Week in review

by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.

Robert Stavins’ insightful assessment of the Lima climate accord [link]
The aristocrats of oil build up their barricades against the arriviste revolutionaries of shale [link]
Brookings: Back to the future – advanced nuclear energy and the battle against climate change [link]
Swiss Re Sees Huge Drop In Losses From Natural/Manmade Catastrophes In 2014! [link]
Since requiring corn ethanol in fuel in 2007, over 1.2 million acres of grassland have been lost to corn & soy crops. [link]
No growth stimulation of tropical trees by 150 years of CO2 fertilization but water-use efficiency increased [link]
Why innovation is the best path to climate policy @BjornLomborg [link]
Natural gas and wind appear to have very similar per-MWh impacts on CO2 [link]  “Nine Fixes for China’s Water Risks”  http://bit.ly/9_Fixes
Nassim Taleb’s  Foreign Affairs essay: Why instability is good, counter current thinking in political “science”. [link]
See more good news about many forms of climate change. Enjoy it; we don’t know how long it lasts. [link]
BBC: Arctic sea ice may be more resilient than many observers recognize [link]
World’s beaches being washed away due to coastal development [link]
Economic modeling should only have a limited role in #climate policy decision-making. [link]
An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy [link]
The Atlantic: Scientists have a sharing problem [link]
Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics [link]
AGU meeting
The annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union was held last week in San Francisco.   I was in San Francisco for part of the week.  Frankly I don’t get much out of this meeting, it is just too big.  The highlight of my week was the Thurs dinner of the Chinese-American Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
Many of the talks are publicly available online [link].  Some talks that I heard were notable include presentations by Brian Hoskins, Ulrike Lohmann, Jeffrey Sachs, James White.You can get a little flavor for the meeting from  twitter #AGU2014.  Anthony Watts is attending the meeting and has several blog posts, there is also a post at RealClimate.
 
 Filed under: Week in review

Source