In which I pull together the strands of the recent bad news from Antarctica and Greenland, and lament the loss of the coastline we all grew up with — no longer a theoretical possibility but a long term certainty. Check out Goodbye coastline – we are beyond the point of no return, this week’s post at The Daily Blog, and start planning for all our watery futures.
Tag: The Daily Blog
TDB Today: Generation Zero’s Clean Energy campaign
My post at The Daily Blog this week ignores all the political kerfuffle surrounding milk-stained cabinet ministers taking holidays from twitter, and focusses on a new report from non-partisan young climate activist group Generation Zero: A Challenge To Our Leaders – Why New Zealand needs a Clean Energy Plan. It’s an impressive piece of work, and an admirable summary of where we are today and where New Zealand should be heading. I commend it to all Hot Topic readers – the pdf is here.
TDB Today: Ragged right caught in reality’s shit sandwich
This week’s Daily Blog post takes a further look at NZ political responses to the release of the of the second part of the IPCC’s Fifth Report, and ponders how everyone who has gleefully claimed that adaptation is all we need to do will react when the third report — on mitigating carbon emissions — is released next week. Good risk management would mean planning to adapt to four degrees of warming, while aiming at emissions reductions that would restrict warming to two degrees…
TDB Today: Facing the future – no Bridges too far
In my post at The Daily Blog today — Facing the future – no Bridges too far — I take a look at the Royal Society of New Zealand’s latest information paper about the need to move New Zealand to a green economy. There’s a yawning gulf between the rational world view embodied in the RSNZ’s paper and the policy settings adopted by the current government. Which comes as no surprise…
Below the fold I’ve embedded the infographic designed by the RSNZ to accompany its paper. It’s well worth taking a look…
Continue reading “TDB Today: Facing the future – no Bridges too far”
TDB today: up a blind alley (without a paddle)
In this week’s post at The Daily Blog — Up a blind alley (without a paddle) — I ruminate further on the message to be gleaned from last week’s flooding in Christchurch, and how ignoring the shape of things to come makes for bad government and worse politics:
What happened in Christchurch was not a consequence of climate change (though the heavy rainfall is something expected to increase in a warming world), but an early warning of what will happen to coastal cities as sea level rise takes its toll over coming decades. With CO2 nudging 400 ppm, the planet can expect the sea to eventually stop rising when it is 15-20 metres higher than today. It might take a few hundred years to get there, but if we don’t act to reduce atmospheric carbon it’s not just a distant threat, it’s a long term certainty.
With another storm bearing down on the country from the tropics and severe weather on the cards for much of the country over the weekend, the government may well have to confront another flood emergency. We can only hope they learn something more than how to deploy the prime ministerial mop.