Has India tossed out the Kama Sutra and come up with another way of screwing the world?

The country is getting in the way of international efforts to protect the climate by phasing out HFCs.

HFCs have become popular coolants since CFCs were phased out under the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 treaty to protect the ozone layer. Today, more than 100 million air conditioners use HFCs in the U.S. alone, and lots of fridges too. The switch from CFCs to HFCs helped save the ozone layer, but it turns out that HFCs are terrible for the climate. And as the ozone heals but the weather goes bonkers, world leaders from U.S. President Barack Obama to Chinese President Xi Jinping have been pledging to work together to stamp out the use of HFCs.

India’s leaders have publicly voiced support for efforts to ban the use of HFCs by amending the Montreal Protocol. But when it came to crunch time during meetings in Bangkok this week, the nation’s negotiators prevented formal discussion of making any such changes.

Continue reading at Grist … http://grist.org/news/india-blocking-efforts-to-save-planet-from-climate-killing-air-conditioners/

It’s extremely likely that humans have been the dominant cause of global warming since the 1950s, according to a landmark report from the world’s top panel of climate scientists. And we’re failing in our efforts to keep atmospheric warming below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit, which many scientists say is needed to avoid massive disruption.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conducted an epic review of climate research over the last three years. It is summarizing the most important findings in its fifth assessment report, which offers the clearest picture science has ever painted of how humans are reshaping the climate and the planet.

Here, in a nutshell, are the main findings of a summary [PDF] of part one of the assessment report, which focuses on the science of climate change:

Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes. …

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.

The IPCC also concludes that oceans have absorbed more of Earth’s excess heat since the 1990s than was the case during prior periods, explaining what climate deniers wrongly describe as a warming slowdown. And the panel revised downward the lower limit of warming that’s expected once we double the atmosphere’s CO2 concentrations, but left the upper limit unchanged from its 2007 assessment.

For background on the IPCC and this assessment report, be sure to check out this explainer.

And to save you the trouble of reading the dense 36-page summary released on Friday, we’ve rounded up highlights here — key numbers, facts, and graphs:

Continue reading at Grist: http://grist.org/climate-energy/what-the-ipcc-found-the-big-news-from-the-new-climate-assessment/

The world’s glaciers are wasting away at a cracking pace — but it’s not just because the climate is warming.

Soot and other black carbon is settling on ice and snow, absorbing the sun’s rays and causing frozen water molecules to melt. It can be hard to tell how much of the melt to attribute to warming and how much to soot.

But researchers have pinpointed a period shortly after the Industrial Revolution when black carbon alone appears to have caused glaciers to melt in the European Alps.

Continues at Grist … http://grist.org/news/we-cant-blame-everything-on-climate-change-soot-melts-glaciers-too/