Monthly Archives: April 2013

Climate Science

Global heating update

5 Comments

Little ice age_130421152401-270

Last month we had a look at the Bigger, better, new hockey stick from a study by Marcott et al. Since then Skeptical Science has a post on the phoney skeptical/denialist critique of the study. We now have a new study, Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia, by 78 scientists from 24 nations analyzing climate data from tree rings, pollen, cave formations, ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, and historical records from around the world published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The study found:

There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century.

The real interest was in the regional variations on a continental scale. Temperatures were identified for the Arctic, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australasia and the Antarctic. There was insufficient data for Africa. Continue reading Global heating update →

Climate Policy & Planning, Politics & Government, Social Science and Society

European ETS

38 Comments

EU_0,,16746928_403,00_300

Last week when the European Parliament voted down a proposal to prop up the EU Emissions Trading System’s languishing carbon price by postponing the sale of 900 million emission allowances until the back-end of this decade the price fell to below AU$4. There are obvious concerns about the legislated linking of the Australian carbon price to the EU scheme in mid-2015. Treasury had forecast an EU price of at least $29 in 2015.

Radio National’s PM program had a roundup of political commentary. Julia Gillard on the 7.30 Report was very clear. The legislation was there, it was hard enough to get through the parliament in the first place and we’d have to work with it.

Big business, quick off the mark, was suggesting that link with the EU should occur earlier, so they could buy permits while they were cheap.

Ross Garnaut said, don’t panic, the ETS is only one measure and targets may tighten by impacting on the price: Continue reading European ETS →

Climate Action, Climate Policy & Planning, Climate Science

Tipping point for climate action?

60 Comments

Recently the Climate Commission issued a report in its The Critical Decade series on Extreme Weather looking at the issues of

  • Heat
  • Bushfires
  • Rainfall
  • Drought, and
  • Sea level rise.

At Radio National’s The World Today Professor Lesley Hughes, a Macquarie University ecologist, talked to Eleanor Hall.

The report looks at extreme weather experience in recent times, such as that documented in the Commission’s report The Angry Summer, puts it in a broader context using the latest science and then uses that as a window to project into the future. The message is plain. The climate has shifted, expect more and more extreme weather and we need to act now.

we really need to view all these events not in isolation but as part of a trend for the future. We need to prepare for them and we need to do our absolute best to cut greenhouse gases to stabilise the climate to prevent them getting to the point at which we cannot adapt.(Emphasis added)

Continue reading Tipping point for climate action? →

Climate Science

Hansen retires to embrace activism

6 Comments

Activist_cropped

We are going to see more images like the one on the left, it seems. I picked up the news from a Google feed to this article at mother nature network. Climate scientist James Hansen has retired at the age of 72 from NASA GISS in order to concentrate on activism. The scoop was claimed by the New York Times. Climate Progress quickly picked up on the story.

Hansen first made a splash with an article with six other scientists in 1981. After his testimony to Congress in 1988 he retired from public advocacy and communication for about 15 years, concentrating on the science and his administrative role at NASA GISS, to become publicly active again from about 2003.

NASA’s press release on his retirement emphasises that his research was closely aligned with:

the development of increasingly sophisticated satellite platform measurements, such as the terrestrial radiation budget, ozone and weather-related data, and the need for increasingly sophisticated atmospheric models to assess and evaluate the information content and utility of these measurements.

Also the use of models to make climate change predictions for the future. Continue reading Hansen retires to embrace activism →