Climate Change

Producing electricity from the sun with solar panels seems like the perfect solution to our energy needs. But solar panels can also create problems for the environment. Switzer Fellow Dustin Mulvaney believes there are win-win solutions out there.

Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events in the form of heat waves, droughts, fires, and flooding have seemed to become the norm rather than the exception. In the past half-year alone, millions of people have been affected across the globe – from Europe suffering from the worst cold snap in a quarter century; to extreme flooding in Australia, Brazil, China, and the Philippines; to drought in the Sahel.

Two energy development scenarios were compared for the Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County, West Virginia: (1) mountaintop mining (MTM) of coal, and (2) wind energy plus underground mining of coal. Economic impact computations over the life of each energy development scenario were made on a county basis for output of goods and services, the number of jobs created, and local earnings. Externality costs were assigned monetary values for coal mining and subtracted from earnings.

In support of DFG’s Science Institute initiative, the Fish and Wildlife Strategic Vision and the upcoming strategic vision process, the DFG Climate Science Program is proud to announce the first of its kind lecture series on climate change as it relates to the mission of DFG. The DFG Climate College is designed to cover the fundamentals of climate science and provide tools and resources necessary to empower participants to better incorporate climate change into their professional responsibilities.

The challenges standing in the way of an effective international climate change agreement are many, but the prospects for a meaningful deal may be better now than in the past decade or more. That is the prevailing theme in a new research paper co-authored by Harvard Kennedy School Professors Joseph Aldy and Robert Stavins, published in the August 31 edition of Science.

Whether you look globally or locally, the last several months featured heat, heat and more heat. And by looking at weather station records over the past 60 years, researchers led by renowned NASA scientist Jim Hansen show this is part of a new trend toward much warmer summers.

Syma Ebbin of Groton, a member of the Long Island Sound Assembly, said her group urges the state to start considering climate change when building future infrastructure projects and to update building codes to account for stronger storms. Read the full story

About 1.4 billion people in the world have absolutely no access to electricity at all and even more have extremely unreliable access. Additionally, there are some 30,000 clinics and 60,000 schools around the world that lack access to electricity.