A Summary of COP19

Reuters nicely summarizes the outcome of the COP19 UN climate negotiations in Warsaw, Poland. FINANCE Developed nations promised in 2009 to increase their aid to poorer countries to help them cope with climate change to $100 billion a year after 2020, from $10 billion a year in 2010-12. But in Warsaw they rejected calls to... Continue Reading →

Major Iceberg Cracks off Pine Island Glacier

Major Iceberg Cracks off Pine Island Glacier : Natural Hazards Between November 9–11, 2013, a large iceberg finally separated from the calving front of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. Scientists first detected a rift in the glacier in October 2011 during flights for NASA’s Operation IceBridge.By July 2013, infrared and radar images indicated that the crack had cut completely across the ice shelf... Continue Reading →

Michael Mann on Super Typhoon Haiyan

Michael Mann echoing Keven Trenberth's position that all weather now has a climate change component since it is occurring in an altered atmosphere (one with more GHGs, heat and water vapour amongst many other factors). But herein lies the crux—we no longer live in a world without warming. Given that 1985 was the last year... Continue Reading →

Signs of hope?

From USA TODAY: The vast majority of Americans in each of 40-plus states surveyed say global warming is real, serious and man-made, and the concerns tend to be slightly higher in coastal or drought-stricken areas, says an analysis out today. At least 75% of U.S. adults say global warming has been happening, but the Stanford... Continue Reading →

It’s the climate, not the oil spill

Mark Jaccard hitting home the point that, while spills might be locally devastating, they pale in comparison to the consequences of unmitigated climate change. Sorry, folks, but if you care about the environment – the planet for that matter – your strategy to stop oil pipelines is futile if its only focus is oil spills... Continue Reading →

Why not buy out the coal industry?

Burton Richter a Nobel Laureate in physics has an interesting idea to stop the use of coal There is no excuse for the continued use of coal to generate electricity that costs too much and is a health hazard to everyone who lives anywhere near a coal-fired power plant. About 137,000 people worked in the... Continue Reading →

Hans Rosling – 200 years of global change

(h/t Andy Skuce) Andy also highlights some key points from the video which are worth highlighting: He commends the IPCC AR5 report as being “as good as science can do”. He says the difficulties of communicating the uncertainties in climate science are far greater than for other science communication problems that he has been involved in professionally,... Continue Reading →

The opposite of progress

A Canadian government report stating that Canadian GHG emissions in 2020 will be 20% higher than the governments promised reductions from the 2009 Copenhagen accord. The estimate of emissions is also 14 million tonnes or 2% higher than last years estimate for 2020. So not only is Canada on a trajectory to miss its GHG... Continue Reading →

The Overton window and its relation to reality

This figure by Michael Tobis should have been published when the IPCC AR5 was released as a reminder of how skewed the public discussion of climate change really is. But I had forgotten about it and it took a twitter conversation/debate between Steve Easterbrook and Richard Betts to jog my memory.

Good news from the IPCC

I haven't seen this reported elsewhere (so perhaps I am way off base) but I think the new statement of climate sensitivity in the IPCC AR5 represents some real good news compared with the statement in AR4 Here is the statement from AR5: Climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, extremely unlikely... Continue Reading →

Certainty

Here is the IPCC message: We are as certain that humans are radically changing the planet's climate as we are that tobacco causes cancer. Peter Gleick

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