2050. But to do that, the world must invest in a "green industrial revolution," focused on low-carbon fuels like wind and solar, between now and 2014. More»

(NEWSER) - Global warming is real, but Al Gore’s crusade to curb carbon emissions is misguided and will squander money that could be applied cheaply and efficiently to those problems now, Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg writes in Esquire. “Here’s the truth: There are better, more cost-effective ways to fight global warming,” Lomborg writes. And “the solutions have very little to do with cutting CO2 emissions.” More»

Coal, oil, companies suppressed experts' findings for years

(NEWSER) - A coalition of industries linked to fossil fuels lobbied for more than a decade to cast doubt on global warming—while the companies' own scientists advised them that climate change was irrefutable, the New York Times reports. The Global Climate Coalition, financed by the oil, coal, and auto industries, conducted a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to challenge the environmental consensus, despite an internal report as early as 1995 that the impact of carbon emissions "is well established and cannot be denied." More»