Written By: - Date published: 7:18 am, December 3rd, 2010 - 63 comments
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 pm, December 1st, 2010 - 121 comments
When they’re not polluting our rivers or fighting animal welfare laws, our farmers, the ‘guardians of the land’, are opposing having to pay for their greenhouse emissions. Now, with the Earth having just clocked up its warmest 12 months since records began, farmers are scratching their heads at the early start to the summer drought.
Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, November 29th, 2010 - 24 comments
It seems I’m not alone in feeling outrage at attempts to bury any sensible debate on the shape and extent of New Zealand’s coal operations
Written By: - Date published: 8:25 am, November 27th, 2010 - 53 comments
On Monday the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference begins in Cancun, Mexico. This is the successor to last year’s spectacularly failed Copenhagen Summit. Nothing useful will be accomplished there. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that we lack the will to save ourselves.
Written By: - Date published: 1:50 pm, November 22nd, 2010 - 23 comments
The Commissioner for the Environment says New Zealand’s greenhouse emissions will be 26% above 1990 levels in 2020, compared to the Nats’ promise to cut them by 10-20% – leaving us with a $1b bill. Worse, the IEA shows that even if we and other countries meet our promised cuts its only half of what’s needed to avert disaster.
Written By: - Date published: 7:37 am, November 22nd, 2010 - 196 comments
It takes many people working together to achieve anything really worthwhile. This also applies to our biggest project yet. Saving a planet. So why can’t we get started? Because human society based around the market can not do it. The answers will only com from the Left. The Left parties, Labour in particular, need to get serious and move Leftward.
Written By: - Date published: 7:38 am, November 20th, 2010 - 102 comments
It has been a year since the CRU emails were stolen and the “climategate” “scandal” broke. There’s an interesting summary at the ClimateSight blog. Meanwhile the record temperatures keep rolling in, the ice keeps melting all over the world, and The Guardian asks “Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?”.
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, November 13th, 2010 - 74 comments
Climate change and a shoals of dirty little red herrings would seem to go together like salt and pepper or cheese and pickle.
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, October 25th, 2010 - 5 comments
The release of 400,000 classified documents on the Iraq war today highlights a much broader issue for New Zealand. As the world moves into uncertainty, some commentators call it a ‘new new world order’, New Zealand must establish itself definitively, cementing the values we wish to hold true for the coming century.
Written By: - Date published: 5:06 pm, October 10th, 2010 - 11 comments
Today is 10 October 2010, a significant date for two serious reasons. And one silly one!
Written By: - Date published: 10:52 am, October 4th, 2010 - 19 comments
The tiny island nation of Kiribati puts the “developed” world to shame.
Written By: - Date published: 3:30 pm, September 27th, 2010 - 38 comments
Christopher Monckton has been one of the “highest profile” climate change deniers. But it looks like his days as poster pinup for the denier movement are well and truly over. He’s busted.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, August 28th, 2010 - 7 comments
Bryan Walker at Hot Topic looks at the large scale renewable energy projects that are being developed in various countries around the world. The contrast with the dated approach to energy from Gerry Brownlee is quite striking. That has been described as “The Government’s energy strategy prioritises drilling and mining for more oil and coal, while providing virtually no stimulation for the development of renewable energy and clean technology. It … makes no attempt to set measurable emissions reduction targets.”
Written By: - Date published: 11:04 am, August 17th, 2010 - 11 comments
Believing that a law suit will make climate change disappear is up there with believing the king can turn back the tides (which poor, maligned Canute was trying to disprove, btw). Nonetheless, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, which appears to know little about the climate and less about science, is giving it a go. Nick S takes a more detailed look at the issue.
Written By: - Date published: 11:57 am, August 16th, 2010 - 98 comments
What do you do when you find science inconvenient to your ideology? Why, you strike it down! Burn the heretics! Or in the modern equivalent, you set the lawyers on them, and try and have the facts declared illegal.
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, August 13th, 2010 - 32 comments
In Morning Report yesterday there was a clear question and statement on the difference between weather events and climate. This is a question that always seems to confuse our CCD’s (climate change deniers and skeptics). So it is worth examining it a bit in the view of some of the unusual weather that has been happening recently. A increased frequency of such events is going to be the main effect of climate change over time, leading eventually to famines.
Written By: - Date published: 9:57 am, August 13th, 2010 - 21 comments
Climate change, peak oil, resource exhaustion, and over-population are combing to cause a new food crisis. Grains supply half the calories we consume directly and feed much of our live-stock. The prices of those are skyrocketing because supply can’t match demand. Starting with Russia, major exporters are limiting the amount they send abroad to keep what they have for their own people.
Written By: - Date published: 8:29 am, August 7th, 2010 - 23 comments
“Global climate talks appear to have slipped backward after five days of negotiations in Bonn, the chief U.S. delegate said Friday, adding that some countries were reneging on promises they made last year to cut greenhouse gas emissions”.
Written By: - Date published: 7:19 am, August 6th, 2010 - 70 comments
Extract from an article by Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. “I’m a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.”
Written By: - Date published: 9:05 am, July 29th, 2010 - 38 comments
The warning indicators of an impending ecological collapse keep piling up. Forests get most of the headlines, but in many ways the oceans are the lungs of the planet. And they’ve been smoking 30 a day for too long.
Written By: - Date published: 10:31 pm, July 19th, 2010 - 13 comments
The ETS-waste regulations currently being consulted on by the Government include a loophole that will actually increase greenhouse gas production in order to save polluters money. Who wrote the regs for the Government? A company that will be able to help landfills exploit this loophole by paying less whilst polluting more.
Written By: - Date published: 10:57 pm, July 15th, 2010 - 16 comments
At Hot Topic, Gareth has a post on Christopher Monckton attempting to stifle the well-justified criticism of himself . For some reason he seems to think that it is ok for him to criticize working scientists despite having little knowledge of the subjects. However he seems to think they should not be able to analyze or criticize his level of stupid ineptitude.
Written By: - Date published: 10:19 pm, July 14th, 2010 - 16 comments
Are swimsuit specials a thoughtful, clever way of arousing interest in climate change? Or are they little more than sexist idiocy? Are you curious enough to find out? Read this from the Guardian…
Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, July 5th, 2010 - 34 comments
We know that the vast majority of climate scientists support the explanation of anthropogenic climate change set out by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. That majority is now quantified in the first study of its kind published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Expert credibility in climate change.
Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, June 30th, 2010 - 28 comments
In a moment of uncharacteristic political honesty, John Key has come clean on his ETS. It loads “disproportionate” costs on to householders. National’s scheme is all about keeping things sweet for their business mates – muffling the price signal that an ETS is supposed to send by (as usual) socialising the costs.
Written By: - Date published: 5:55 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 25 comments
I’m tired of hearing about the ‘medieval warming period’ and ‘hockey-stick’, which are respectively almost two decades and a decade old. It came up in comments today again, and I get the impression that CCDs are firstly euro-centric and secondly never seem to look at the current evidence. There have been many studies that substantially support the ‘hockey-stick’ and none that support the MWP. The Crock of the Week did this video explaining it…
Written By: - Date published: 3:29 pm, June 26th, 2010 - 24 comments
Peter Sinclair in Crock of the week uses some old classic movie and TV footage to point out the debunking the ‘climategate’ myth. Quite simply this hack of the e-mails hasn’t changed any of the science of climate change and is as ineffectual as most of the anti-science inquisition has been over the last century. It really just shows how pathetic and ineffectual that the CCDs are becoming.
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, June 25th, 2010 - 44 comments
The point of an ETS isn’t to just blindly pay more, it is to change our behaviour so that we don’t have to. National don’t get it, so they have brought us the worst of all possible ETS schemes. Badly designed and devoid of vision. An ETS with all of the costs and none of the benefits.
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, June 19th, 2010 - 1,346 comments
The most comprehensive collection and analysis of global temperature trends comes from NOAA.Their global temperatures report for May 2010 makes sobering reading. Since 1880, the globally hottest 10 years have happened in the last 15 years. It looks like 2010 will beat the previous hottest year in 2005, and we’re still at the least energetic part of the sunspot cycle.
Written By: - Date published: 11:01 am, June 18th, 2010 - 7 comments
President Obama has just come out and said the US and the world needs to get off its oil addiction. But, just as we’ve been talking about climate change for nearly two centuries, before it was even a problem, and done nothing about it, Presidents have been declaring its time to end the oil age for 40 years and nothing has changed. Why can’t we get serious about saving ourselves?
Written By: - Date published: 9:16 am, June 11th, 2010 - 37 comments
The sun is emerging from its deep sleep of the Solar Minimum. The increased sensitivity of human networks from satellites to power grids is starting to worry people who know what they’re talking about enough to cause them to have held a meeting on it. The sun produces sunspots in a reasonably regular eleven year […]
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