emissions

Welcome political forthrightness

by Bryan Walker December 5, 2011

I felt a twinge of envy watching a recent BBC Hardtalk interview with Chris Huhne, Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. The tone of his statements was much more forthright than anything we’re likely to hear from New Zealand government ministers. It was no more than we have a right to expect [...]

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The Climate Show #21: carbon, coal and Cook on BEST

by Gareth November 10, 2011

Bad news on carbon emissions balanced by good news on solar photovoltaics, a Medicane bringing dramatic flash flooding to Italy and France, a scientist who thinks the Arctic could be effectively ice free in late summer in only four years, and the inside story on what the New Zealand election might mean for climate policy [...]

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Not good news

by Bryan Walker September 23, 2011

My reading this morning didn’t incline me to optimism. I don’t actually need reminding, but in case I did two items underlined that we remain very much on course for a 3 to 4 degree global temperature rise by the end of the century.  A new report published by the Joint Research Centre of the [...]

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The Minister’s chart-junk part 2

by Mr February September 21, 2011

Simon Johnson guest posts on the mysterious number of emissions units allocated to emitters and a junk chart in the Ministry for the Environment’s Report on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme. You may recall that I previously commented on the low quality of data presentation in the Ministry for the Environment report Report on [...]

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Natural Gas is Not a Green Fuel

by Bryan Walker September 14, 2011

My heart sinks when I read enthusiastic acclamations of natural gas as a substitute for coal. It releases less CO2 on combustion, we’re told. It is a good bridge to the time when renewable energy is sufficiently developed to take over. And latterly, with the development of fracking, that’s going to be a very long [...]

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Breaking the deadlock on shipping emissions

by Bryan Walker September 11, 2011

International shipping is responsible for an estimated 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to those of Germany, thirteen times those of New Zealand. On current trends they are expected to increase by 150-250 percent by 2050. They are as yet unregulated, trapped for over a decade in a familiar impasse where developed countries [...]

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Anthropogenic CO2 Far Exceeds Volcanic

by Bryan Walker August 7, 2011

I was a little startled a few weeks back to see in a Waikato Times column written by former National Party MP Michael Cox the extraordinary claim that the 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption “shot out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire years on Earth”.  I [...]

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Grim news on emissions

by Bryan Walker May 30, 2011

The Guardian, with the exception of the foolishness of its analysis of the climategate emails, is one of the world media’s bright spots when it comes to recognising and communicating the realities of climate change. It carried grim news yesterday. Environment correspondent Fiona Harvey reported International Energy Agency (IEA) unpublished estimates that greenhouse gas emissions [...]

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The Climate Show #11: a trillion tonnes of trouble

by Gareth April 14, 2011

Glenn says he thinks this show’s “a cracker” (but he always says that), and despite the lack of a special star guest — though with the help of assorted luminaries from the Climate Futures Forum (David’s Karoly and Frame, Robert Gifford and Erik Conway –) we cover a huge range of issues, from Jim Hansen’s [...]

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A ton too far (more bad news)

by Gareth April 12, 2011

At the Climate Futures Forum in Wellington a couple of weeks ago, David Karoly discussed the idea of considering carbon emissions as a “stock” problem, not a “flow” problem. If we want to give ourselves a 75 percent chance of coming in below a 2ºC rise in the global average temperature, then we (as in [...]

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