January 5, 2010 - On Monday the National Park Service ruled that Nantucket Sound is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The ruling was sought by the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag tribes who asserted that the wind farm planned by Cape Wind would interfere with their worship of sunrise. The ruling means likely delays, negotiations and changes to the project. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar set a deadline of March 1 for the tribes and the project’s developer, Energy Management Inc., to reach a compromise. If a compromise is not achieved, then Salazar himself could decide the project's fate. Here's the story from Abby Goodnough NYTimes.

December 6, 2009 - Tomorrow some 15,000 delegates from around the world will be gathered in Copenhagen for what is formally called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The goal of the week long conference is to lay out a plan for a global response to global warming. The core premises of the conference are that climate change is happening and that human activity is either causing or contributing to it. There is a general worldwide consensus on these two fundamental points.

However, a general consensus leaves a lot of room for dissent and the dissenters have had support from a recent controversy at East Anglia University in the UK, a leading university in the field of environmental studies. There, researchers who support strong action to reverse the emissions of greenhouse gasses, emailed each other about how to best present evidence that supports global warming and how to suppress evidence that is contrary. Here's one of the many stories on this subject from Guardian UK. And then there's news that global warming has been stalled for the past ten years as reported in Der Spiegel.

Beyond these disputes about the data, there are deep divisions among the governments and peoples of the world. Countries emerging from poverty, such as China and India blame rich established countries like the US for creating the problem and say that rich countries should do more to mitigate emissions even as they (the emerging countries) contribute an ever larger share. More on this issue.

But even if the issues about the fundamental data and who-to-blame are resolved and the world agrees to take unified action there is the question of what to do? Should the rich countries pay Brazil, Indonesia, Congo and Burma to stop burning and logging timber in their rain forests? Should the world make a concerted effort to switch from coal and oil based sources to non emitting sources such as sun, wind and nuclear?

Here's an illuminating view from aliens written by NY Times science commentator Olivia Judson: Betting on Copenhagen

November 19, 2009 - One of the biggest issues in the ongoing debate about C02 and global warming is measurement. How quickly are we adding C02 to our atmosphere? It's not a simple matter of adding up the total output of C02 each year. The reason is that land and seas absorb much of the C02 that is emitted. Increased absorption of C02 is believed to be the reason that oceans have become more acidic. It may also be the reason that the effects of a thickening C02 blanket have been mitigated thus far. But now, after absorbing much more C02 than in the past, the oceans' ability to absorb C02 seems to be diminishing. This means that the amount of C02 remaining in the atmosphere may increase more quickly than it would otherwise. Measuring this change in absorption is difficult but necessary to accurately forecast future C02 levels. Here's the full story from David Biello at Scientific American.

November 6, 2009 - Brona Simon, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Historical Commission has decided that Nantucket Sound is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic places because of its significance to the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag indian tribes. The tribes have maintained that windmills on Horseshoe Shoal will disturb their ritual of greeting the sun every morning. In a letter made public yesterday Simon wrote that she believes Nantucket Sound should be listed on the National Register as a traditional cultural property. This view is opposite that of the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that led the environmental review of the Cape Wind project. The National Park Service has been asked to review the claim - this could delay the Cape Wind project for up to a year. Here's more from Beth Daley at Boston.com.