Author: Gareth

Oxfam NZ Election Debate: Climate change

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Environment minister Nick Smith, Labour’s David Parker and the Green Party’s Kennedy Graham debate climate policy in these edited highlights from the first of Oxfam NZ’s election debates, held last week in Auckland. Debate ranged from whether New Zealand can become carbon-free to the likelihood of a cross-party agreement on long-term issues that last more than an election cycle, and from the effect of investing in roads to the question of bringing agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

More on the debate from Oxfam NZ’s Jason Garman below the fold…

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The denial tango

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A telling little ditty to start your week with a chuckle: Australia’s Men With Day Jobs perform the Denial Tango (lyrics below the fold). And for your further amusement, Joe Romm at Climate Progress notes an interesting cartoon at the New York Times — Happy Climate Change Denial Season.

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Riddle-me-ree/open thread

We haven’t had an open thread for a while, and as there seems to be some desire to discuss Matt Ridley‘s recent lecture at the RSA in Edinburgh (see Bishop Hill for the first appearance thereof), here’s your chance. There’s a lot of other interesting stuff around — feel free to roam. But first, I’d like to offer some observations on Ridley, his lecture and the response from the usual suspects.

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Cracked PIG spawns big berg

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NASA’s IceBridge operation for this Antarctic summer has discovered that the Pine Island Glacier is in the process of calving a massive iceberg — 880 square kilometres of the floating glacier tongue is about to go floatabout, leaving the glacier snout shorter than any time since its position was first recorded in the 1940s. The crack was first spotted by a flight on October 14, and surveyed during a flight on the 28th — featured in the video above. NASA’s Earth Observatory has more pictures and commentary, and there’s a background piece for the video at the NASA IceBridge news page. See also the NASA Ice Fickr stream and NASA Explorer Youtube channel.

The gullible leading the credulous (with a sting in the tale)

One for the “It would be big news if it were true” file — according to John O’Sullivan (see So Many Lies — And The Liar Who Tells Them) a Japanese satellite has discovered that CO2 emissions from the world’s least developed countries are greater than from industrial nations. Here’s how he describes the discovery in an article titled New Satellite Data Contradicts Carbon Dioxide Climate Theory:

Bizarrely, the [satellite] maps prove exactly the opposite of all conventional expectations revealing that the least industrialized regions are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet.

Yes, you read that correctly: the U.S. and western European nations are areas where CO2 levels are lowest.

Big news, yes? But — and very much par for the course — it turns out that O’Sullivan has made another of his trademark public mistakes. And of course, the credulous wing of the campaign for climate inaction are more than happy to take O’Sullivan’s nonsense at face value. There’s a fine example over at NZ’s own “Climate Conversation Group”, where Richard Treadgold waxes philosophic:

Of a certainty, the Earth does not need saving.

Consider the thousand-year atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide. Consider that the bloody poor people did this to us. Consider their crimes.

Analyse that.

So what’s the real story?

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