emissions

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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The billion dollar gap

by Gareth April 7, 2011

Dr Jan Wright, New Zealand’s parliamentary commissioner for the environment, today released her submission (pdf) to the Emissions Trading Review panel. It calls for a significant toughening up of the scheme that was so extensively watered down by the current government in 2009, in order to avoid a billion dollar per year cost to taxpayers. [...]

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Lester Brown and the water lilies

by Bryan Walker April 6, 2011

When I was reviewing Paul Gilding’s book The Great Disruption I was frequently aware of similarities with Lester Brown’s writing, most recently World on the Edge. The parallels were highlighted further for me when I viewed an excellent recent documentary on Lester Brown’s advocacy which has recently screened on PBS in the US. I recommend the film [...]

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The Climate Show #8: Kevin Trenberth and our shaky future

by Gareth March 3, 2011

The Climate Show returns with a packed show, featuring one of the world’s best known climate scientists, NZ-born, Colorado-based Dr Kevin Trenberth — star of the Climategate “where’s the missing heat” emails. He’s been in New Zealand to visit family (experiencing the Christchurch quake in the process) and to attend a conference, and his comments [...]

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Zero net emissions by 2050 – preferably sooner

by Gareth March 1, 2011

I’ve just sent my submission on the NZ government’s intention to make a formal commitment to a target of a 50 percent reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to the Ministry of the Environment — barely squeaking in before the published deadline. My original intention was to submit a closely argued case for [...]

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The road to ruin

by Bryan Walker February 27, 2011

Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of Manchester has been sounding alarms about the inadequate rate of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions for some years now. He’s done it again in a sobering paper written with colleague Alice Bows and recently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal [...]

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Institutional lemmings

by Bryan Walker February 14, 2011

I was struck by a passage in Noam Chomsky’s conversational remarks on climate change in the video clip Gareth recently posted. Commenting on the campaign waged by powerful business lobbies to convince the public that global warming is a liberal hoax, he pictures the people responsible as trapped by their functions in the institutions they work [...]

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Russian roulette with a rainforest

by Bryan Walker February 11, 2011

I reported in a November post that it appeared likely that the 2010 Amazon drought was even more severe than the 2005 drought, itself identified as a 1-in-100-year event. Now Simon Lewis of Leeds University and Paulo Brando of Brazil’s Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) and others have published a paper in Science with rainfall [...]

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Heart of the city

by Bryan Walker January 27, 2011

We tend to become riveted on the efforts of national governments to address greenhouse gas reductions, so far with dismal results. But as a valuable new study reminds us, city administrations can play a significant role in mitigation and with more immediate effect. Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Moving Forward is to be published in [...]

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