Category: Climate business

Adapting to climate change in Vietnam and the Philippines

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 as the evidence of climate change effects accumulate around the world. The narrator presumably felt obliged to mention in passing that sceptics dispute the impacts of climate change identified by the local people, but that kind of disputing will surely wither in the face of the realities such populations are facing. Facing with energy and purpose in the two cases covered by the short documentary.

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Four years on…

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the first post at Hot Topic — four years since the blog’s birth, and as my mum would say, hasn’t time flown? This birthday post is number 1,080, and it will be read by many, many more people than those first brief paragraphs announcing the book and blog. I’m not one for tootling my own trumpet (at least, not loudly), so I won’t be making great claims about how far we’ve come and how much we’ve achieved, but I will take this opportunity to muse a little on what I’ve learned. A lot, but not perhaps enough… 😉

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Something(s) for the long weekend

It’s Saturday afternoon, and there’s a large piece of pig in the oven — which will, if all goes well, provide the first of two family meals scheduled for this long weekend. I also have a browser stuffed with open tabs, each containing climate stuff of interest — so here’s a random dump of material that will repay the diligent reader.

First: Stephan Lewandowsky and a team of academics from Western Australia have launched Shaping Tomorrow’s World, a web site (coding by John & Wendy Cook) devoted to discussing solutions to the climate, energy and resource crises:

From climate change to peak oil and food security, our societies are confronted with many serious challenges that, if left unresolved, will threaten the well-being of present and future generations, and the natural world. This new website www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org is dedicated to discussion of those challenges and potential solutions based on scientific evidence and scholarly analysis.

Well worth checking out, and it’ll be interesting to see how the site develops.

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Alley’s documentary: upbeat and optimistic

Richard Alley’s book Earth: The Operators’ Manual, which I reviewed recently, was written as a companion to a PBS documentary of the same name. The documentary has recently screened in the US and is now available for viewing here. The broad themes are the same as those of the book. They’re not complicated: taking our energy from fossil fuels has caused climate change, but there are clean energy alternatives more than adequate to human needs and the sooner we move to deploy them the better.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the documentary takes Alley to many places and countries, including New Zealand. He dwells on the human need for energy, the kind of energy demands a growing population will make, and the ultimate inability of fossil fuels, a limited resource, to meet that demand even if we could carry on burning them with impunity. But we can’t, and Alley explains why. A visit to the Franz Josef and Tasman glaciers, with some great photography, is part of what he uses to explain the real world impact of changing levels of CO2. A fascinating visit to the national ice core laboratory in Denver, Colorado demonstrates that today atmospheric CO2 is at a level not seen in cores that go back as far as 400,000 years – far above them, in fact. Then it’s back to New Zealand as, against the background of Rotorua thermal activity, Alley explains the isotopic evidence that backs up the relative volume measurements to confirm that the increased CO2 is the result of burning fossil fuels, dwarfing natural volcanic processes.

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Engaging the Public with Climate Change

Engaging the Public with Climate Change: Behaviour Change and CommunicationClimate scientists and those working in associated fields have established a clear picture of human-caused climate change and what it is likely to mean in the future. The basic information is readily understandable. It’s alarming in what it portends and a rational human society would by now be well on its way to the change of direction which would reduce the need for alarm. But we are not well on the way and there’s little urgency in our approach to the issue. Wide public alarm is rarely even voiced, let alone a stimulus to determined action. The science may be clear, but its appropriation by society at large is obviously no straightforward matter.

Can the social sciences help us? I was attracted by the title of a recently published book, Engaging the Public with Climate Change: Behaviour Change and Communication, edited by three academics, Lorraine Whitmarsh, Saffron O’Neill and Irene Lorenzoni. In its twelve chapters a couple of dozen social researchers and practitioners look at how climate change can be constructively woven into public perception and action. The writers are clear about the urgent need to tackle climate change, but the book doesn’t offer strong advocacy so much as close investigation of the dynamics at work in obtaining and supporting positive public engagement.

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