Category: Climate science

Another planet (3.0)

There’s a new kid on the climate block: a sustainability news blog/portal called Planet 3.0. Prime mover behind the initiative is long-time Only In It For The Gold blogger Michael Tobis, and he sets out the stall for the site in an introductory post titled (quoting Sartre) The Future Is Not Yet Written:

It is time for us to start writing it [the future]. We cannot do so if we limit the discussion by imposing the interests of any particular culture or interest or institution. We need to take the discussions that the cleverest of us occasionally manage to have over beer at midnight, and put them front and center, into the public sphere. A cold, hard look at the present and the future can be frightening, but it also can be exhilarating. It is time for us to be willing to say what mustn’t be said, and consider doing what mustn’t be done. This is no time for an excess of propriety. But the time for blame and recriminations is over. We can’t afford them anymore. Let’s move on.

Let’s look reality in the face and decide what needs to be done.

The tag line for Planet 3.0 is Beyond Sustainability. That can be taken two ways: as a statement of the fact that we are living well beyond the planet’s means, eating natural capital; and as a pointer to where we need to go – -beyond traditional ideas of sustainability to design ourselves a system that will enable the survival of our civilisation.

The conversation Tobis wants to spark is vital. Go and have a poke around Planet 3.0, and contribute to the discussion. We’ve only got the one planet to play with. Time to start treating it right. The current paradigm is getting us into trouble. What might a new paradigm for benign development look like?

Hot Topic is very pleased to support Planet 3.0. You can find a full list of the supporting blogs here. It’s an honour to be in such distinguished company. Good luck to all who sail in her…

[The Only Ones]

A fighting chance?

Bill McKibben has a striking article this week in Yale e360 in which he explains why the protest against the pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the US may be the start of “something big and desperate”. The desperate part is easy to understand. Three converging factors contribute to it, political, meteorological and geological.

Politically the US administration has failed to secure carbon legislation, or even to show much resolve to do so, with the result that there isn’t going to be a price on carbon in America, and hence not in most of the world, any time soon. The hope that surrounded Obama’s election in that respect has evaporated.

That hope was perhaps always excessive — but then, the man himself had done all that he could to encourage it. On the night he clinched the nomination he said that during his presidency “the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.” Waiting for a messiah, we managed to convince ourselves we might have found one.

Meanwhile the climate is changing. Continue reading “A fighting chance?”

Water, water everywhere…

New Zealand’s response to the water crisis in Tuvalu and Tokelau is making headlines. Foreign Minister McCully announced yesterday:

Tuvalu has declared a state of emergency relating to water shortages in the capital, Funafuti, and a number of outer islands. A New Zealand Defence Force C-130 left this morning to take supplies and personnel to Tuvalu. The supplies include two desalination units as well as water containers. Two Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff on board, including our Wellington-based High Commissioner, will remain in Tuvalu to help assess needs on the ground. New Zealand will be working with partners and other donors to consider the best medium-to-long-term response options.

Tuvalu, with 11,000 inhabitants, is not the only island nation in trouble. Tokelau, with 1400 inhabitants, has declared a state of emergency because fresh water supplies might run out in a few days. Samoa is rationing water also.

There appears to be a reasonable probability that there is a causal link between the drought and water scarcity affecting the islands and climate change.

Continue reading “Water, water everywhere…”

SOS tour adds Lakes dates; Wratt in Wellington

The Saunders Oram and Salinger climate roadshow continues to rumble on through the spring, and news reaches me that they’ve just added talks in Queenstown and Wanaka on Thursday Nov 3 to their already crowded itinerary. Venues are still to be arranged, but the Queenstown talk will be in the afternoon and the Wanaka talk in the evening. All the latest details (including a confirmed gig on Waiheke Island) are in this information sheet. Jim tells me they’ve been getting very good attendances — 70 in the recent Kaiapoi session and 70 at Omakau (probably the highest per capita attendance of the lot). By the end of November they will have completed a remarkable 37 presentations. Hats off to all three of them…

Wellingtonians with a lunch hour free on Thursday (6/10) might like to note that Dr David Wratt, Director of the NZ Climate Change Centre and NIWA’s Chief Scientist (Climate) will be giving a presentation on Assessing Scientific Knowledge about Climate Change as a part of the NZ Climate Change Research Institute’s seminar series. Time: 12 – 1pm in Cotton Building 304 on VUW’s Kelburn Campus. David will cover developments since AR4 and discuss the process of putting AR5 together. Contact Liz Thomas at the NZ CCRI for more information.

Butterfly futures flutter by

James Hansen’s latest discussion paper begins and ends with Monarch butterflies. He watches some on his property in Pennsylvania as they prepare to leave for their migration to Mexico and reflects on the prospects for their survival as a species as global warming takes hold. The Monarchs cross Texas on their way south, a difficult path this year over desolate, baked-out territory. Which leads Hansen to a spirited denunciation of “well-oiled Governors and Senators in Texas and Oklahoma” who assert that global warming is a hoax and help business-as-usual CO2 emissions to continue.

He addresses the question of whether the drought and fires in Texas can be attributed to global warming. The media have remained largely silent this year on possible connections between extreme weather events and human-made climate forcing, and Hansen asks whether scientists should be making more effort to draw public attention to the human role in climate anomalies.

Continue reading “Butterfly futures flutter by”