Climate Change

A new year brings renewed public discussion of climate change to Baltimore. Notre Dame of Maryland University is launching a " Green Baltimore " series of four forums in early 2013 on environmental topics, featuring experts from government, business, academia and nonprofit groups. The first session Jan. 2 will tackle the science and policy debate on global warming, focusing on the impacts in Maryland and this area. Baltimore city's Climate Action Plan will be reviewed, as will the state's draft plan for reducing greenhouse gases across Maryland.  Scheduled speakers include Danielle Schwarzmann, an economist with the state Department of the Environment, John Cookson, instructor and director of the environmental sustainability major at Notre Dame and Afred D'Agostino, a chemistry professor there.

Declaring that Maryland's coastal areas are increasingly at risk from a rising sea level, Gov. Martin O'Malley has ordered state agencies to weigh the growing risks of flooding in deciding where and how to construct state buildings. "Billions of dollars of investments in public infrastructure will be threatened if the state of Maryland fails to prepare adequately for climate change," he said in Friday's executive order, which calls for avoiding low-lying sites and elevating new or reconstructed state buildings to avert flooding.

Taking a cue from what they're learning in class, some Johns Hopkins public health students are spearheading a climate-conscious drive to get the university to divest itself of fossil fuel holdings. Just before taking off for the holiday break, leaders of the Refuel Our Future campaign delivered to JHU President Ronald J. Daniels' office a petition with more than 800 signatures on it calling on the university to rid its $2.7 billion endowment of fossil energy stocks in an effort to ease the predicted environmental and health impacts of climate change.

In your editorial on Doha's failure ("Global climate talks stall - again," Dec. 11), you wrote: "The people who went to the polls last month knew which candidate favored stronger action in this arena and voted for him. " We voted for President Barack Obama to set sane energy policies, rational environmental policies and logical fiscal policies. Until the House is ready to present him with the sensible fiscal legislation he wants, President Obama should ignore fiscal issues and focus on educating the public on the energy and environmental legislation needed to slow climate change.

Spurred by a recent article in Rolling Stone, some Baltimore television meteorologists are weighing in against global climate change -- and are drawing some criticism for it. WBAL-TV's Tony Pann shared the article, which calls some TV meteorologists "climate crackpots", on his Facebook page. He, along with others like WMAR-TV's Mike Masco and former WMAR meteorologist Justin Berk, argue climate change is an unproven theory. The Rolling Stone article, published Dec. 5 , questions why more TV meteorologists don't agree with global warming.

A pioneering regional compact to fight climate change stands at a crossroads, as officials from Maryland and eight other Northeast states meet Tuesday in New York to weigh new limits on their power plants' carbon dioxide emissions. With emissions significantly reduced since the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative began in 2008 - though mainly from other factors - the states are weighing how much lower to try to push carbon-dioxide releases through the end of the decade without risking stifling their economic recovery.

One can just imagine the future "Jeopardy" TV quiz show answer: The name of the international conference that took place in early December of 2012 that critics universally panned for accomplishing little despite overwhelming evidence of a global ecological catastrophe on the horizon. "Alex, what is the Doha Climate Change Conference?" would be the winning question and surely worth a lot to the right contestant. After all, the planet is already in "double jeopardy" - not only from climate change but from the continuing failure of the wealthiest nations to do much about it. As President Barack Obama is looking to come up with $60-to-$80 billion to offset the worst effects of Hurricane Sandy, a storm that practically shut down New York City, the world's media center, one would think the call to avoid more such costly catastrophes in the future would be deafening.

Wally Vait has a good eye for such things, so I'm not surprised that during a hike Saturday on the North Central Railroad Trail in Freeland, he spotted an Eastern garter snake on a sun-splashed rock. The question: What was it doing there, after one of the coldest Novembers on record, and with the winter solstice two weeks away? Did a snake aboveground portend doom for us all, as in the purported Mayan prophecy for Dec. 21, 2012? Was this a sign of the Almighty's unhappiness with Maryland's same-sex marriage law?

Gov. Martin O'Malley has urged President Obama to look to Maryland as a model for how government can fight climate change, while also appealing for federal help in his own quest to get wind turbines built off Ocean City. In a letter released Thursday by the governor's office , O'Malley welcomed Obama's recent call for renewed efforts to deal with climate change in the destructive wake of the storm Sandy, which ravaged New York City and the New Jersey shore just before the election.

While politicians spar in Washington over how to keep the nation from going over a "fiscal cliff," environmental activists warn that the wind-energy industry faces its own cliff if Congress doesn't act soon to extend a federal tax break for turbine construction, which expires at the end of the year. The latest alarm comes from Environment Maryland , which held a press conference on Baltimore's Federal Hill Wednesday to tout the environmental benefits of wind farms, including healthier air, water conservation and reduced emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants.