Patrick McCully: Kyoto's Carbon Offsetting Moves from Tragedy to Farce

The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has long been known to be a honey pot of carbon credit income for cheating project developers. But a recent investigation commissioned by German NGO CDMWatch shows that the problem is even worse than many critics had feared.
...Because the waste gases are so potent, carbon offset buyers will pay around $140,000 for the destruction of a tonne of HFC-23 - 70 times more than the cost to the chemical companies of incinerating the gases.
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The first problem here is obviously that this scam is increasing global greenhouse gas emissions in the name of reducing them: European polluters are able to avoid cutting their emissions by buying certificates from Chinese chemical companies that represent emission reductions in the same way that Sarah Palin's views on climate change represent intelligence.
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[Any time I write anything critical of the CDM it gets used by the wingnuts as proof that the Kyoto Protocol is a socialist plot, Al Gore is the anti-Christ, and global warming is the biggest hoax since the Holy Prepuce. The denialists will presumably do this again this time. But fear of provoking the conspiracy nuts is not reason to keep quiet about the CDM's failures, but rather a lesson that measures to deal with global warming must be transparent, fair and effective to avoid giving the nutjobs ammunition (and boy do they love their ammo!)].

If We Can Attribute Natural Disasters to Climate Change, Who Could Victims Sue for Damages? : TreeHugger

Say it could be determined that the recent Pakistani flooding was definitively caused 25% by human-caused warming--the rest is a combination of natural variability, poor civic infrastructure, and both legal and illegal deforestation upstream. After that you assess the damage from the disaster and assign an monetary amount--likely well short of the actual suffering caused, but it's something.

What do you do with the 25% figure? Who's actually responsible for that? Do you break down a payout, an amount due by all the nations of the world, based on percentage of total greenhouse gas emissions--China and the United States each responsible for a large chunk, followed by the EU, India, Japan, Australia, Indonesia and so on down the line? Those percentages discounted by the amount that Pakistan itself contributed to global emissions.

Where does it go from there? At the national level you could figure out how much Corporation X contributed to the national emissions total and therefore how much they contributed to the event.

The Hindu : Sci-Tech : How giant reptiles thrived in Arctic

The team concluded the average temperatures of the warmest month on Ellesmere Island during the early Eocene were from 19-20 degrees C, while the coldest month temperature was about 0-3.5 degrees C
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During the Eocene, Ellesmere Island — which is adjacent to Greenland — probably was similar to swampy cypress forests in the southeastern United States today, said Eberle.