Britain

The climate terroirist – Gladstones’ new bag

by Gareth January 8, 2012

Regular listeners to The Climate Show will know that I often witter on about what I’ve been up to in my little vineyard. At Limestone Hills we grow pinot noir and syrah grapes and make small quantities of wine. It’s more than drinkable. One day it may even be very good. If we get that [...]

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The other side of the world

by Gareth April 8, 2009

Imagine this: the country’s leading business organisation — noted for its robust espousal of free markets and business freedom — takes the government to task for not doing enough, fast enough to get emissions on a downward path. So it releases four roadmaps, for the power, industrial, energy and transport sectors designed to deliver emissions [...]

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Fractured air

by Gareth February 8, 2009

The roots of the recent cold weather in Britain and eastern North America lie in unusual goings on high in the atmosphere above the North Pole, as this animation from NASA’s Earth Observatory demonstrates (full video here: 6MB .mov file). The left hand image shows vorticity (rotation, roughly) and the right the temperature at 20km. [...]

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Long hot summer

by Gareth February 5, 2009

There’s record heat in Australia and deep snow in England (with more to come, say Met men), and it’s all consistent with continuing global warming. Over at Wellington’s leading public transport blog, this is enough to inspire a remarkably ill-informed diatribe: Following the news as I do, it was delicious today to see the global [...]

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Once upon a time there was an ocean

by Gareth August 10, 2008

The Arctic summer sea ice cover could be reduced by 2013 to “a few outcrops on islands near Greenland and Canada between mid-July and mid-September”, according to new research reported in The Observer [UK] today. The paper also suggests that this year could still see a new record minimum. Wieslaw Maslowski, the US Navy researcher [...]

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Santa’s blues

by Gareth June 28, 2008

What’s a Christmas icon to do, when all the ice at the North Pole disappears in summer? This startling question is posed by the latest flush of media attention to events in the Arctic. First there was a National Geographic story on June 20th speculating that the North Pole would be ice free this summer [...]

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Sail on sailor

by Gareth March 6, 2008

Pausing in my peregrinations in Nelson, where it rains (but not so much as in Golden Bay last weekend), I’m catching up on climate news. In Hot Topic I looked forward to the day when the first NZ wine clipper sailed into the Port of London, bringing the new vintage of sauvignon blanc to Britain’s [...]

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Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.

by Gareth January 22, 2008

There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no [...]

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Crankwatch

by Gareth October 17, 2007

Al Gore’s making most of the climate news at the moment. Winning a Nobel Peace Prize and having a British judge find nine “errors” in An Inconvenient Truth has generated a lot of copy, and more hot air. Others have done a lot of footwork on this story: Deltoid looks at the nature of the [...]

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Clearing the decks

by Gareth October 11, 2007

A few quick links before I post on the government’s just announced energy strategy: cleaning out the tabs in my web browser… Professor Graham Harris of the University of Tasmania addresses the issues I raised in my “ecological overdraft” post a few days ago, in Sleepwalking Into Danger – an article for ScienceAlert: “It is [...]

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