What we’re reading II

From the media

“How does the recent pause affect our projections of future climate?”

Three briefing papers from the UK Met Office explain

“The first sale of forest-carbon credits developed by indigenous people”

Ecosystem Marketplace on a pioneering REDD+ project in Brazil

“There is no country on Earth with a child mortality rate below 10 per 1,000 births that has a fertility higher than 3 children per woman”

Matt Ridley is rationally optimistic about future global population

“I see no other way forward for humanity or nature but by improving our social systems and technologies”

DotEarth gets Erle Ellis to explain what he really meant in a New York Times op-ed about carrying capacity

“Natural scientists are not comfortable with ruthless extrapolation of past trends”

A critique of Ellis (one of many) from Tom Murphy at Do the Math

“The Anthropocene challenges geographers and other thinkers to understand the earth’s surface or lithosphere as a three dimensional space”

Helen Pallett reflects on discussions at the UK Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference

“Soil is a big mystery”

Jennifer Huber on how soil holds so much carbon, and whether it will go on doing so

“Journalists are going to become more exposed to the language and the concept of risks in covering climate science”

A new book from Oxford’s Reuters Institute surveys climate coverage. (The intro is freely available as a PDF)

“The fate of Africa is largely in the hands of the big polluters”

Mulugeta Ayalew and Florent Gasc discuss how Africa should approach future international regulation of geoengineering

"The president has made it … clear that he wants further action on climate to be a big part of his legacy"

Coral Davenport on why Barack Obama is packing second and third tier positions in US agencies with climate and anergy activists – in Atlantic Media's Government Executive

“A community that takes very seriously the importance of rigorous testing”

Scott K Johnson takes an in depth look at climate models for Ars Technica

“I started to think much more carefully about the type of mindset that is especially drawn to geoengineering as a technological response to global warming”

Climate Progress interviews Clive Hamilton about his recent book Earthmasters, and his next – on the Anthropocene

What narratives might acknowledge our human responsibilities without obsessing, anthropocentrically, about ourselves as either rampant destroyers or benevolent saviors of nature?

Ursula Heise consider recent books on environment and conservation, for Public Books

“All realistic stabilization scenarios are decidedly at odds with current emissions trends”

Quirin Schiermeier profiles Otmar Edenhofer, Chair of IPCC Working Group 3, for Nature

“The highest-resolution, most up-to-date map of global temperatures ever created”

Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic on a creative use of “big data”

From peer-reviewed journals

Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling

 Yu Kosaka& Shang-Ping Xie write to Nature that a natural climate variability is responsible for the recent "hiatus" and warming expected to resume

"These questions have important policy implications, and the IPCC is the right body to answer them. But it need not wait six years to do so"

Nature's special IPCC issue argues giant reports should be ditched for "more relevant research"