carbon tagged posts

A great whale is worth US$2 million (NZ$3.1 million). The size of that number so terrified Ralph Chami, the economist who appraised the whales, that he sought refuge in a church for the first time in 30 years. Inside St. Matthew’s Cathedral here, a few blocks from Chami’s office at the International Monetary Fund, the economist said he had “a conversation with the Maker. I said: ‘If you aim to humiliate me, there are other ways of doing it.’ “

Chami had, after all, veered outside his lane to make a first-of-its-kind claim. He studies macroeconomic policies in developing countries, not ecology...

There are 1.85 billion, billion tonnes of carbon on Earth, with more than 99% of it resident beneath our feet. Scientists from the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) project have spent 10 years assessing the “reservoirs and fluxes” of the chemical element. In other words, they worked out where carbon is held and in what form, and how it moves through the Earth system.

The findings will help understand the limits of life on our planet and in the forecasting of volcanic eruptions.

“This work really came out of the realisation that much of the carbon that we are concerned about for climate change is only a tiny fraction of our planet’s carbon...