Gareth Renowden • Jan 29, 2014 •
A classic case of WACCy weather in the northern hemisphere, seen here in a map from the excellent Climate Reanalyzer site, prompts me to discuss the 2013 global temperature numbers, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and what sea ice loss is doing to northern hemisphere weather patterns in my post at The Daily Blog this week. […] … Read More
Gareth Renowden • Aug 23, 2013 •
The area of land affected by extreme heatwaves is expected to double by 2020 and quadruple by 2040, and there’s no way we can stop it happening according to a new paper by Dim Coumou and Alexander Robinson – Historic and future increase in the global land area affected by monthly heat extremes (Environmental Research […] … Read More
Mr February • Aug 30, 2012 •
On the same day as the death of Neil Armstrong, the first astronaut to step onto the Moon, became public, the NZ High Court moonwalked its way to an off-the-world moment. It decided that greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are off-limits in the planning for an open cast coal mine. That’s as just as [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • May 21, 2012 •
Earlier this month James Hansen wrote a trenchant op-ed in the New York Times. Â He reiterated the warning that the exploitation of the Canadian tar sands will be game over for the climate, spelt out some of the long-term drought consequences for the US of continued warming and identified notable heat waves of the last [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • May 04, 2012 •
Two North American pieces I’ve read this week appealed to me for their directness about the export of coal. One, via James Hansen, was a letter from a Canadian group to Warren Buffet, informing him of their intention this Saturday to prevent coal trains from his BNSF railway company from passing through White Rock, British [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Apr 19, 2012 •
The latest communication from James Hansen to his email list this week was a sharp reminder that the New Zealand Government’s commitment to the pursuit of unexploited fossil fuels is part of widespread malpractice. The global stampede to find every possible fossil fuel is not being opposed by governments, no matter how dirty the fuels [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Feb 21, 2012 •
It was clearly never Michael Mann’s wish to be embroiled in the public controversy that has been manufactured by the denial industry around his and his co-authors’ work. He’s a scientist first and foremost, the nine-year-old who wanted to know what it meant to go faster than the speed of light, the high school student [...] … Read More
Gareth Renowden • Jan 22, 2012 •
The NASA numbers are in, and 2011 was the ninth warmest year since 1880 — 0.51ºC above the 1951-80 global mean. Nine of the ten warmest years in the long term record have occurred in this century. According to the analysis released by James Hansen and his team at GISS, a combination of low solar [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Jan 11, 2012 •
James Hansen and two fellow-authors have circulated a new paper which they will be submitting for publication, Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice. I’m not qualified to comment on its scientific detail beyond reporting it as relatively accessible to the lay person, but there were elements in the discussion with which it concluded [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Dec 14, 2011 •
An image that has lingered with me from all the reports of the Durban conference was the Democracy Now interview with a somewhat disconsolate Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chair. He was at Durban to represent the science, a rather thankless task since he detected very little interest in what the science has to say. “I’d [...] … Read More