Category: Climate science

On the road, again

goingwestlogo-08.jpg It’s going to be a busy weekend for your blogger. On Friday afternoon I’m off to deepest Titirangi to prepare for a Saturday morning panel on coverage of the climate issue at the Going West Books & Writer’s Festival. Warming Up – A Hot Topic will be chaired by Francesca Price, presenter of Wasted and editor of Good magazine, and my co-panellist will be Nikki Harré from Auckland University, who edited the recent book Carbon Neutral by 2020. Full details of the weekend, which looks very interesting, here. Sadly, I have to return to Waipara, because on Sunday I’m off to Wellington…

On Monday and Tuesday next week, I’ll be chairing the Climate Change Law Summit at Te Papa. Two full days of presentations by some of NZ’s top people in their fields – including Julia Hoare, Karen Price, Vernon Rive, Rachel Devine, Prof Martin Manning and Guy Salmon. There’s a full agenda at the link above. Should be a fascinating couple of days. If anyone is interested in attending, I might be able to wangle a guest pass – which if you check the fees, is a pretty generous offer. Please email me ASAP (gareth at the hot topic domain), and I’ll see what can be done.

I will be posting on the Arctic soon, I promise.

Beat the retreat

MarionArawata.jpg New Zealand’s glaciers lost 2.5 km3 (2.2 billion tonnes) of permanent ice from April 2007 to March 2008, leaving 44.9 km3 of ice in the Southern Alps – the lowest amount since NIWA began regular surveys 32 years ago. The picture (credit: “Mr Ice” Trevor Chinn, click for larger image) shows the Marion Glacier in the Arawata Valley in South Westland which has recently retreated above its proglacial lake. The annual survey uses a fixed wing aircraft to record the height of the snowline at the end of summer (and Trevor gets to take the pix). Jim Salinger, NIWA’s principal scientist, says that the survey shows that the glaciers had lost a lot more ice than they had gained over the preceding winter [press release]:

“As a result of La Niña conditions over New Zealand, more easterlies, and warmer than normal temperatures, there was less snowfall in the Southern Alps and more snowmelt. The higher the snow line, the more snow is lost to feed the glacier. On average, the snow line this year was about 130 metres above where it would need to be to keep the ice mass constant.”

More below the fold…

Continue reading “Beat the retreat”

Would you give this man any creedence?

It’s YouTube weekend chez Hot Topic: Sunday’s offering is the Two-Mile Time Machine man and all-round ice expert, Dr Richard B Alley, giving a (ahem) creditable rendering of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary, with a message about coal and climate.

[youtube]6mziX8yuq7w[/youtube]

(Full story of Alley’s rock videos at Dot Earth). [References]

Alley’s riffing on coal captures the zeitgeist, what with Greenpeace campaigners in the UK escaping conviction for vandalising a coal-burning power station chimney by painting UK PM Gordon Brown’s name on it (over here they’d fall foul of the Electoral Finance Act), thanks in no small part to testimony by James Hansen (testimony (pdf), recent paper).

Way off-topic, but I can’t let this video weekend pass without mentioning the Large Hadron Rap. Damn catchy, and didactic to boot – even features a guest appearance from MC Hawking. New frontiers in science communication…

Busy doin’ nothin’

Global warming is a difficult problem for our society to deal with, because our brains are not equipped to cope with this class of danger, argues Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert in this short talk. Well worth 15 minutes of anyone’s time. [Hat tip: Desmogblog]

Part one: [youtube]uiz3XARUNeM[/youtube]
Part two: [youtube]VTnkT2pcV3s[/youtube]
Gilbert lends some weight to my suspicion that the global community won’t fully appreciate the seriousness of the issue we confront until there is some sort of climate disaster that can be unequivocally laid at the door of global warming. Or until we give climate change a face… preferably a puppy’s.

Here come de judge

judge How does an intelligent layman decide between the competing claims of the climate cranks (including Rodney Hide), and the position presented to us by scientific institutions and the IPCC? It’s easy to assume that there are “two sides” to the story, and that both should be heard. This is the idea that Avenues – a glossy freebie magazine in Christchurch – decided to use for a series of articles earlier this year. The editor, Jon Gadsby (who has since left), lined up NZ C”S”C veteran Gerrit van der Lingen to take the crank side, while Professor Bryan Storey, director of the University of Canterbury’s Gateway Antarctica programme took the IPPC position. In his introduction to one of the pieces Gadsby said:

This whole project is a major one, and something Avenues has not entered into lightly. We are though, if one side is to be believed, facing the single greatest threat to life in the history of humankind. If the other side is correct, we are in the midst of the single greatest, stage-managed deception in recorded history.

Nicely put, Jon. The final judgement appeared in the magazine’s August issue, provided by the recently retired High Court judge, Justice John Hansen. His summing up is interesting for the approach he took, even if his finding comes as no surprise.

Continue reading “Here come de judge”