Antarctica

NZCCC 2013: Jim Renwick on Antarctic sea ice, SAM and ozone

by Gareth June 11, 2013

Here’s the final interview I recorded at last week’s NZ Climate Change Conference in Palmerston North: VUW’s Dr Jim Renwick1 talking about the complex relationship between the southern annular mode — a north-south movement of the westerly winds that blow around Antarctica — sea ice growth and the ozone hole. It’s interesting stuff, not least [...]

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Climate lulz: Rings around Antarctica

by Gareth April 16, 2013

Two things made me laugh out loud today — great gusts of guffaws enough to wake the trufflehound from her slumbers. The first was a perfectly pitched piece of satire in the Southland Times, the second a reinvention of the ocean atmosphere interface by astrological long range weather forecaster Ken Ring. Both are worth your [...]

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Monckton in NZ: tells lies on radio, threatens academics and journalists

by Gareth April 4, 2013

The Monckton has landed in New Zealand, and he’s up to his usual tricks. In a desperate display of attention-seeking behaviour, the discount Viscount has lashed out at his critics, threatened libel actions against a scientist and a journalist, and attacked the good standing of Victoria University of Wellington. To make matters worse, in a [...]

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The Climate Show #32: a Cook’s tour of the Aussie heat

by Gareth January 24, 2013

At long last: John Cook from Skeptical Science rejoins the Climate Show team for the first show of 2013. He hooks up with Glenn and Gareth to review Australia’s big heatwave, and stays around to dig into the new Greenpeace report on dirty energy, discuss Obama’s inauguration speech and Boris Johnson’s climate blunder, the latest [...]

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The year the earth bit back: top climate stories of 2012

by Gareth December 29, 2012

2012Amidst the blizzard of year-end roundups, here’s one you have to read in full — a joint effort put together by a diverse group of bloggers and scientists: Angela Fritz, Eli Rabett, Emilee Pierce, Greg Laden, Joe Romm, John Abraham, Laurence Lewis, Leo Hickman, Michael Mann, Michael Tobis, Paul Douglas, Scott Mandia, Scott Brophy, Stephan [...]

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The Climate Show #30: Obama, Sandy and the rabbit

by Gareth November 9, 2012

Another news special on this week’s Climate Show. With Barack Obama winning “four more years“, and the biggest Atlantic storm ever seen slamming into New Jersey, New York, and most of the northeastern USA, Glenn and Gareth chew over the details and consider the implications. With a side order of accountants PwC being gloomy, agricultural [...]

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Arctic meltdown: two views and a bit of PIG

by Gareth October 19, 2012

From NASA’s Earth Observatory Youtube channel: a great video showing the calving of this year’s Petermann Ice Island. Most impressive is the speed with which it passes down the Nares Strait. And to provide a little North-South symmetry, today’s EO Image of the Day shows the steady enlargement of a giant crack in the Pine [...]

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The Climate Show #29: if the sun don’t come, you get a tan from standing in the English rain

by Gareth October 11, 2012

This week The Climate Show brings you an all news special. We have wet summers for Europe, permafrost warming delivering a methane kick, La Niña driving floods that make sea level fall, a glacier calving in Antarctica, mammoths and sabre tooth tigers — all delivered with Glenn and Gareth’s inimitable panache (!). Watch The Climate [...]

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Prat watch #7.5: No, you’re not entitled to your opinion

by Gareth October 8, 2012

This morning my breakfast reading included a marvellous short article at The Conversation from philosopher Patrick Stokes of Deakin University in Melbourne. Stokes riffs on that familiar justification for holding a view, “I’m entitled to my opinion”, and makes some interesting observations about how it distorts public debate: The problem with “I’m entitled to my [...]

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Prat watch #7: the unbearable rightness of being wrong

by Gareth September 28, 2012

The carefully cultivated cocoon of ignorance over at New Zealand’s own tiny corner of the climate crank echo chamber has been glinting in the harsh light of reality in recent weeks, as a number of climate realists (that is, people who have a realistic appreciation of what climate science is all about, not cranks attempting [...]

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