Today marks the fourth anniversary of the first post at Hot Topic — four years since the blog’s birth, and as my mum would say, hasn’t time flown? This birthday post is number 1,080, and it will be read by many, many more people than those first brief paragraphs announcing the book and blog. I’m not one for tootling my own trumpet (at least, not loudly), so I won’t be making great claims about how far we’ve come and how much we’ve achieved, but I will take this opportunity to muse a little on what I’ve learned. A lot, but not perhaps enough… đ
Category: environment and ecology
Something(s) for the long weekend
It’s Saturday afternoon, and there’s a large piece of pig in the oven — which will, if all goes well, provide the first of two family meals scheduled for this long weekend. I also have a browser stuffed with open tabs, each containing climate stuff of interest — so here’s a random dump of material that will repay the diligent reader.
First: Stephan Lewandowsky and a team of academics from Western Australia have launched Shaping Tomorrow’s World, a web site (coding by John & Wendy Cook) devoted to discussing solutions to the climate, energy and resource crises:
From climate change to peak oil and food security, our societies are confronted with many serious challenges that, if left unresolved, will threaten the well-being of present and future generations, and the natural world. This new website www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org is dedicated to discussion of those challenges and potential solutions based on scientific evidence and scholarly analysis.
Well worth checking out, and it’ll be interesting to see how the site develops.
Ratcliffe coal protesters invited to appeal conviction
The defence of the Ratcliffe coal power plant protesters in the UK, charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass, was that they were acting through ânecessityâ to prevent death and serious injury caused by carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. James Hansen was among the defence witnesses, testifying to the reality of the danger from climate change. The prosecution argued that the defendants were not really intending to stop carbon emissions, but instead engaged in a publicity stunt. I wrote in this post in January of the lenient sentencing from a judge who was clearly impressed by the motivation of these âdecent men and women with a genuine concern for othersâ. They were found guilty and had to be punished, albeit leniently.
Their conviction now appears likely to be overturned. The Director of Public Prosecutions, no less, has urged them to appeal their convictions after allegations that police suppressed potentially crucial evidence from an undercover police officer. “I have invited the defence to lodge an appeal and to include the issue of non-disclosure of material relating to the activities of an undercover police officer in any grounds of appeal.”
Continue reading “Ratcliffe coal protesters invited to appeal conviction”
Alley’s documentary: upbeat and optimistic
Richard Alleyâs book Earth: The Operatorsâ Manual, which I reviewed recently, was written as a companion to a PBS documentary of the same name. The documentary has recently screened in the US and is now available for viewing here. The broad themes are the same as those of the book. Theyâre not complicated: taking our energy from fossil fuels has caused climate change, but there are clean energy alternatives more than adequate to human needs and the sooner we move to deploy them the better.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the documentary takes Alley to many places and countries, including New Zealand. He dwells on the human need for energy, the kind of energy demands a growing population will make, and the ultimate inability of fossil fuels, a limited resource, to meet that demand even if we could carry on burning them with impunity. But we canât, and Alley explains why. A visit to the Franz Josef and Tasman glaciers, with some great photography, is part of what he uses to explain the real world impact of changing levels of CO2. A fascinating visit to the national ice core laboratory in Denver, Colorado demonstrates that today atmospheric CO2 is at a level not seen in cores that go back as far as 400,000 years â far above them, in fact. Then itâs back to New Zealand as, against the background of Rotorua thermal activity, Alley explains the isotopic evidence that backs up the relative volume measurements to confirm that the increased CO2 is the result of burning fossil fuels, dwarfing natural volcanic processes.
Continue reading “Alley’s documentary: upbeat and optimistic”
Return of the Climate Cluelessâ˘: there’s none so blind…
Sir Peter Gluckman, scientific adviser to NZ prime minister John Key, recently published a discussion paper entitled Towards better use of evidence in policy formation (pdf). It’s an interesting read for anyone who has ever noted the sometimes large discrepancy between political dogma and policy outcomes. Sciblogger Peter Griffin went so far as to describe it as “possibly one of the most important [papers] he has released thus far”.
Over in the land of the Climate Clueless⢠however, Richard “Climate Conversation” Treadgold has taken Gluckman’s paper as a cue to demand evidence of climate change. Treadgold appears to have forgotten that one of Sir Peter’s first acts following his appointment was to review the evidence and issue a statement on the subject, and is perhaps still smarting from Gluckman’s comments on climate denial last year. He therefore issues this stern challenge:
I would remind Sir Peter that evidence is required to establish the following key factors in the global warming debate â evidence that has not surfaced so far. We have been looking for evidence to show:
- The existence of a current unprecedented global warming trend.
- That the greenhouse effect is powerful enough to endanger the environment.
- A causal link between human activities and dangerously high global temperatures.
- That climate models have a high level of skill in predicting the climate.
- A causal link between atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and global temperatures.
- A causal link between global warming and the gentle rise in sea level.
Time to play some whack-a-mole…
Continue reading “Return of the Climate Cluelessâ˘: there’s none so blind…”