Last night Radio New Zealand’s Nights programme — a show with a long-standing commitment to excellent coverage of science and scientists — for some strange reason decided to broadcast an interview with Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. Quite why they bothered to give him a platform remains to be seen, but as you might expect, [...]
Posts Tagged RNZ
Monckton misfires on Radio New Zealand: a baker’s dozen of errors and deception Apr 19
Join the conversation at Hot TopicStuff and nonsense (ministerial condescension and media fossil fools) Dec 11
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A select few politicians have the ability to make me (and others) shout at the radio. New Zealand’s minister of climate change issues Tim Groser is one such. On Radio New Zealand National’s Morning Report this morning he gave vent to his feelings on NZ’s Colossal Fossil winning performance at Doha. It was an “absurd and juvenile prank”, apparently, put together by “extreme greens and youth groups”. He definitely had it in for the youth groups, referring to them twice. His extreme condescension to young people who think that his policies are at best wrong-headed, at worst disastrous for the country they will inherit, caused me to interrupt my tea making to shout at the radio, much to the dog’s surprise. Hear the full interview here, and see if you are immune to Groser’s aggressively smug assumption that only he holds the key to climate action:
And then, over the now brewed cup of tea, Google’s morning newspaper presented me with a news item from the Dominion Post (via Stuff) about a new paper in Nature Climate Change co-authored by Dave Frame of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute. The basic news item’s straightforward enough: Frame and co-author Daithi Stone, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have looked back to the IPCC’s 1990 projections, and found that they were remarkably close to what has actually happened over the last 20 years — bad news for climate deniers who insist that model projections have failed and that warming has stopped. (See also VUW press release, Phys.org, The Conversation). Perhaps that’s why the journalist, one Tom Hunt, chose to close his piece with a quote from physics denier Bryan Leyland (cue coughing and spluttering):
But Bryan Leyland, from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, said science had shown global temperatures had not risen in 16 years and the world was more likely to get cooler.
Leyland, as we discussed at Hot Topic recently, is now happy to align himself with the über cranks who deny the reality of the greenhouse effect. Quoting him on climate research is about as meaningful as seeking the flat earth society’s opinion on orbital mechanics.
For that stupid piece of false balance, Tom Hunt and the Dom Post win my inaugural Media Fossil Fool award. Anyone care to design a nice badge they can wear with shame?
Hansen in NZ: first reports May 13
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James Hansen’s tour of New Zealand is off to a flying start, with an appearance on TVNZ’s Close Up, coverage in the Herald (they got his age wrong) and an interview with the Dominion Post‘s Kiran Chug, followed by a business lunch (or a lunch with business) and an evening talk to a packed room at Auckland University. Jim Salinger reports:
Jim Hansen’s lecture last night was great. The lecture room held 250, and there were 350 stuffed in sitting on the floor and standing room only, with an overflow room full and buzzing.
The talk was recorded, luckily, and can be seen here. Blogger No Right Turn was at today’s Palmerston North session and tweeted: It was a good talk. The thrust: “think of the grandchildren”. No surprises there. Hansen will be interviewed on Kim Hill’s show on Radio NZ National on Saturday morning at 8-15am, and although my sources suggest Kim may want to push a sceptical line, it should be well worth a listen. For a little amusement, Facebook users might want to check out the tour Facebook page, where a couple of NZ’s more incorrigible denialists — Steve Wrathall and Andy Scrace — have taken it upon themselves to post stupid comments. No surprises there, either. Meanwhile, plans are afoot for GR and The Climate Show to interview Hansen next week in Christchurch. Watch (and indeed listen) to this space…
[Update 14/5: Full report on Palmerston North talk at No Right Turn here.]
Something for the weekend: poles, podcasts and Chomsky Feb 12
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Something for everyone this weekend: a few podcasts to grab, ice news from both ends of the planet, interesting reading, and a great interview with Noam Chomsky. Audio first: Radio NZ National’s Bryan Crump interviewed Prof Jean Palutikof, Director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University in Queensland at the beginning of the week. It’s a wide-ranging discussion: Palutikof is an engaging speaker and frank about the dangers we confront. Grab the podcast now, because it’ll disappear from the RNZ site on Monday.
Matthew Woods’ Journeys to the Ice blog (part of the Sciblogs network) recently featured a two-part podcast on “the Greenland ice sheet in a high CO2 world” — an extended interview with Canadian ice modeller Jeremy Fyke. It’s interesting both for the light Fyke’s work sheds on possible futures for the ice sheet, but also a fascinating insight to the process of building and running complex climate models.
At the other end of the planet:
- Aussie researchers working on the Lambert Glacier ice stream have discovered evidence that the huge East Antarctic ice sheet may respond to warming rather more quickly than had been thought. Oh dear.
- Antarctica New Zealand has finished provisioning a new camp at Roosevelt Island, 700 km East of the NZ and US bases on the western edge of the Ross ice shelf for the Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution (RICE) project, a seven nation collaboration between NZ, the US, Denmark, Germany, Britain, Australia, and Italy. Drilling starts next summer with the expectation of producing a high resolution core that will shed light on the stability of the Ross ice shelf and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the transition out of the last ice age.
- The BBC looks at the secrets of Antarctica’s fossilised forests — how gingkos survived the long night (the long summers more than made up for the dark, apparently), and how the local dinosaurs adapted.
On the big island to the north of Tasmania, the government’s chief climate adviser Ross Garnaut has begun releasing updates to his 2008 report: three in the last ten days. I’m waiting with interest to hear what he has to say about the state of the science (due on March 10), but he wasn’t afraid to draw the obvious conclusion about weather extremes when releasing the first update, Weighing the costs and benefits of climate change action. One point seemed well made: “the presence of uncertainty in the range of possible climate outcomes strengthens the case for climate change action” — something that every politician needs to understand.
On the subject of extremes, Reuters has a long feature on how the US insurance industry is responding. “It’s a tough time to be in the $500 billion U.S. property insurance business. Storms are happening in places they never happened before, at intensities they have never reached before and at times of year when they didn’t used to happen.”
Some good new web sites:
- NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) has relaunched its web presence with a very good looking and informative site. Plenty of material on ocean acidification and the oceanic carbon cycle, with excellent graphics. Worth having a dig around there…
- If you ever get confused but all those acronyms for ocean/atmosphere interactions — PDO, ENSO, NAO, SAM and so on, UCAR has the page for you. Good clear explanations and nice illustrations.
- The Carbon Brief is a new UK climate news site. It’s a professional effort, with good news coverage, excellent background articles and profiles of key players. Keep an eye on their Twitter or RSS feed.
A prominent scientist is fighting back against the libels slung around so freely by the denial campaign. Canadian climatologist Andrew Weaver is suing “freelance climate change denier” Tim Ball. DeSmogBlog and the New York Times have the details, but it looks like an open and shut case. Ball went too far, and picked on the wrong person…
And finally: Noam Chomsky. Many years ago, in a classroom far, far away, I had to parse a page of Chomsky (writing about grammar) as part of the entrance exam to a well-known university. It was damn near impenetrable (but I got in). In this interview, he’s anything but. In some senses, his views are old fashioned — you don’t hear many people (especially not in the US) talking about class issues — but even if you don’t agree with everything he says, the man talks sense. Discussing the election of so many Republican climate deniers he says: ’If this was happening in some small country it wouldn’t matter much. But when it’s happening in the richest, most powerful country in the world, it’s a danger to the survival of the species.’ I fear he’s right [via Energy Bulletin].
