RECOMMENDED READING

Forest Carbon Credit Programs Already Showing Cracks

"It could save the rainforests of Borneo, slow climate change and the international community backs it. But a plan to pay tropical countries not to chop down trees risks being discredited by opportunists even before it starts...Reuters has uncovered evidence of a multi-million-dollar offer of assistance from carbon brokers to a government agency, and confusion over whether offset sales were from valid projects." [Reuters]

Bigger Role for Concentrating Solar Power?

"Solar advocates have increased their forecasts for the amount of electricity that could be supplied by a technology known as concentrating solar power, saying that C.S.P. may be able to deliver up to 7 percent electricity demand worldwide by 2030 and up to a quarter of those needs by mid-century." [Green, Inc. - New York Times]

Sweden Picks Site to Bury Nuclear Waste for 100,000 Years

"One of the world's first permanent nuclear waste storage sites that can house highly radioactive waste for more than 100,000 years will be built in Sweden, project officials said on Wednesday. The waste will be buried in tunnels drilled 500 metres (1,640 feet) underground in the bedrock...Construction on the cutting-edge site could begin in 2016 and the site could be inaugurated in 2022 or 2024." [AFP - TerraDaily]

Arranging a Slow Farewell to a Coastal Wildlife Refuge

"A century from now, rising sea levels will have overwhelmed the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, which juts from North Carolina's mainland like a beckoning finger, shielded from the raw ocean by a sliver of barrier beaches known as the Outer Banks...Instead of digging in and fighting the changes, the projects' sponsors will concede to a future that will in no way look like the past. With that, they hope to steer the ecosystem off the road to collapse." [ClimateWire - New York Times]

VISUAL

"Earlier this year, a team of NASA-led scientists set out to predict what the ozone layer would have looked like today and in the future if countries around the world had not signed the Montreal Protocol Treaty banning ozone-depleting chemicals. This series of images shows ozone concentrations over the mid-latitudes of the Western Hemisphere, based on months of calculations by the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry-Climate Model." [Earth Observatory - NASA]