USA

Prat Watch #4: Foundation and Empire

by Gareth March 20, 2012

While the noble Lord, Viscount Christopher “I’m no potty peer” Monckton tours the USA and Canada at the behest of his friends at the Heartland-lite Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (aka the Billionaire Liberation Front), his Australian admirers, led by former Climate Sceptic Party candidate Chris Dawson, have announced the creation of… wait for it… [...]

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The Bast Effect: summertime in wintertime

by Gareth March 18, 2012

Forget the Gore Effect1, Chicago — and much of the eastern half of the continental USA — is now experiencing the Bast Effect — a record March heatwave in the Heartland of climate denial. The figures for this heatwave are truly extraordinary. Here’s Jeff Masters: For the third consecutive day, Chicago, Illinois hit their warmest [...]

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Inhofe’s “Hoax”: foolish and dangerous

by Bryan Walker March 3, 2012

I decided to take a look at Senator Inhofe’s newly published book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, thinking I might get a better understanding of what impels a politician like him into aggressive denial of climate science and opposition to any moves to tackle the climate crisis. It wasn’t [...]

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Reinventing Fire

by Bryan Walker February 29, 2012

Is there movement already under way in the world of industry which will outstrip the painfully slow progress of the political world in facing up to the challenge of climate change?  Amory Lovins certainly thinks so and his recent book, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era, explains why. Lovins is the [...]

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Stuck in the muddle with Obama

by Bryan Walker January 27, 2012

I look back with some embarrassment on my enthusiastic posts when Barack Obama was in the early days of his presidency.  I thought he was offering strong political leadership in addressing climate change.  His words seemed unequivocal. Here he is speaking at the UN in September 2009: That so many of us are here today [...]

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Prat Watch #2: the 2011 Climate BS Awards

by Gareth January 6, 2012

The 2011 Climate BS Awards (where BS stands for Bad Science) have just been announced by Peter Gleick and the Pacific Institute [Huff Post, Forbes]. Nominated and voted for by a crack team of climate scientists and communicators, the awards go to “particularly egregious, notorious, or well-publicized examples of bad climate science that were produced [...]

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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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Liveblog: Durban down to the wire

by cindy December 10, 2011

3.20 am Sunday morning The South African Minister took key people into a “huddle” for 10 mins. “Can the world be saved in a tea break?”  tweeted @FionaHarvey from The Guardian. Tea Break over… so. They have agreed “to launch a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal [...]

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Lies, damned lies and brutal storms

by cindy November 30, 2011

Hot off the wires: Hot Topic’s Durban correspondent Cindy Baxter posts her first insider’s view from COP 17. As thousands of people poured into Durban’s massive conference building yesterday morning for the start of the 17th session of climate talks, we heard news that the extraordinary storm we’d gotten soaked in on Sunday night had [...]

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Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change

by Bryan Walker November 1, 2011

Canadian investigative journalist William Marsden doesn’t hide his anguish or his anger as he reports the maddening incapacity of political leaders and negotiators to come to terms with climate change. Nor should he. It’s a sorry story he has to tell in his new book Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change. Marsden’s [...]

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