Bryan Walker • Sep 17, 2009 •
At least some Americans and Chinese are getting together to work on climate change. A team of researchers from Harvard University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have been conducting a serious investigation into China’s wind power potential. Their work was the cover story for the Sep 11 issue of Science (sub required) and is reported [...] … Read More
Gareth Renowden • Sep 11, 2009 •
Awesome (defined as extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear) time-lapse pictures of the calving face of the great glacier at Ilulisat, Greenland pouring ice into the ocean — the single biggest ice discharge of any northern hemisphere glacier. Greenlanders reckon this is where the iceberg that sank the Titanic originated. The [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Sep 10, 2009 •
Sea level will rise by more than a metre by 2100 according to the authors of the third chapter in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s new Arctic report, introduced by Gareth a few days ago. Eric Rignot, one of the two authors of the chapter, is principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering [...] … Read More
Gareth Renowden • Sep 08, 2009 •
The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has bought a shiny new supercomputer. For $12.7m they’re getting a IBM Power 575 that will be the fastest climate machine in the southern hemisphere, 14th fastest in the world — and it will get an upgrade in 2 years which will double its speed. Sounds [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Sep 01, 2009 •
Oxfam climate change reports keep coming. This time it’s Nepal, a country about which New Zealanders who share Edmund Hillary’s values will care. Oxfam spoke to people in fourteen rural communities across three ecological zones in that country. What those people had to say is remarkably consistent with the current climate change projections. But it’s not [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Aug 29, 2009 •
Australian scientist and coral reef expert John Veron reckons there’s a “great big gorilla in the cupboard†— advancing ocean acidification. It cleans out reefs, leaving them “horrible places – dead, empty, slime-covered.†He paints this grim picture in a lecture given to the Royal Society in London last month. It’s available on line and [...] … Read More