ecosystems

Not a pretty picture: recent science summarised

by Bryan Walker October 17, 2011

A valuable review, Climate Science 2009-2010, has just been published by the World Resources Institute. It’s a summary of major peer-reviewed research in climate change science and technology during those two years. Aimed at policymakers, the NGO community, and the media, it offers succinct summaries of the findings of a wide array of scientific papers, [...]

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Jolting Contrasts

by Bryan Walker September 12, 2011

I read this morning yet another dismal report on the extraordinary lengths to which Republican politicians hopeful of nomination as presidential candidate in America are going in their denial of climate change. Then I watched an excellent PBS television interview with a couple of intelligent and knowledgeable American scientists which regular Hot Topic commenter Bill [...]

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No Penguin Café when the ice melts

by Bryan Walker June 30, 2011

At Yale Environment 360 Fen Montaigne provides a fascinating, if disturbing, report on the findings of scientists working on the effects of sea ice retreat on the polar marine food chain. Montaigne is the author of the book Fraser’s Penguins which I reviewed earlier this year and of an earlier article at Yale Environment about [...]

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An immediate halt to CO2 emissions is an absolute necessity…

by Gareth February 8, 2011

…if we are to maintain the health of ocean ecosystems, says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in this video presentation, given to a symposium at the recent Our Changing Oceans conference in Washington DC. It’s sobering viewing. Here are the primary messages from the symposium: There [...]

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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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Climate compendium: important insights

by Bryan Walker September 28, 2009

“The Climate Change Science Compendium is a wake-up call. The time for hesitation is over”. So wrote Ban Ki-moon in his foreword to this UN Environment Programme publication released last week. The publication is a review of how climate science has evolved since the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), and is based on some 400 major scientific contributions [...]

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Copenhagen 2: dangers ahead

by Bryan Walker June 22, 2009

The second section of the Copenhagen synthesis report, Social and Environmental Disruption, discusses the dangers of climate change relating to society and the environment, noting that scientific research provides a wealth of relevant information which is not receiving the attention one might expect.     Considerable support has developed for containing the rise in global temperature to [...]

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Heatstroke

by Bryan Walker June 15, 2009

Anthony Barnosky is a Berkeley University paleoecologist deeply concerned about what lies ahead for Earth’s ecological systems if we persist in heating the globe. His recently published book Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming explains his concerns. Global warming with its own method of ecosystem demolition has joined the three other factors — [...]

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