Even though countries are burning unprecedented amounts of oil and gas, the estimates of how much is left continue to grow, thanks to high prices and new technologies that have enabled companies to find and extract new resources. A decade ago, it was the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela. More recently, hydraulic-fracturing technologies have opened up oil and gas resources in the United States.
Diplomats from around the world will gather for the United Nations (UN) climate talks in Doha, Qatar, where negotiators hope to agree a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol and lay the groundwork for a new global treaty that will take force by 2020. Nature takes a look at what is expected from the 18th annual Conference of the Parties (COP 18), which runs from 26 November to 7 December.
When a chartered fishing boat strewed 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the ocean off western Canada last July, the goal was to supercharge the marine ecosystem. The iron was meant to fertilize plankton, boost salmon populations and sequester carbon. Whether the ocean responded as hoped is not clear, but the project has touched off an explosion on land, angering scientists, embarrassing a village of indigenous people and enraging opponents of geoengineering.
The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has plummeted by 77% in the past seven years, but annual carbon emissions associated with deforestation have not fallen nearly as much, says a Brazilian study that combines satellite data and biomass maps to model the change. The difference is in large part due to a natural lag as carbon stocks slowly decay and make their way into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
NASA climatologist James Hansen made headlines during the US heatwave of 1988, declaring in testimony to Congress and during interviews on prime-time television that a build-up of greenhouse gases was increasing the probability of weather extremes. Now, as much of the United States sizzles through another torrid summer and the Midwest endures a historic drought, Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, claims that the future he predicted has arrived.
Brazil’s celebrated coastal metropolis is defined by stark contrasts, both geographic and economic. Extravagant
wealth rings the city’s luxurious beaches, while poverty looks on from the haphazard developments called favelas that sprawl across the surrounding hills. Such conspicuous inequality is symbolic of the challenge humanity faces on a
global scale — a problem that restricted progress at the Rio+20 meeting to a modest and mostly voluntary set of commitments.
Brazil’s vast forests lost some legal protections last week, but less than environmentalists had feared. On 28 May, President Dilma Rousseff vetoed a dozen sections of the revamped forest code passed a month earlier by the lower house of Brazil’s National Congress.
