Obama

Dominion Post editorial as shaky as Herald’s

by Bryan Walker February 6, 2010

When I was writing the post on the Herald’s acceptance of journalistic say-so in its editorial on the IPCC Gareth drew my attention to the fact that the Dominion Post had also produced an editorial claiming that the ethics and integrity of climate scientists is being called into question.  I was too engaged with the [...]

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Source for the goose: footnotes to history

by Gareth January 17, 2010

Exploring the footnotes in Ian Wishart’s Air Con is proving to be an entertaining exercise. Last week I followed a reference that revealed a “National Science Foundation report” he cites to support his thesis that glaciers are showing a “delayed reaction” to warming hundreds of years ago, was in fact a 10 year old US [...]

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A positive view of Copenhagen

by Bryan Walker December 29, 2009

I wrote a column early in December trying to discern reasons for hope even in the face of the likelihood that Copenhagen was not going to produce a legally binding agreement. In the event it not only did not produce a legal agreement, but endorsed an Accord quite different from the kind of document we were [...]

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A thread of hope

by Bryan Walker December 2, 2009

The following column was published in the Waikato Times on 1st December Do we lament that the Copenhagen Conference is evidently not going to produce a binding global deal to tackle climate change?  Or can we take comfort from the likelihood that it will produce an agreement in principle and proceed to further legal negotiations [...]

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Obama’s new pathways for power

by Bryan Walker October 29, 2009

Barack Obama is matching his words with action. Four days after his MIT speech on renewable energy he has announced, under the Recovery Act,  $3.4 billion in grants to improve the US electricity grid. The grants go to 100 partners with plans to install smart grid technologies in their area. The government money will be [...]

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Obama to UN: Let’s do it

by Bryan Walker September 23, 2009

Obama’s speech at the UN yesterday may have disappointed some commentators who were looking for more specifics for progress than he provided, but from another perspective it was a most notable occasion. The world’s leading politician, speaking in a global forum, was unequivocal about the seriousness of the issue of climate change: That so many of us [...]

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Down to the Wire

by Bryan Walker September 7, 2009

“My subject is hope of the millennial kind.” So writes David Orr in his new book Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse. The challenges ahead are more difficult than the public is led to believe and than most leadership apparently understands.  There is a long emergency for us to get through -– E.O.Wilson’s “bottleneck” [...]

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Prescott presses climate case

by Bryan Walker August 11, 2009

Tony Blair is not the only former UK Labour Party leader to seek to influence the direction of the climate change talks.  John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister, is deeply involved in trying to secure a successor to Kyoto.  A Guardian article reports on his efforts and his views, both of which I found heartening.

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Walking the Green talk

by Bryan Walker August 7, 2009

Watching Stephen Sackur’s BBC Hard Talk interview with the retiring head of Greenpeace this week I was reminded of why I feel thankful that Greenpeace campaigns so hard and so persistently on climate change.  The adversarial style of Hard Talk often grates, and it certainly did when Sackur accused Gerd Leipold of alarmism and even managed to [...]

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Hope piling up?

by Bryan Walker April 29, 2009

I realise that I have had several posts on signs of hope from the Obama administration, the last only four days ago, but I can’t forbear offering another one. I have just read the President’s address given to the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, and it confirms the enormous changes, indeed reversals, which seem [...]

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