CS3 In the News

A group of MIT-affiliated cyclists hope to fuel themselves from New York to Washington in a few weeks to raise awareness -- and money -- for climate change initiatives. The nine graduate students, researchers and friends are all planning to take part in the Climate Ride 2008, a five-day, 320-mile ride from the Big Apple to the nation's capital that symbolizes the nation's need to get out of the car.

Says policy-making requires ambitious short-term goals.

Long-term climate change policy in the United States and abroad is likely to change very slowly, warns an MIT professor who says the lack of future flexibility argues for stronger short-term goals to reduce carbon emissions.

Coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy, this Synthesis and Assessment 2.1 report is titled Scenarios of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Atmospheric Concentrations, and Review of Integrated Scenario Development and Application, and provides a new long-term, global reference for greenhouse gas stabilization scenarios and an evaluation of the process by which scenarios are developed and used.

DOE Press Release

Today's release of a widely anticipated international report on global warming coincides with a growing clamor within the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the potentially devastating consequences of global climate change. "There's clear evidence that greenhouse gases have been increasing by very large amounts since preindustrial times, and the vast majority of these increases are due to human activity," said Prinn, whose specific task on the panel was to assess this issue.

There's one basic answer to the question, Why are we worried about energy? The answer is climate change, argues MIT's Ron Prinn: if there were no global warming threat associated with fuels like oil and coal, there'd be no crisis.