Tag: sea level

A lecture not to miss

Tim Naish’s lecture, of which we gave notice recently, is now recorded on the Climate Change Research Institute’s website. I warmly recommend it for viewing. Naish is one of the lead authors for the paleoclimate chapter for working group 1 of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report due in 2013. In this lecture he uses paleoclimate material to provide perspective for the projections of rising global temperature and climate change. We are headed for climates and temperatures that haven’t been seen on the planet for more than a million years and the paleoclimate record helps us to understand what we might expect in terms of polar ice behaviour and sea level rise.

In fact we have to go back 3 million years – to the mid-Pliocene –  before we see temperatures like those the models are projecting, 2 to 3 degrees warmer by 2100. The atmospheric CO2 level then was about 400 parts per million. This Pliocene warm period is becoming an important window into what we might expect incoming decades. Continue reading “A lecture not to miss”

Jolting Contrasts

I read this morning yet another dismal report on the extraordinary lengths to which Republican politicians hopeful of nomination as presidential candidate in America are going in their denial of climate change. Then I watched an excellent PBS television interview with a couple of intelligent and knowledgeable American scientists which regular Hot Topic commenter Bill had recommended.

It was an extraordinary juxtaposition, all the more surreal because both relate to Texas. How does a country like the US, with scientists and scientific institutions so advanced, manage to throw up leading politicians so wilfully ignorant?  (That’s a rhetorical question unless your answer has nothing to do with money.) Continue reading “Jolting Contrasts”

A Week of Contradiction

We seem to have convinced the world that we’re right up in the forefront when it comes to tackling climate change.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon came to New Zealand this week to the Pacific Islands Forum and called at Kiribati en route.

“For those who believe climate change is about some distant future, I invite them to Kiribati.

“Climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet – quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere.”

“We will not succeed in reducing emissions without sustainable energy solutions,” he said, and then he praised New Zealand as a global leader in sustainable development, with the vast majority of its energy coming from renewable sources. Continue reading “A Week of Contradiction”

Global Climate Change: A Primer

Global Climate Change: A Primer may be a book for beginners, but those with an understanding of the issue will find interest in the wide-ranging exposition provided by geologist Orrin Pilkey  and his lawyer son Keith. Pilkey’s research area has been shorelines and coastal geology, with a special focus on barrier island coasts, and his previous book The Rising Sea, which I reviewed here, gave clear warning of the possible magnitude of sea level rise this century. This primer has been written to provide a brief and simple account for the layperson of the science of global climate change. The guided tour the authors provide is well managed in terms both of the straightforward language they use and the topics they select to survey.

Continue reading “Global Climate Change: A Primer”

Risky business: insuring against climate change

Thumbing idly through last Friday’s Business Herald lift-out, I clicked to attention at a double page spread headed Climate of Fear reporting on how seriously the insurance industry is taking climate change. Peter Huck’s article didn’t appear on the Herald website for a few days, but it’s there now, I’m glad to report.  It’s a thorough and scientifically aware piece of journalism which it was pleasing to see given prominence in the paper. And no, he didn’t go looking for any obliging deniers to balance the concern of the insurance industry.

How do insurers calculate their exposure, as “hundred year” weather disasters become ever more common in the “new normal”?  Getting a handle on it means taking climate science very seriously. And the news on the science front is not good, as he briefly recounts.

Continue reading “Risky business: insuring against climate change”