An article in last week’s British paper, The Telegraph, claimed that the IPCC had made yet another significant mistake – this time overstating the sensitivity of the Amazon rainforest to drought.  It turns out that the article severely misrepresented the state of the science. While that one very dry year did not produce the kind of vegetation changes detectible by satellite imagery, it did, in fact, kill a number of trees, turning the rainforest from a “sink” that absorbed 2 billion tons of CO2, to a “source” of even more CO2 from the resulting number of dead trees. The culpa for an initial post to Desmogblog, taking the IPCC to task, is exclusively mea.  The correct narrative of the rainforest’s vulnerability to severe drought comes courtesy of the scientists at Realclimate.

At 5 a.m. Central European Time (CET) on Nov. 24, wind power reached a new record of meeting 43% of Spain's electricity demand - with 9,253 MW of wind energy in operation - of the 21,264 MW total demand.

The previous record was broken March 22 at 6 p.m. CET, with 40.8% of the demand, or 9,862 MW. At 12:30 p.m. CET on Nov. 24, 10,263 MW were being produced simultaneously. The previous record of 10,880 MW of wind production was reached on April 18 at 4:50 p.m. CET, representing 30% of the peninsula's demand.

According to La Asociacion Empresarial Eolica, wind energy prices could drop to 6 euros per MWh. Wind energy has experienced a savings of 2.077 billion euros for the electrical system (4.50 euros of savings per citizen).

After virtually abandoning the issue for three decades, the environmental movement got a bold reality check this week from a new book highlighting relentless human population growth as a driving force behind global warming.

This wouldn’t have raised eyebrows in the 1970s, when the modern environmental movement had its genesis and Paul Erlich’s “The Population Bomb” was on just about everybody’s bookshelf.

Since then, however, overpopulation has dropped from the vocabulary of most environmentalists despite a near doubling of the world’s numbers to an estimated 6.8 billion people today.

It's no silver bullet, but Terra Preta de Indio, a centuries-old agricultural-waste management and fertilization practice, may provide part of the solution to global warming - and to the gathering world food shortage.

Terra Preta is a literal description of the "dark earth" that European explorers first discovered in the Amazon basin, earth that researchers now believe was enriched with charred agricultural waste. Preparing and mixing this biochar into the earth is a great way to sequester carbon AND to fertilize crops.

There are a host of challenges - a large number of hurdles to clear before biochar can be guaranteed as a useful solution to climate change - but when asked if it's a possible goal, Cornell University Assoc. Professor Johannes Lehmann, one of the world's leading experts on biochar, said: "Absolutely!"

A climate conference in Brazil’s Amazon basin has drawn indigenous groups from 11 Latin American countries, Indonesia and Congo. In the largest gathering of its kind, they came to forge a plan whereby wealthier nations would compensate developing countries for saving tropical forests.

Scientists reckon tropical deforestation causes 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. An international carbon-trading plan was a central topic last December at a climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

Having sped past the U.S. as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, China has become a despoiler on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion, plundering smaller nations to fuel its own rising tide of consumption.

A New York Times article just after the UN climate-change conference in Indonesia identified China as the pivotal determinant on global warming. Now, the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine has drawn a scathing portrait of a nation that not only leads the world in coal consumption, but also uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations – the U.S., Russia and India – combined, with ominous implications for the planet.

China says that as a poor nation of 1.3-billion people, it is entitled to pollute and spew greenhouse emissions to alleviate poverty. But with its middle class projected to leap from less than 100 million to 700 million by 2020, and with sales of Porsches, Ferraris and Maseratis flourishing in Beijing, that argument is rapidly losing its edge.