Category: Hot Topic

Shaken and stirred: Christchurch earthquake Feb 2011

Cathedral

It’s a grim day in Canterbury. 75 people are confirmed dead and 300 are missing following the magnitude 6.3 earthquake which struck at 12-51pm yesterday. As I write, teams of urban search and rescue specialists from NZ and Australia (soon to be joined by teams from all over the world) are crawling over collapsed buildings throughout the central city. The cathedral (above) has lost its spire, and there are bodies in the rubble around it. I am glad to report that my family and friends, and that of Climate Show co-host Glenn Williams are well, but no-one is untouched by this terrible disaster. Up here in Waipara the initial shaking was bad enough to make us run outdoors, but our relief at escaping damage was immediately tempered by the realisation that someone had just taken a hammering…

Continue reading “Shaken and stirred: Christchurch earthquake Feb 2011”

Winter, fire and snow

Serendipity leads me to this great film: in the British winter of 1963, railway workers battle to keep the trains running. There’s one corker of a shot of a steam engine barrelling into a drift, plenty of impressionistic cutting and a wonderful soundtrack (an extended arrangement of Sandy Nelson’s Teen Beat). Directed by Geoffrey Jones, it was nominated for an Oscar. More on the film at the British Film Institute. Meanwhile, the current European cold snap (or at least the British part of it) looks like it might be about to end. Jeff Masters suggests that a major change of weather patterns is on its way, and to prove that for every cold spot there’s a warm one, parts of Bulgaria reported record warmth on Christmas Day. Novinite.com reports:

The highest air temperature in Bulgaria on Saturday was recorded in the northern city of Veliko Tarnovo – 20.1 degrees Celsius. The previous record on Christmas Day in Veliko Tarnovo was recorded in 1956, long before the more recent effects of the global warming started to kick in, and it was only 16.6 degrees Celsius.

It was pretty warm in Waipara, too… 😉

[Anuna & Katie McMahon]

Wishart only wishes…

…that Seek NZ would immortalise him with a Shockwave game…

Talk in the town

Last night’s session with the Skeptics in the Pub in Christchurch was an interesting experience (some nice feedback too, thanks). It gave me a chance to develop a few of the thoughts that have been running through my mind recently — and it’s good to do that by presenting them to an audience willing to explore and challenge ideas. The question session at the end ran for about 40 minutes, and the best moment came when one sceptic (no “k”, he was clearly of the “not persuaded” variety) had been pushing me for a worst case. I said that it was conceivable that climate change could end our civilisation. The questioner turned to the rest of the audience and asked them if they really believed that, to receive a chorus of agreement and nods. That’s what happens in the real world: when sceptics leave the comfortable certainty of Wishart-world or Treadgold territory, µWatts or Morano’s depot, they find that the rational world is coming to terms with the real risks.

I promised the group I would make my slides available: they’re here [3.3MB pdf]. The first half of the talk dealt with some basics, and ended with a Katey Walter earth fart lighting session. I then moved on to explore some of the reasons why there is so much manufactured doubt about the reality or seriousness of climate change. The slides are reasonably self-explanatory, happy to discuss in comments.

References/credits:

Many thanks to John Cook at Skeptical Science for making so much of the necessary material so easy to find and use. And for the iPhone app…

[The (older) Pretenders]

New comment system for Hot Topic

It’s Saturday afternoon, and between finishing the chilli jam to go with tonight’s six-hour roast lamb and a quick pre-dinner bike ride, I’m moving Hot Topic over to use the Intense Debate comment system. This is an externally-hosted comment service, operated by Automattic, the WordPress people. During the import process, existing comments may not appear on the site, but all should be well within a few hours. This is only a trial, and I can revert to the basic WordPress comment system at any time (it runs in parallel, in fact), but Intense Debate offers a wide range of features that should make commenting (and managing comments, from my point of view) easier. Existing log-ins should synchronise with Intense Debate, but if you create an Intense Debate account you can have personal profiles and other things. The experiment has begun…

[Update Sunday evening] It appears that existing Hot Topic log-ins are not automatically recognised by Intense Debate. I recommend that regular commenters sign up for an ID account. That gives you access to “reply by email”, which is a neat feature of the system. You can also comment as a guest, but without that (and other) features.]