floods

The Climate Show #23: Durban and the return of the electric car

by Gareth December 21, 2011

Grab some holly, deck your halls, heat up some mince pies, and then settle down to the last Climate Show of 2011. We look at the outcome of the Durban conference, discuss heavy rain in New Zealand and record-breaking weather extremes in the USA, and ponder the implications of news of more methane erupting from [...]

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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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Wake of the flood (first reprise)

by Gareth October 26, 2011

Thailand is experiencing its worst monsoon flooding for at least 50 years. The NASA Earth Observatory image above shows the waters piling up to the North of the capital Bangkok, which is already beginning to experience flooding (visit the EO page to see a comparison with earlier floods, and The Guardian for a striking set [...]

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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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Lessons from a drowning continent: no time like the present to invest in our future

by Gareth February 15, 2011

Jim Salinger’s spending the summer at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. This reflection on the lessons of Australia’s recent floods first ran in the Waikato Times at the beginning of the month, but I felt it deserved a wider audience and so with Jim’s permission reproduce it here. As I watch from my summer [...]

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Too many teardrops

by Gareth January 12, 2011

This astonishing video was shot on Monday as flash flooding hit the Queensland town of Toowoomba after a reported 140mm of rain fell in only 30 minutes. 12 people are confirmed to have been killed in the region, and 90 more are missing according to state premier Anna Bligh. Floodwaters are rising in the state [...]

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Wake the world

by Gareth September 24, 2010

This is a guest post by Anthony Giddens and Martin Rees. Giddens is a former director of the London School of Economics, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the author of The Politics of Climate Change. Rees is president of the Royal Society. This year has seen outbreaks of extreme weather in many regions [...]

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People get ready

by Gareth September 18, 2010

Britain needs to step up its efforts to prepare for unavoidable climate change, according to How well prepared is the UK for climate change? the first report of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change— the body established by the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act to advise government on all aspects of climate-related [...]

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Tumbling dice

by Gareth August 23, 2010

Statement of Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Mahmood Qureshi to the UN general assembly: Climate change, with all its severity and unpredictability, has become a reality for 170 million Pakistanis. The present situation in Pakistan reconfirms our extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change. It also complicates the reconstruction and rehabilitation scenario in Pakistan. Nature [...]

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When warming burns…

by Bryan Walker August 19, 2010

Severe risks to human health will accompany the disturbed global climate which comes with global warming. We have only to consider the consequences of the heat waves, the flooding, the African droughts, of recent times to be alerted to that. Our experiences of climate change in New Zealand are unlikely to reach such extreme levels, [...]

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