This week The Climate Show brings you an all news special. We have wet summers for Europe, permafrost warming delivering a methane kick, La Niña driving floods that make sea level fall, a glacier calving in Antarctica, mammoths and sabre tooth tigers — all delivered with Glenn and Gareth’s inimitable panache (!).
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Story references
Wet British summers: Guardian, Nature.
Permafrost & methane: Skeptical Science.
US swing voter survey: China Daily(!)
La Niña driving sea level fall: Geophysical Research Letters.
SE Australia drying: eScience News
Thwaites Glacier calving: From a Glaciers Perspective.
Thanks to our media partners: Idealog Sustain, Sciblogs, and Scoop .
Theme music: A Drop In The Ocean by The Bads.
Title reference: Gareth’s favourite Beatles track…
Once again I get “404 File not found”
Noel
Sorry, noel. I’ll chase Glenn – he does the Libsyn uploading…
Thanks for the show, guys.
Forget the camera: I can’t be the only one wondering about its friend the rabbit! Waistcoat and all…
Browsing tip for Glenn: FF + NoScript + AdBlockPlus means no ads and no popups, ever.
A very special rabbit, with an interesting story – perhaps for a future show…
Also my favourite Beatles song!
Audio all go. Just had to switch it on.
Interesting. While we’re talking about chunks falling off glaciers this just out. May explain a few things…
Also, names familiar to readers (Dana N, John C, and Rob P) have just had a paper accepted at Physics Letters – congratulations to all (and that’s 2 papers – in 2 fields – in the last month for John Cook!)
Great show. Glad to hear you guys again.
I live in the US. So, regarding your discussion of the US election campaign:
The talk about swing voters being interested in climate comes from a a Yale University poll. It seems the Obama campaign feels they’d lose more from their “decideds” than they’d gain from bringing the issue up more to appeal to these “undecideds”.
It is incredible how both parties are avoiding discussion of the issue. The difference between how each party officially views climate couldn’t be greater.
Since a modern US political convention doesn’t decide who the party will pick as its Presidential nominee but nevertheless a convention is still by dying tradition a colossal media event, the meetings have become a showcase the parties can use to promote their interests.
Each party devoted about one minute to climate as an issue at their respective conventions.
A video of Romney’s entire minute is here. Romney felt comfortable ridiculing everyone in the world who thinks climate change is serious. In the video clip if you look in front of Romney as he tells his joke there is one delegate on the convention floor who almost fell on the floor laughing. The Republican Party National Platform which was formally adopted at the convention addressed climate as an issue in only one place, in the national security section, where Obama was criticized for treating the issue as seriously as national security. In other places, without specifically mentioning climate the platform called for prohibiting the EPA from doing anything about greenhouse gases, and there was a thinly veiled threat to prosecute climate scientists for fraud, worded this way: “We must restore scientific integrity to our public research institutions and remove political incentives from publicly funded research”
You don’t have to say or do much to be the clear choice for anyone concerned about climate change, once your opponent has declared the issue to be a joke in the biggest spotlight his party had up to that point in this election year.
Obama responded to Romney by declaring that “climate change is not a hoax – more droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke…” A video clip of the entire 34 second climate change section of Obama’s convention speech is here. One story has it that in the more than 80 other speeches at that convention, the issue was raised once. The Democratic Party 2012 National Platform mentions the issue repeatedly and in ways even Gareth would approve of.
According to the New Yorker magazine, Obama views climate as something he would like to address in a meaningful way in his second term, if he gets one. I believe it.
I have to disagree with your “there isn’t a politician in the world” who understands how serious climate change is idea.
Check out this podcast which is a talk given by two politicians from Grenada, i.e. Karl Hood, Grenada’s Foreign Minister, and Leon Charles, Grenada’s lead climate negotiator, given to an audience at the London School of Economics.
Another politician who “gets it” is the former President of the Maldives. This movie, “Island President” is worth watching. It depicts then President Mohamed Nasheed during the runup to the Copenhagen negotiations. Its very clear how serious he thinks climate change is.
These politicians think the way they do, obviously, because they represent “small island states” where people are waking up to the fact that sea level rise dooms their countries to be eliminated from the face of the earth.
The attitude these politicians have is going to be the attitude of all politicians one day, once people wake up and realize we’re all small states that need to cooperate with each other no matter how large we may have thought we were, because we all face being eliminated as countries from the face of the earth as civilization collapses.
Perhaps I should have said there isn’t a politician in the world “with real clout”, or something similar. Obviously there are some world leaders and statesmen who “get” the problem, but they are not (currently) in any position to bring about a change in government and international policy settings. Sadly.