carbon

Bloomin’ marvellous

by Gareth December 11, 2010

A stunning image of a massive bloom of phytoplankton off the Chatham Islands (to the east of NZ — that’s Wellington and the Wairarapa in the top left corner), snapped by NASA’s Aqua satellite on December 5th and featured this week at NASA’s excellent Earth Observatory. Click on the image to see the full (4MB) [...]

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(2) Degrees of existence

by Gareth November 24, 2010

According to a UN Environment Programme report released yesterday, The Emissions Gap Report – Are the Copenhagen Accord Pledges Sufficient to Limit Global Warming to 2° C or 1.5° C? (summary PDF), if the planet is to have a reasonable (defined as 66%) chance of limiting warming to 2ºC, global emissions will have to peak [...]

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Challenged by Carbon

by Bryan Walker August 20, 2010

Oil industry geologists have hardly been noted for their readiness to accept the findings of climate science. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a large international organisation of 31,000 members, is non-committal in its 2007 statement, though that was admittedly an advance on their previous rejection of anthropogenic warming.  Bryan Lovell has worked as a [...]

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Biochar: looking better all the time

by Bryan Walker August 5, 2010

Interesting biochar research is reported in a news release from the American Society of Agronomy.  An Australian research team has been testing the effects of biochar on nitrous oxide emission and nitrogen leaching from two different soil varieties. Their results are reported (no charge for this month) in the Journal of Environmental Quality. The study [...]

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Life in the Hothouse

by Bryan Walker May 5, 2010

“Wetlands are wastelands” was the explanation the chair of a local trust in my city gave for opposing a grant to a wetlands restoration project. He’s a rabid climate change denier and hence unlikely to read Melanie Lenart’s recently published book Life in the Hothouse: How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change. If he did [...]

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Carbonscape and the new Victorians

by Bryan Walker January 2, 2010

Buried among the emails which accumulated while I was in hospital was one from Carbonscape, the NZ company working on biochar, drawing my attention to an article in the UK Sunday Times. It missed proper attention until I tidied up my inbox yesterday, but even a few weeks late I think it’s worth reporting, especially [...]

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What cap and converge means with a realistic 2050 emissions target

by Gareth September 22, 2009

This New Scientist video is a superb illustration of the tough emissions targets the world needs to be thinking about. More details in the NS story here. The basic premise is that if we take a 2ºC target seriously, then we have to limit our total emissions to 2050 to about 750 billion tonnes of [...]

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Why did Nick Smith hide the facts on forestry?

by Gareth August 21, 2009

Government ministers have deliberately played down the role of forestry in meeting emissions targets, documents released under the Official Information Act suggest. Diligent digging at No Right Turn has uncovered a Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry paper [PDF] titled New forest planting and harvesting intentions under high carbon prices, which makes clear that forest planting [...]

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No vision, no guts, no future

by Gareth August 10, 2009

The New Zealand government announced this afternoon that NZ would table a conditional emissions target of between 10% and 20% cuts on 1990 levels by 2020 [Scoop, Herald]. The range is supposed to allow for a response to the progress of international negotiations, and the conditions are that there should be a comprehensive international agreement [...]

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Tall trees

by Gareth July 27, 2009

Setting emissions targets means more than just making direct emissions cuts — it also means growing our carbon sinks. Climate change minister Nick Smith seems to want to ignore this, insisting (once more) in his interview with Kathryn Ryan this morning that because NZ’s emissions were now running 24% above 1990 levels, that a 40% [...]

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