Category: Climate science

Sciblogging: they blinded me with science

This week sees the launch of the next big thing in science communication down under – Sciblogs, the new science blogging platform from the NZ Science Media Centre. Sciblogs is hosting 25 blogs, from scientists in Crown Research Institutes, universities and private research companies, with two dozen PhDs involved. I’m letting the side down on that score… but Hot Topic is very pleased to be on the Sciblogs blogroll as one of the founding participants. There are some established bloggers on the platform, including Ken Perrott’s Open Parachute and Jim McVeagh’s MacDoctor, and there many others that deserve a wider audience. New bloggers include Andy Reisinger, a senior climate researcher from VUW, and there’s my new favourite blog with kakapo pictures: Chthonic Wildlife Ramblings (title explanation).

All Hot Topic‘s posts are being syndicated to Sciblogs, and will appear there under our own banner, but this site will continue as before. All discussion will take place here, unless and until we can work out a way of syncing comments between the to two platforms. Sciblogs looks set to be a one-stop shop for great science coverage from New Zealand, and I wish it (and all who sail in her) well.

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Climate compendium: important insights

Compendium“The Climate Change Science Compendium is a wake-up call. The time for hesitation is over”. So wrote Ban Ki-moon in his foreword to this UN Environment Programme publication released last week. The publication is a review of how climate science has evolved since the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), and is based on some 400 major scientific contributions in the peer-reviewed literature or from research institutions since the deadline for inclusion in AR4 three years ago. It appears in response to the request of many governments and stakeholders for a snapshot update. Achim Steiner, the Executive Director of the Environment Programme makes it very clear that it doesn’t replace the painstaking rigour of an IPCC process, but he hopes it will provide important insights into the rapidly developing and fast moving realm of climate science so that the choices made by leaders in Copenhagen in December are informed by the best and the latest research available to the international community.

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Arctic takes a Turney for the worse

British geologist Chris Turney is just back from fieldwork in Svalbard, the island archipelago situated halfway between Norway and the North Pole. He has written about it in his popular science blog, under the title A Warning From the North. I’ll draw attention to some of his main points here, but first a reminder that he is the author of Ice, Mud and Blood which I reviewed on Hot Topic early this year. He’s also a director of New Zealand company Carbonscape which Hot Topic has featured more than once.

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One of the saddest encounters I had with a frog…

Sir David Attenborough makes an eloquent plea for the survival of rainforests on behalf of the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project, courtesy of the Telegraph. He’s a great communicator, and it’s an important subject. No gorillas involved.

What cap and converge means with a realistic 2050 emissions target

This New Scientist video is a superb illustration of the tough emissions targets the world needs to be thinking about. More details in the NS story here. The basic premise is that if we take a 2ºC target seriously, then we have to limit our total emissions to 2050 to about 750 billion tonnes of carbon. Then divide that up by the current population of the world, and allocate countries a carbon budget, based on their population, that they can burn by 2050. Not good news for big emitters like the US, which would burn its total budget in about 12 years at current rates. As the presenter suggests, this is only a thought experiment not a model for policy, but it provides a realistic context for policy making. Required viewing.