Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, May 25th, 2011 - 45 comments
No Right Turn on the cost of the ETS to farmers. Forecast to be paid over $8 per kilo for milk solids, what cost do you guess that the ETS subtracts from that sum?
Written By: - Date published: 3:04 pm, May 16th, 2011 - 47 comments
James Hansen was among the first to raise the alarm about climate change, and is sometimes called “the father of climate change science” for his trouble. He’s currently in New Zealand, and had an excellent interview last Saturday with Kim Hill on RNZ. Click through for a schedule of his public lectures, and also two “Dark Ecologies” talks.
Written By: - Date published: 7:03 am, April 26th, 2011 - 46 comments
I recently finished “Eaarth” by Bill McKibben (of 350.org), a book about the effect of climate change on the planet and how we should be preparing for the future. Comprehensively researched and brutally honest, Eaarth is a smack in the emotional solar plexus. Everyone should read it.
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, April 20th, 2011 - 14 comments
The United Nations joins those voices pointing out that Nationals”policy” on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a complete sham. Reposted from No Right Turn.
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, April 20th, 2011 - 4 comments
The government’s books are tight. We shouldn’t borrow more, so there need to be reversals of the tax cuts and spending cuts. What matters is what is cut – all cuts are not the same. I’d like to see the $110 billion dollars of subsidies for greenhouse polluters under National’s Emissions Trading Scheme cut.
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 pm, April 4th, 2011 - 26 comments
Last year, the New Zealand Institute lambasted the Nats’ ‘aspiration’ to catch Australia by 2025 with a report entitled ‘A goal is not a strategy‘. Did the Nats change? Of course not. Yesterday, their energy strategy was released. It offers some goals but is mute on how to get there. It’s not really a strategy at all, but it serves the Nats’ purpose nonetheless.
Written By: - Date published: 9:11 am, March 13th, 2011 - 7 comments
Apropos of nothing in particular, one of my favourite poems.
Written By: - Date published: 11:43 pm, February 14th, 2011 - 51 comments
Look at the international media these days and what do we see? Oil prices rising due to peak oil. Extreme weather events due to climate change. Rising food prices due to peak oil increasing production costs, climate change destroying crops and resource depletion. And, in the most exposed countries, governments falling in revolution.
Written By: - Date published: 12:27 pm, February 11th, 2011 - 5 comments
Skeptical Science has posted a very interesting video with Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg running through the current known climate science and associated risks on oceans. Our civilizations have both direct and indirect dependence on oceans. The implications of destroying the ecosystems there is probably going to impact earlier than most of the other effects of our current unrestricted CO2 emissions.
Written By: - Date published: 6:02 am, February 3rd, 2011 - 22 comments
By the time this is posted Yasi will have hit Australia. There will be massive damage, and probably loss of life. Most New Zealanders will have friends or family in Australia, perhaps in the areas affected. I’m sure our thoughts are with our cousins over the ditch. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent as a result of climate change. We should all make whatever preparations we can.
Written By: - Date published: 6:03 am, January 31st, 2011 - 15 comments
It’s crunch time for humanity and for our current way of life. Ever since the failure of the Copenhagen summit on climate change I have been less than optimistic about the outcome. So the Christmas break was a good time to read Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope by Tim Flannery. An argument for hope was exactly what I was looking for…
Written By: - Date published: 2:01 pm, January 14th, 2011 - 17 comments
To all those deniers who claimed the record cold in January & February in parts of the Northern Hemisphere (and again in December in Britain) proved global warming was a hoax… In fact globally 2010 equalled 2005 as hottest year ever overall, being 0.62C warmer than the twentieth century average (~14C globally). Deniers looked away …
Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, January 5th, 2011 - 26 comments
Our guest poster looks at the “Warm Arctic / Cool Continents” idea about why Europe and North America have been cold and the Arctic has been so warm over recent years. Quoting Conrad, our guest then skewers ‘skeptics’ with the statement “Or to put it another way: you might not be interested in global warming, but global warming is interested in you.”
Written By: - Date published: 9:04 am, December 28th, 2010 - 32 comments
In 2007, Charles Stross a noted science fiction writer wrote a great essay on the known limits to space (without finding some kind of magic toolkit). This is worth reading in its own right. But it also implies why trashing our current life support system through laziness or stupidity is such a silly idea.
Written By: - Date published: 4:29 pm, December 26th, 2010 - 19 comments
Chinese manufacturing and state support is transforming the cost structure of solar technology. This in turn is helping to put in power support for the emerging use of wireless technologies in the developing world. This helps to ensure that less dirty carbon emitting technologies are not used in the developing world.It is hard to see a downside to this state initiative because it makes solar tech cheaper and more available earlier rather than later.
Written By: - Date published: 7:32 am, December 19th, 2010 - 19 comments
NIWA has had some of their data, methodology, and results checked by the aussies. As expected by anyone who knows something about the subject, they came back with substantially the same result. For the others like the nutters at the CSC and their political allies – well I can just see another conspiracy theory arising…
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, December 15th, 2010 - 64 comments
How does large hunks of most of our coastal cities and thousands of acres of farmland being swallowed the sea sound? This neat graphic shows effects of sea level rises from climate change: 1m – roughly in line with official predictions; through 6m – collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; to 14m – doomsday scenario. Even a small rise is catastrophic.
Written By: - Date published: 9:49 pm, December 13th, 2010 - 31 comments
How journalists make a hypothetical question based on a nutty claim and manufacture a sensational headline out of it. The really sensational headline is that western journos appear to have picked up the story from that world renowned nutter Anthony Watts raving about a fictional war between Russia and Poland. It looks like you can only rely on hard checked science news from some of the rational blogs, and a Chinese news agency…
Written By: - Date published: 7:35 am, December 13th, 2010 - 12 comments
The UN climate change talks at Cancun, Mexico, are finished. There were some positives, but not on the big issues. Reduction targets are still voluntary and still too low. We’re still on a catastrophic collision course with the laws of physics.
Written By: - Date published: 9:22 am, December 9th, 2010 - 7 comments
The Commissioner for the Environment’s “Lignite and Climate Change: The High Cost of Low Grade Coal” has been released today. Its release had been postponed because of concerns that it would become entangled with reports concerning the Pike River Mine disaster.
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, December 4th, 2010 - 24 comments
I confess that I am used to thinking of China as a polluter, not much concerned with environmental standards or green technology. I am very pleased indeed to find that I am wrong. Green technology is yet another area where China is drawing ahead of America and much of the West.
Written By: - Date published: 7:18 am, December 3rd, 2010 - 62 comments
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 pm, December 1st, 2010 - 120 comments
When they’re not polluting our rivers or fighting animal welfare laws, our farmers, the ‘guardians of the land’, are opposing having to pay for their greenhouse emissions. Now, with the Earth having just clocked up its warmest 12 months since records began, farmers are scratching their heads at the early start to the summer drought.
Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, November 29th, 2010 - 23 comments
It seems I’m not alone in feeling outrage at attempts to bury any sensible debate on the shape and extent of New Zealand’s coal operations
Written By: - Date published: 8:25 am, November 27th, 2010 - 51 comments
On Monday the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference begins in Cancun, Mexico. This is the successor to last year’s spectacularly failed Copenhagen Summit. Nothing useful will be accomplished there. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that we lack the will to save ourselves.
Written By: - Date published: 1:50 pm, November 22nd, 2010 - 21 comments
The Commissioner for the Environment says New Zealand’s greenhouse emissions will be 26% above 1990 levels in 2020, compared to the Nats’ promise to cut them by 10-20% – leaving us with a $1b bill. Worse, the IEA shows that even if we and other countries meet our promised cuts its only half of what’s needed to avert disaster.
Written By: - Date published: 7:37 am, November 22nd, 2010 - 194 comments
It takes many people working together to achieve anything really worthwhile. This also applies to our biggest project yet. Saving a planet. So why can’t we get started? Because human society based around the market can not do it. The answers will only com from the Left. The Left parties, Labour in particular, need to get serious and move Leftward.
Written By: - Date published: 7:38 am, November 20th, 2010 - 98 comments
It has been a year since the CRU emails were stolen and the “climategate” “scandal” broke. There’s an interesting summary at the ClimateSight blog. Meanwhile the record temperatures keep rolling in, the ice keeps melting all over the world, and The Guardian asks “Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?”.
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, November 13th, 2010 - 72 comments
Climate change and a shoals of dirty little red herrings would seem to go together like salt and pepper or cheese and pickle.
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, October 25th, 2010 - 4 comments
The release of 400,000 classified documents on the Iraq war today highlights a much broader issue for New Zealand. As the world moves into uncertainty, some commentators call it a ‘new new world order’, New Zealand must establish itself definitively, cementing the values we wish to hold true for the coming century.
Written By: - Date published: 5:06 pm, October 10th, 2010 - 10 comments
Today is 10 October 2010, a significant date for two serious reasons. And one silly one!
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