Introducing Climate Change Science Blog

The world will be watching Copenhagen between December 7 and 18. The Copenhagen Climate Conference is the most important meeting of climate negotiations since the Kyoto conference in 1997. The Kyoto Accord that came out of that conference expires in 2012. Kyoto, it is widely acknowledged, did not succeed in achieving its goal: reducing carbon dioxide emissions. A new regime is needed. Many scientists say humanity must act very soon lest the impacts of global warming become not merely bad but absolutely catastrophic.

I will be sending multimedia posts on climate science from the Copenhagen Conference. I want to provide visitors to this blog and other blogs to which I am contributing climate-science context for understanding the conference and its significance. Along with diplomats, environmental activists and industry lobbyists; some of the world's leading climate scientists will be at the Copenhagen conference. I will meet them and produce postings about their researcher, their insights and their concerns. I will be learning and posting about climate impacts on ecosystems, on humans and on the physical environment, such as the world's ice. I will be learning and posting about plans for adapting to altered conditions that will occur even if urgent action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide output.

My postings will be seasoned by my experience reporting on climate change. In the last decade, I have traveled to two dozen countries and all the world's continents to report on this topic, including to within 800 miles of each of Earth's poles. I have been to many far flung research sites, including Palmer Station a US research base in Antarctica; the North Greenland Ice core Project site in the center of the Greenland Ice sheet and Sverdrup station, the Norwegian base on the Arctic Ocean island of Spitzbergen.

I have plans to meet with many of the scientists I have interviewed in the past, many of whom will be attending the conference and some of whom are based in Copenhagen. I will meet many others as well, including some of the top scientists advising the Obama administration on climate issues. I invite you to visit my postings to follow my reporting beginning on the first day of the Conference, on December 7.

This story was reported for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting as part of the Copenhagen News Collaborative, a cooperative project of several independent news organizations. Check out the feed here from Mother Jones.