Archive for the 'Climate Change' Category

We’re toast if we don’t stop global warming

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting We’re toast if we don’t stop global warming.
Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist says the situation has got so bad that the world’s only hope is drastic action.
James Hansen told US Congress today that the world has long passed the “dangerous level” [...]

Climate science is nothing new

Monday, June 16th, 2008

The above is an excerpt is from the 1958 educational documentary “Unchained Goddess” directed and produced by the legendary Frank Capra for Bell Labs for their television program “The Bell Telephone Hour.” The film went on to become a staple of middle school science classrooms across the United States for decades.
The science of climate change [...]

Visualising our Disappearing Forests with Google Earth

Friday, June 13th, 2008

The Google Earth Blog has a great post; Disappearing Forests Google Earth Visualizations.
An excellent set of 3D visualizations has been added to the Google Earth Outreach Showcase. The visualizations show the state of forests around the world by country. The world has lost close to half of its forests already today, and the continued high [...]

Garnaut Speaks at ANU

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Professor Ross Garnaut, the man in charge of determining just how the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme should work, gave the 2008 Arndt Memorial Lecture on World Environment Day at the Australian National University in Canberra. His speech, Measuring the Immeasurable - The Costs and Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation has been widely reported, [...]

Great tits cope well with warming

Friday, May 9th, 2008

A pair of Great Tits

The BBC is reporting some good news on the climate for a change in a story Great tits cope well with warming.
Researchers found that great tits are laying eggs earlier in the spring than they used to, keeping step with the earlier emergence of caterpillars.
Writing in the journal Science, they point [...]

Climate Change in Australia

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Australia’s Future Climate is quite well modeled and the results of that modeling have been made available online.:
Our future climate will depend on greenhouse gas emissions, so the regional projections are available for low, mid-range and high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. These scenarios were developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and are [...]

The Australian Carbon Trading Expo 2008

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

On Wednesday I gave a talk at the 2008 Australian Carbon Trading Expo in Melbourne called “The Train is Leaving: Implications for Business of the new Carbon Constrained Economy,” which just so happens to be the title of the book I am currently writing. The slides above give you some idea of what I [...]

Garnaut’s Interim Report is Out

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

In April 2007, Professor Garnaut, a Professor of Economics in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University, was commissioned by the Australian States and Territories, and more recently the Commonwealth Government, to undertake a review examining the impact of climate change on the Australian economy and potential medium to [...]

The Sixth Extinction

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

There’s a sobering article in the Washington Post called It Happened to Him. It’s Happening to You.
Now we face the possibility of mass extinction event No. 6. No big killer asteroid is in sight. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are not of the scale to cause mass extinction. Yet recent studies show that troubling earlier projections [...]

Antarctica is melting faster than previously thought.

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Antarctic Ice as seen in Google Earth
There’s a story in the International Herald Tribune titled , citing a study published in last week’s Nature Geoscience that paints yet another gloomy picture.
Skeptics about global warming often point to Antarctica to show that Al Gore and others who worry about climate change have exaggerated the dangers greatly. [...]