The Climate Show #8: Kevin Trenberth and our shaky future

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The Climate Show returns with a packed show, featuring one of the world’s best known climate scientists, NZ-born, Colorado-based Dr Kevin Trenberth — star of the Climategate “where’s the missing heat” emails. He’s been in New Zealand to visit family (experiencing the Christchurch quake in the process) and to attend a conference, and his comments on the state of our understanding of climate change should not be missed. John Cook of Skeptical Science returns with his new short urls and an explanation of why declines have never been hidden, and Gareth and Glenn muse on Arnie “Governator” Schwarzenegger riding to the rescue of climate science, cryospheric forcing and carbon cycle feedbacks from melting permafrost, and a new paper that suggests that current policies are pointing us towards extremely dangerous climate change. All that and hyperbranched aminosilica too…

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The Climate Show

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Show notes below the fold.

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Speakin’ out

Over recent months I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated at the efforts by a tiny minority of commenters to derail discussions by trolling or wandering off-topic. I have always wanted Hot Topic to be a place where a wide variety of views can be canvassed and discussed, but unfortunately the actions of a few have the effect of making civilised conversation all but impossible. I have therefore decided it’s time to have a formal comments policy: outlined below, and on the Comments Policy page (in the menu under About at the top of the page).

Readers wishing to post at Hot Topic will now have to create an account and log in before commenting. Many regular readers will already have accounts. Please don’t create duplicates if you can avoid it — if you can’t remember your log-in details email me (gareth at hot-topic etc) and I’ll reset them for you. This will, with luck, reduce the incidence of sock-puppetry and drive by trolling, as well as help to control spam.

The most important feature of the new policy is that comments must be relevant to the subject of the post below which they appear. Off-topic comments will either be moved to the most recent open thread, or to a new repository for the effluvia of the terminally bemused, The Twilight Zone. I will only delete comments that are obvious spam, legally dubious or obscene.

The intention of the new policy is not to stifle debate, but to make honest and intelligent discussion possible in the face of efforts to derail it. All views are welcome here, but if you want to question the basic science of climate change, do it in an open thread or under a relevant post, and do it in good faith.

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People talkin’ (open thread)

It’s been a little while since we had an open thread, and since a key feature of Hot Topic’s new comment policy (coming soon) is a requirement that comments should be relevant to the topic of the post, I’ll be making an effort to ensure that one is always available on the front page of the site. Over to you…

Adapting to Climate Change

Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, GovernanceAdapting to Climate Change is a reassuring sounding title, but the content of this book makes it clear that there will be nothing straightforward or easy as human communities try to ready themselves for the coming climate crisis. Editors Neil Adger, Irene Lorenzoni and Karen O’Brien have been doing on research in the area for a number of years and worked closely together in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on adaptation. They convened a conference in 2008 at the Royal Geographical Society in London and the resulting papers are the basis of this book, now published in a paperback edition.

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