Hot Topic is about to over-indulge. In a few hours, I will be elbow deep in a raw turkey, inserting stuffing. It will take hours to cook and minutes to eat, and then we’ll fall asleep in the sun and in the evening complain about sunburn and dehydration. In other words, climate matters will be (with luck) far from my mind. There will be peripatetic blogging over the holidays, but don’t expect too much. Thanks to all the regular readers for showing up diligently, and may all your Christmases be white (if appropriate to your circumstances).
Tag: Hot Topic
Bali ha’i, Bali low?
The Bali conference ended with a cliffhanger, but as I was cocooned in a kayak paddling up the coast of the Abel Tasman it passed me by like a fur seal in the night. I did notice a fishy smell, but I don’t think it emanated from Nusa Dua. The big news, of course, was the US climbdown at the last minute, memorably blogged by David Sassoon at Solve Climate. He extensively quotes an eye witness account by Peter Riggs, Director of the Forum on Democracy and Trade:
The canary croaked
From AP (via CNN): “The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.” The annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco is bringing bad news about the Arctic – most of it listed in the foregoing linked article. One paragraph is particularly shocking:
Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004’s total.
In three years, half of the summer ice has gone. In Hot Topic I suggest that it might all be gone in my lifetime – and I thought I was being pretty daring, given that the IPCC talks about the end of the century. One ice modeller who has been predicting an early demise for the summer sea ice is the US Navy’s Wieslaw Maslowski. From the BBC:
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
RealClimate is providing coverage of AGU highlights (here, here, here and (update – sea ice specific) here. The Herald runs with a very US-angled Reuters story. As I’ve pointed out before, the consequences of the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic for northern hemisphere climate is not known, but I would expect that there’s some urgent work being done to find out. We’re into the land of the unknown unknowns, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
It’s not just the cows
It’s been a quiet few days chez Hot Topic, as the sun’s been shining (until today), the farm’s been calling and friends have been dining, but I can’t pass over this piece of news. A new web site called CARMA – Carbon Monitoring for Action – was launched last week [Science Daily ]. It pulls together information on carbon emissions from the 50,000 power plants around the world and the 20,000 companies that run them, and ranks countries, regions and cities on their emissions. So what happens when you have a look at New Zealand?
As you might expect, Huntly dwarfs the competition, credited with producing 7.6 million tons of CO2 per year, but if you click on the emissions intensity tab (far right) – the amount of CO2 per unit of power generated – a couple of Fonterra factories top the charts. Step forward Waitoa and Edendale – NZ’s most intense/least efficient emitters of CO2. Can’t be good for their performance on Fonterra’s internal “carbon account“. CARMA is a treasure trove of information, well worth a long look.
Blah, blah, blab, Blaby (*)
Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, a British Tory politician who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet during the 1980s, is visiting New Zealand as a guest of the Business Roundtable to give this year’s Sir Ronald Trotter memorial lecture. Lawson withdrew from the mainstream of Conservative politics in 1992 “to spend more time with his family” (coining that phrase as he did so), but in recent years he has reinvented himself as a climate sceptic, a vociferous opponent of the Kyoto protocol and a scourge of what he terms “eco-fundamentalists”. Clearly, the Business Roundtable has brought in a wise elder statesman to provide much needed context to the climate debate, to better inform its members about the need for emissions reductions. Sadly, Lawson is far more likely to serve up a rousing speech packed with half-truths, distortions, and advice so bad it amounts to dangerous folly, if reports in the Sunday Star Times and Dominion Post are to be believed.