Retailers Complain About Global Warming Christmas

Retailers are calling it the Coat Crisis of 2006, a fashion fiasco measured in racks of unsold fur-lined shearlings at Saks Fifth Avenue and down puffer jackets at Bloomingdale’s. Balmy temperatures on the East Coast, with average highs this holiday season 15 degrees warmer than last year, have been disastrous for sales of all kinds of cold-weather clothing, from cashmere caps to wool scarves. What seemed like a meteorological aberration — the coatless, hatless, gloveless morning commute in Washington, New York and Boston — is starting to feel like the new normal, encouraging consumers to splurge on a flat-screen television instead of a peacoat. The glut of winter wear has sent a chill through the executive suites of major retailers, who count on big profits from coats in the crucial holiday shopping season. They are even starting to grumble about the first “global warming Christmas.” So like farmers praying for rain, merchants have begun scanning weather forecasts, hoping for a sudden drop in temperature to lift their sales. “At first, you start to chuckle in the morning when it’s 50 degrees, then you start to snicker and then you start to curse,” said Rick Weinstein, director of sales and marketing at Searle, a Manhattan retailer that supplies coats to high-end department stores. Read the rest here.

Global Warming Solutions: Markets, taxes, or nothing at all?

Assume man-made global warming is a big, bad problem. Let's try some thought experiments concerning what, if anything, should be done about it. One "solution" might be recognizing, at least, that there is nothing to be done about it. One might argue that for the sake of lifting billions of poor people out of abject poverty humanity must continue to burn cheap oil and coal to fuel economic growth in this century. One unavoidable side effect is that this will increase the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus boost global average temperatures by between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. People three generations hence will just have to adapt to this increase. Fortunately because of the wealth produced by burning fossil fuels, average incomes will have increased about sevenfold and so they will have the resources to do so. In addition, wealth may enable them to develop new low pollution energy technologies. But let's further assume that that it turns out that most people prudentially prefer to leave a cooler planet to their posterity. What to do then? In that case, one proposed "solution" is a global carbon market. This is the idea behind the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) established to meet its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Countries set a limit on how much carbon dioxide they will emit and then allocate permits to emitters. The permits can be bought and sold among emitters. Those that can cheaply abate their emissions will do so and have some permits leftover. The cheap abaters can then sell their extra permits to other emitters who have a harder time reducing their emissions. Thus a market in pollution permits finds the cheapest way to cut emissions. The advantage of creating a carbon market is that it allows for the setting an overall specific limit on carbon emissions. For example, some scientists argue that it will be necessary to cut humanity's carbon emissions by 70 percent in order to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Once carbon has a price, it boosts the prices that people pay for electricity and gasoline. Read the rest of the article here.

Open peer review a bust for NATURE

Back in the summer, we reported that Nature, perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal on the planet, was experimenting with open peer review (OPR). Instead of simply assigning manuscripts to a set of anonymous reviewers, Nature offered the authors the opportunity to also have their work posted on a publicly accessible site that provided a mechanism for making comments on the text. The editors would then combine the peer reviewers' recommendations with the public comments when making decisions regarding whether to publish the work or to require additional revisions. Nature ran a trial of this system (details are available as a FAQ) from the beginning of June until the end of September, and followed up on it with surveys of authors and editors. Their resulting analysis makes it clear that, at least as structured, OPR went nowhere. Out of nearly 1,400 manuscripts chosen for review during that period, only five percent of the authors agreed to have theirs subjected to OPR. Those 71 manuscripts elicited a grand total of 92 comments; nearly half received no comments at all, and over half of the comments were directed at eight individual papers. Read the rest of the article here.

Climate Change vs Mother Nature: Scientists reveal that bears have stopped hibernating

Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world. In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep. Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, slowing their body rhythms to a minimum and drawing on stored resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. The barely breathing creatures can lose up to 40 per cent of their body weight before warmer springtime weather rouses them back to life. But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera - which have a slightly different genetic identity from bear populations elsewhere in the world - have remained active throughout recent winters, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation (La Fundación Oso Pardo - FOP) said yesterday. Read the rest of the article here.