CO2

Ken Ring: he’s wrong about everything

by Gareth March 20, 2011

This weekend a few of the struggling residents of earthquake-hit Christchurch have moved out of the city hoping to escape another dangerous quake, a shock foretold by Ken Ring, a New Zealand astrologer who makes a living producing “long range weather forecasts” for NZ, Australia and Ireland based on the movements of the moon. Ring [...]

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How to believe in impossible things

by Doug Mackie January 8, 2011

Despite the huge number of mutually contradictory claims denialists make, there is something they all have in common: no matter how much green ink a they use in their writing, denialists never formally criticise each other. The term cognitive dissonance was coined by Leon Festinger, a psychologist who (in 1954) infiltrated a UFO cult that [...]

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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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I’ve been wrong before

by Gareth October 15, 2010

It appears that the crank pantheon has a new hero: John O’Sullivan — the “world’s most popular Internet writer on the greenhouse gas theory” and the man unafraid of getting everything wrong. The last time we encountered him, he was getting everything wrong about the New Zealand Climate “Science” Coalition’s attempt to take NIWA to [...]

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Something for the weekend

by Gareth July 2, 2010

Lazy blogging. Just links to a few things I think you might find interesting to read (and a performance to enjoy) while I get some work done. First up: Swiss Re, the giant reinsurance company, has published a handy new report called Climate sceptic arguments and their scientific background (pdf), written by Swiss scientist Urs [...]

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Gore makes a connection

by Bryan Walker May 9, 2010

If the oil spill is a disaster consider the CO2 spill, writes Al Gore in an article published yesterday in The New Republic. “Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from [...]

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Down to the sea

by Bryan Walker May 6, 2010

An interview with climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson published yesterday in Yale Environment 360is a reminder that for those working with ice there’s not much doubt about where we’re heading. She spent six weeks of the summer on her ninth visit to Antarctica drilling ice cores on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming places on earth. [...]

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Garth goes off the deep end

by Gareth April 22, 2010

Another week, another load of tripe from Garth George in the Herald. He emerges from his sulphurous lair stirred by stories of volcanoes in Iceland to lend his weight to calls for the suspension of the Emissions Trading Scheme. He makes so many egregious errors that he not only makes himself look foolish, but also [...]

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New dimensions in earth science uncovered by NZ blogger

by Gareth January 30, 2010

Exciting new concepts in earth systems science are emerging from the fertile intellect of one of Hot Topic’s most diligent readers, Ian Wishart. Either that, or he’s demonstrated (again) that he doesn’t understand what he’s writing about. In this astonishing post, published yesterday, he considers something he calls the “feedback warming effect”, and attempts to [...]

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More than a number

by Gareth December 10, 2009

If you want to know what’s happening on a stockmarket, the first place to look is at the relevant index — the Footsie (FTSE) for the London Stock Exchange, or the Dow Jones for Wall Street. Those indices aggregate all the price movements over a day into one handy number, to give a quick overview [...]

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