Climate Change Working Group

Image: Chinese workers level coal to be used for generating electricity on a freight train at a railway station in Jiujiang city on June 16, 2014. Imaginechina via AP Images

america.aljazeera.com - August 5th, 2014

China has announced plans to ban the use of coal in its smog-plagued capital by the end of 2020, as the country fights deadly levels of pollution, especially in major cities.

Beijing's Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau posted the plan on its website on Monday, saying the city would instead prioritize electricity and natural gas for heating.

The Chinese central government recently listed environmental protection as one of the top criteria by which leaders will be judged.

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The sun rises over an oil field over the Monterey Shale formation where gas and oil is extracted using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on March 24, 2014 near Lost Hills, California.  David McNew, Getty Images

cbsnews.com - by Michael Roppolo - July 23, 2014

A new international survey shows that Americans are more divided and doubtful about climate change than people in other leading countries, even as the scientific evidence supporting it keeps piling up.

Ipsos-MORI, one of the largest market research companies in Great Britain, released its new Global Trends 2014 survey covering data from 200 questions with over 16,000 interviewees in 20 countries. . .

. . . When asked if they agreed with the statement, "The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity," just 54 percent of Americans surveyed said yes. Although this number indicates a majority, the United States still ranked last among 20 countries in the poll.

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CLICK HERE - The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP)

submitted by Albert Gomez

e360.yale.edu - July 15, 2014

Thirty scientific institutions from 15 countries last week released a report for the United Nations outlining how the world’s major carbon dioxide-emitting nations can slash those emissions by mid-century. Called the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, the initiative aims to provide government leaders with a plan of action in advance of a UN climate summit in September and climate negotiations in Paris in late 2015. Yale Environment 360 asked Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a key player in the decarbonization project, five questions about the initiative and the prospects for global action on the climate front.

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Image: The Keeling Curve

economist.com - May 11th, 2013

Charles D. Keeling, mostly known as Dave, was a soft-spoken, somewhat courtly man who changed the way people and governments see the world. A slightly aimless chemistry graduate with an interest in projects that took him out into the wild, in 1956 he started to build instruments that could measure the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a scientific topic which, back then, was barely even a backwater. In 1958, looking for a place where the level of carbon dioxide would not be too severely influenced by local plants or industry, he installed some instruments high up on Mauna Loa, a Hawaiian volcano.

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