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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Self-interested, myopic hot-air

AtomHeartMother.jpgNew Zealand’s farming leadership have not distinguished themselves in the debate about climate policy. Federated Farmers president Don Nicholson has called for NZ to set no target for emissions reductions and for agriculture to be excluded from the emissions trading scheme, and former vice-president Frank Brenmuhl is still ruminating on the need for more debate on basics:

Political expediency has ensured the scientific debate has been reduced to a battle between believers and deniers.

No prizes for guessing Brenmuhl’s position… It gives me great pleasure, therefore, to point to an excellent analysis of agriculture’s role in the ETS by Adolf Stroombergen at Infometrics. He is scathing of Federated Farmers:

Once again we hear Federated Farmers bleating about the potential burden placed on them by an emissions trading scheme, proclaiming that farmers are doing all they can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hence any carbon charge on agriculture would be pointless. Rubbish.

Stroombergen doesn’t mince his words:

Arguing that agriculture should not be part of this mechanism has as much merit as arguing that it should not pay ACC premiums linked to its accident rate, or that it should not face fines for polluting waterways.

Merit has seldom been a key feature of Federated Farmer’s arguments about emissions policy, but Stroombergen notes that:

The self-interested myopic hot air from some in the agricultural sector has fortunately been given little credence.

Perhaps Nicholson and Brenmuhl haven’t got the ear of the right people in the National Party. We should all be grateful for that.

The biased leading the blind

homer.jpgTwo of New Zealand’s most prominent climate cranks, “inexpert witness” Chris de Freitas and Bob “great communicator” Carter are no strangers to the art of misrepresenting facts in support of their peculiar political visions, but recent articles by the pair set new standards for economy with the truth. Here’s De Freitas, writing in Energy NZ:

…no one has yet found even a shred of objective scientific evidence that humans are causing damaging global climate change.

No to be outdone, in Aussie “journal of ideas” Quadrant Carter revives the oldest zombie fact of them all:

As the temperature trend for ten years now has been one of cooling, since the unusually warm El Nino year of 1998, this requires a precautionary response to cooling rather than warming.

De Freitas’ piece is — even to my jaundiced eyes — remarkable for how liberally he misleads his readers…

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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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