Climate Change Attorney Blog

This week the Department of Interior announced the establishment of the second and third of eight planned regional Climate Science Centers(CSC). The Southeast CSC will be hosted at North Carolina State University and the the Northwest CSC will be a consortium of three universities--Oregon State University, University of Washington and the University of Idaho.

As noted in a press release announcing the two new centers it was stated in part that the centers: "will provide the science needed to understand which resources are most vulnerable to climate change and will work closely with natural and cultural resource managers faced with planning for those changes."

The CSC program is part of what the Department of the Interior has termed a "Strategic Response to Climate Change."

-Steven Silverberg

In the most recent issue of Science, a report concludes that the development of future sources of carbon emissions pose a greater threat of climate change than existing sources. As reported by the Carnegie Institution of Science, if no additional sources of carbon emissions are built, existing sources would increase global warming, but probably not beyond a critical tipping point. However, the authors of the report note: “Because most of the threat from climate change will come from energy infrastructure we have yet to build, it is critically important that we build the right stuff now – that is, low carbon emission energy technologies,...We cannot be complacent just because we haven’t yet reached a point of no return.”

-Steven Silverberg