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This paper puts the spotlight on the discursive practices by which politicians, interest group representatives, and other influential public figures in effect promote climate inaction by conveying confidence in technological innovation. Data consist of policy debates on prominent public service television in Denmark. The study uses Discursive Psychology to examine how references to technological innovation are: (i) sequentially invoked as the solution to problematization of policies that allow high levels of emissions; (ii) grammatically designed to highlight the force of technological innovation; and (iii) rhetorically produced to support a subjective contrast between a pessimist and an optimist outlook. Overall, the study finds that invocation of technological optimism constitutes a 'ready answer' to communicative challenges that emerge during the debates, which effectively justifies inaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has tied the journalistic norm of 'balance' to an overarching tendency to polarize the climate debate between realists and contrarians. This study uses conversation analysis to advance our knowledge about how climate changes are debated verbally in practice. It builds upon a corpus of current televised climate change panel debates in Denmark. The corpus confirms a documented turn from debating if global warming is a fact to debating what we should do to reduce emissions. Analyses detail two methods, which the interviewer invokes to administer turn-taking: (a) stand-alone next speaker reference and (b) prefatory address term + interrogatives that implicitly project disagreement. These methods help interviewers sustain their formal neutrality. But the study also finds that perspectives are orchestrated to (re)produce multiple polarizations between representatives of different interests and ideologies, for example activists versus business representatives, which might not be helpful in solving the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the topics receiving much attention in recent years is climate change and the potential of its integration in impact assessment, both in terms of achieving mitigation and adaptation. Renewable energy projects are part of the efforts to mitigate climate change, replacing the use of fossil fuel with CO2-neutral energy sources. A variety of these projects are subject to environmental impact assessment (EIA), which raises the following questions: What role does an impact assessment play? When is the project environmentally friendly? How are climate change-related impacts assessed in projects with inherent positive effects on climate change? This paper reviews practice, and takes up these questions based on a document study of 19 EIA reports of renewable energy projects in Denmark. The results show that climate change mitigation is included in 18 of the EIA reports reviewed, while adaptation is absent. Also, the results show an emphasis on positive impacts in the reports, and in a few cases discussions of enhancements. Identification and assessment of negative climate change impacts are less apparent. This leads to a discussion of the results in the light of the purpose of EIA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global warming increases the temperature of the planet, so does the likelihood that European countries will be faced with climate migrants. Since climate migrants cannot apply for asylum, they would need public and political support to gain residency in the countries to which they migrate. In this article, I show how likely Danes are to grant residency to climate migrants compared to other types of migrants and explore what individual‐level factors explain variations in this. I answer the two questions by combining the results of a conjoint survey experiment with an election survey. The results show that climate migrants are perceived to be less deserving of permanent residency than migrants who typically could qualify for asylum, but more likely to be deemed deserving than those who could broadly be called economic migrants. The results also show that three factors explain variations in this – attitudes to climate change, attitudes to migration and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The outcome of COP15, the conference on climate change in Copenhagen, was the Copenhagen Accord which was recognised by the 193 countries that attended. The Accord set no compulsory limits on carbon emissions, and none of the countries that introduced it – USA, China, India [with Brazil and South Africa] – has signed the Annexe to the Kyoto Agreement, committing them to limit their emissions. Climate change is only of secondary importance to them compared with eradicating poverty. Nevertheless three of these countries are in the lead currently for installing renewables, far ahead of most of those [only 37 out of 187 countries world-wide] who are committed to limiting their emissions. This paper explains why. The main function of renewable energy is to save fuel, thereby reducing energy imports and maintaining security of energy supplies without the need to fight world wars over them. Also, being capital intensive with all the money paid up-front, renewables avoid the price fluctuations that bedevil the oil and other fossil fuel industries. As capacity is doubling every 3 years, renewables prices will come down with savings of scale, so wind power in particular will soon be the cheapest form of power. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A successor accord to the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to be wrapped up in Copenhagen in December 2009, but negotiations are now expected to extend through the South African UNFCCC conference in 2011 since the Copenhagen talks failed to yield a binding agreement. To reach a comprehensive deal, major gaps between developing and developed countries must be narrowed. The gaps include the character of common but differentiated responsibilities, financial support, technology transfer, and trade subsidies and sanctions. The paper concludes with some options and recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African governments face increasing pressure from major export destinations, primarily former colonial and slave-owning countries, to be climate change compliant. This will certainly be on display at the upcoming December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which will seek to strengthen climate change rules agreed on in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and adopt new protocols on global climate change regulation. Climate change is a double-edged sword: on one side it is hitting Africa's agricultural sector with increased droughts, floods, extreme frost and wildfires; and on the other, African governments are being forced to respond to stringent regulatory regimes imposed by international export destinations. Currently, the per capita greenhouse gas emissions from the highly industrialised nations - the North - is estimated to be four times that of Africa and the rest of the developing world. Twin research questions were investigated in this article: (1) to what extent does climate change impact on African trade and development, and (2) how can African governments stay on a path of sustained trade and development in this era of climate change? The article argues that Africa's survival in these times of climate change compliance rests on a shift to greater intra-African trade, as individual nations move towards cleaner and more organic technologies to become full-fledged partners in the international climate change regulatory regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM; ∼ 55.9 Ma) was a period of rapid and sustained global warming associated with significant carbon emissions. It coincided with the North Atlantic opening and emplacement of the North Atlantic Igneous Province (NAIP), suggesting a possible causal relationship. Only a very limited number of PETM studies exist from the North Sea, despite its ideal position for tracking the impact of both changing climate and NAIP activity. Here we present sedimentological, mineralogical, and geochemical proxy data from Denmark in the eastern North Sea, exploring the environmental response to the PETM. An increase in the chemical index of alteration and a kaolinite content up to 50 % of the clay fraction indicate an influx of terrestrial input shortly after the PETM onset and during the recovery, likely due to an intensified hydrological cycle. The volcanically derived zeolite and smectite minerals comprise up to 36 % and 90 % of the bulk and clay mineralogy respectively, highlighting the NAIP's importance as a sediment source for the North Sea and in increasing the rate of silicate weathering during the PETM. X-Ray fluorescence element core scans also reveal possible hitherto unknown NAIP ash deposition both prior to and during the PETM. Geochemical proxies show that an anoxic to sulfidic environment persisted during the PETM, particularly in the upper half of the PETM body with high concentrations of molybdenum (Mo EF > 30), uranium (U EF up to 5), sulfur (∼ 4 wt %), and pyrite (∼ 7 % of bulk). At the same time, export productivity and organic-matter burial reached its maximum intensity. These new records reveal that negative feedback mechanisms including silicate weathering and organic carbon sequestration rapidly began to counteract the carbon cycle perturbations and temperature increase and remained active throughout the PETM. This study highlights the importance of shelf sections in tracking the environmental response to the PETM climatic changes and as carbon sinks driving the PETM recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate changes are expected to result in a warmer global climate, with increased inter-annual variability. In this study, the possible impacts of these climate changes on irrigation and low stream flow are investigated using a distributed hydrological model of a sandy catchment in western Denmark. The IPCC climate scenario A1B was chosen as the basis for the study, and meteorological forcings (precipitation, reference evapotranspiration and temperature) derived from the ECHAM5-RACMO regional climate model for the period 2071-2100 was applied to the model. Two bias correction methods, delta change and Distribution-Based Scaling, were used to evaluate the importance of the bias correction method. Using the annual irrigation amounts, the 5- percentile stream flow, the median minimum stream flow and the mean stream flow as indicators, the irrigation and the stream flow predicted using the two methods were compared. The study found that irrigation is significantly underestimated when using the delta change method, due to the inability of this method to account for changes in inter-annual variability of precipitation and reference ET and the resulting effects on irrigation demands. However, this underestimation of irrigation did not result in a significantly higher summer stream flow, because the summer stream flow in the studied catchment is controlled by the winter and spring recharge, rather than the summer precipitation. Additionally, future increases in CO2 are found to have a significant effect on both irrigation and low flow, due to reduced transpiration from plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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