extremes

Current extreme weather events part of climate change

by Bryan Walker September 20, 2011

Al Gore didn’t hesitate to dwell on extreme weather events as evidence of the reality of climate change in his closing address for the 24-hour Climate Reality Project last week. There has certainly been no lack of them in the past year or so. Was he pushing the boundaries of the science? It wouldn’t worry [...]

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Hard Talk on the wrong track

by Bryan Walker July 27, 2011

I wondered what Stephen Sackur might want to put to Rajendra Pachauri when he interviewed the IPCC chair on BBC’s Hardtalk this week. His agenda turned out to be depressingly predictable for the most part. The opening was not encouraging. Sackur referred to other options than a global climate deal in view of the stalled [...]

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Revolution and realism required: UN report

by Bryan Walker July 14, 2011

I’ve been looking at the The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation which Gareth drew attention to in his recent post.  It’s a long document prepared by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), not intended for casual consumption, and I haven’t read all 250 pages.  But the [...]

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The Climate Show #15: Michael Ashley and the ineducable Carter

by Gareth June 29, 2011

We thought we’d try for a record short show — and failed, because once again there was just to much to talk about. We have more on Eritrean volcanoes, extreme weather over the last 18 months, a new report on the dire state of the oceans, and Stoat’s big bet. Special guest is Professor Michael [...]

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Catch a fire (worst year since 1816)

by Gareth June 26, 2011

The extraordinary sequence of extreme weather events during the last 18 months is probably the worst run of natural disasters since 1816, when a huge volcanic eruption at Mt Tambora cooled the earth enough to cause the famous “year without a summer“, according to a powerful blog post by Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters. He [...]

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Al Gore: denial derails the democratic conversation

by Bryan Walker June 24, 2011

Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason, which followed An Inconvenient Truth, was published in 2007 and revealed an impressive intelligence in its analysis of how America was losing the rule of reason in democratic discourse, the Enlightenment ideal which was a founding principle of the new republic in the 18th century.  America’s people were [...]

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The illustrated McKibben

by Gareth June 9, 2011

If you watch nothing else today, watch this: Bill McKibben’s recent opinion piece on recent US and world weather extremes illustrated with pictures of the events Bill describes. Excellent work by Plomomedia. [Update: Amy Goodman at The Guardian provides more context: "The troubled sky reveals the grief it feels..."]

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Adapting to climate change in Vietnam and the Philippines

by Bryan Walker April 27, 2011

I stumbled across a documentary programme on BBC World during the weekend, Nature Inc. It visited two Asian regions where the impacts of climate change are being experienced and described the active local measures under way to cope with them. It’s the sort of programme we ought to be seeing a great deal more of [...]

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Routefinding the future: reflecting on the climate futures forum

by Gareth April 5, 2011

Two busy days in Te Papa last week, and a lot to think about. The Climate Futures Forum organised by the Climate Change Research Institute at VUW was fascinating and disturbing in equal measure. Fascinating because it’s hard not to be interested when a lot of very smart people are feeding you information, and disturbing [...]

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Remember a (World Meteorological) day

by Gareth March 23, 2011

Today (March 23rd) is World Meteorological Day — the 61st since the founding of the World Meteorological Organisation in 1950 (press release). This year’s theme is “Climate For You”, and the WMO has published a couple of interesting documents to illustrate the idea. Climate For You [pdf] gives an overview of the climate system and [...]

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