Tag: ice

Another Friday roundup

NzmapI’m a sucker for pretty computer graphics, especially if they’re didactic. Today’s discovery is a superb Flash animation of the sea level history of Australia and New Guinea, lovingly prepared by Monash University‘s new SahulTime project [ABC coverage here]. From the web site:

The concept of SahulTime is similar to GoogleEarth, except that SahulTime extends each of GoogleEarth’s paradigms through a further dimension in time. Satellite-style images change to reflect coastlines, the icons are time-aware, and even photographs can can be taken through a timewarp to view reconstructed ancient landscapes.

You drag a pointer back along a profile of how sea level has changed over the last 100,000 years, and watch how Australia’s coastline changes, merging with New Guinea. Fantastic. Can we have one for New Zealand, please?

Meanwhile…

  • Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has been passed by a UK High Court judge as fit to be seen by UK schoolchildren, but only with changes to the accompanying teacher’s notes to clarify nine scientific “errors”. News media are buzzing: a few samples – Herald, BBC, and Guardian (UK). The BBC’s environment correspondent provides some context, and Stoat (aka climate scientist and ice gambler William Connolley) looks at how serious the mistakes really are. The right wing roots of the court case are explained by Oil Change International, and one of the “expert” witnesses looks like it might have been the NZ CSC’s own Bob Carter. Not surprising then that former ACT MP Muriel Newman’s NZ Centre for Policy Research site is all over the issue – though she manages to find two extra bonus “errors” from somewhere. Read the judgement in full here. Real Climate’s original review supports the judge’s finding that AIT gets the basic science right.
  • New Scientist reports on a Canadian study that finds that to keep global temperature under the EU’s target of 2C above pre-industrial levels, cuts of 90% of emissions will be needed by 2050, much deeper than the 50% reductions already promised.
  • The new edition of popular computer game SimCity is to feature global warming, offering players high and low carbon energy options – sponsored by BP. A sign of the times….

Clearing the decks

A few quick links before I post on the government’s just announced energy strategy: cleaning out the tabs in my web browser…

  • Professor Graham Harris of the University of Tasmania addresses the issues I raised in my “ecological overdraft” post a few days ago, in Sleepwalking Into Danger – an article for ScienceAlert: “It is time to admit how little we know and face the risks of planetary degradation – this goes way beyond climate change. Biodiversity isn’t just birds, primates and whales; it is planetary function and resilience.”
  • The Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds is planning [Guardian, BBC] to allow the sea to reclaim 728 hectares of coastal land in the Essex marshes on Britain’s east coast to restore habitat for wildlife – and as a pragmatic adaptation to rising sea levels. Could we see the same sort of thing here?
  • The Andrill project – a sea floor drilling effort under the Ross Ice Shelf involving NZ and US scientists – is using nifty Apple computers, so Apple has posted an interesting perspective on the work being done. New drilling season starts soon.
  • Brian Fallow in the Herald takes a look at the cost of carbon in the new ETS and speculates about ongoing impacts on the government’s accounts.
  • Carbon emissions from shipping may be much higher than previously thought, according to The Independent (UK).
  • German solar power company Conergy is planning a 500 turbine windfarm near Broken Hill in New South Wales. Meanwhile, BusinessWeek (US) profiles entrepreneur John O’Donnell, who has bought into Aussie scientist David Mills solar thermal designs, and plans to build a lot of generation at costs competitive with coal. With Silicon Valley money, and soon.
  • The Dominion Post digs up some advice to government on dealing with “environmental refugees”. NZ will probably want to help small Pacific nations, but refugees from the Asian megadeltas might be another matter.

Emissions Trading Scheme workshop: final thoughts

Wp-Content Uploads 2007 09 Nzets1-3Two thought provoking days, and a crash course in carbon trading (and carbon trading politics), leaves me with a few key comments (and many more questions). There’s lots of devil in the detail in the documents (which are many, and often thick) – but these are my headlines.

Continue reading “Emissions Trading Scheme workshop: final thoughts”

Biofuels to fly, and other stories

747Air New Zealand is carefully positioning itself as a climate-friendly airline with its latest announcement that it is to trial biofuels in a 747 flight from Auckland in the next couple of years. Working with Boeing, Air NZ will be part of the first commercial trial of biofuel, in a Rolls-Royce-powered jumbo in the next 18 months . The flight will only use biofuel in one engine, and will not carry customers. [Stuff, Herald, BBC, June HT blog on aviation biofuels].

Trumpets, #2

Another nice review, this time from the Howick and Pakuranga Times, by Barbara Weil: “[…]this book’s value lies not only in what he says, but how – in terms that we can all understand quite clearly.