Provocative author and scholar Clive Hamilton will discuss why facing up to Climate Change is “Just too Hard” in a public lecture this month hosted by the newly established Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland.
There have been any number of urgent scientific reports in recent years emphasising just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act.
Around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming; others prefer to believe denialists such as Monckton and Plimer, in …

Dr Peter Gleick writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Here is the best argument against global warming:
. . . .
Oh, right. There isn’t one.
There is no good argument against global warming. In all the brouhaha about tiny errors recently found in the massive IPCC report, the posturing by global climate deniers, including some elected officials, leaked emails, and media reports, here is one fact that seems to have been overlooked:
Those who deny that humans are causing unprecedented climate change have never, ever produced an alternative scientific argument that comes close to …

Daily Telegraph, 15th March 2010
AUSTRALIA’S leading scientists have hit back at climate change sceptics, accusing them of creating a “smokescreen of denial”.
The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology will today release a State of the Climate document, a snapshot of Australia’s climate data and trend predictions.
The apolitical science organisations have weighed into the debate as they believe Australians are not being told the correct information about temperatures, rainfall, ocean levels and changes to atmospheric conditions.
The State of the Climate report …

I see over on “The Politics and Environment Blog” in response to the ocean thermostat study published recently that the following comment from the ill-informed Dr Peter Ridd’s diatribe “The Great Great Barrier Reef Swindle” is again being misconstrued as evidence that warmer waters will be beneficial for corals:
“The scientific evidence about the effect of rising water temperatures on corals is very encouraging. In the GBR, growth rates of corals have been shown to be increasing over the last 100 years, at a time when water temperatures have risen. This …

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have joined forces to produce an effective and simple snapshot of how our climate is changing. See below for a summary, or download the entire document here. As a key document released by Australia’s two lead climate science agences, this should be front page news for every newspaper around the country today.

This looks pretty cool.  I’d love the view from the kitchen.  And there is great watersports potential (open ocean kiteboarding!).  But having lived at sea on large ships and underwater in the NOAA Aquarius Habitat, I can attest that though very cool, it isn’t the most comfortable experience (think wet, cold, bad food, rough, lots of fungal growth on your body, etc).  And would they still be called “skyscrapers”?
Read all about underwater skyscrapers here.

Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, Middle East expert and high profile blogger has a piece on his site about whether and how scientists should engage environmental skeptics, in particular AGW deniers. His perspective is that we should and that it can be effective if done right but that there can be personal costs, e.g., hate mail and death threats. Also see the discussion at DotEarth about how scientists should respond and communicate. There are well argued points on both sides, or all sides, …

Ecologists and environmentalism
Donald R Strong (2008) Ecologists and environmentalism. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: Vol. 6, No. 7, pp. 347-347.
Environmentalism needs serious discussion by ecologists. I was primed on this topic by recent statements made by colleagues to the effect that, “I’m no environmentalist, but… (insert an eminently reasonable environmentalist proposition of your choice here)”, as well as by a plaintive comment in a recent student evaluation, “The instructor is an environmentalist”. Denied the opportunity to reply to the student, I do so here. “This is an ecology course; …

I read James Hanson’s first book on climate change (“Storms of my Grandchildren” ) over the Christmas break. It is a engaging book which quietly outlines the essential facts for why one of the world’s leading planetary scientists feels we are headed for planetary disaster.  Phillip Adams does an excellent job of filling up the story by interviewing James Hansen below:
[http://www.climateshifts.org/media/ln.mp3]

This awesome essay is by Bill McKibben.  It originally appeared here and is being widely circulated. It is from his forthcoming book “Eaarth: Making a life on a tough new planet”.  I was in LA (doing my masters degree at CSUN) during the infamous OJ trials. Like everyone else around the world, I was shocked that a jury of peers could find him innocent given the overwhelming evidence against him. (and this is especially jarring given his recent quasi-confession). It was a stunning display of cognitive dissonance. The facts, more …

Science magazine’s awesome blog, ScienceNow, just held a contest for the best bloggers covering the 2010 AAAS meeting.  The third place winner Daniel Stolte, a science writer at the University of Arizona, made two excellent posts on two very depressing aspects of ocean degradation.  The first, “Blinded by the Noise”, is on marine noise pollution interfering with whale communication and the second, Oases of Life in Perpetual Darkness”, is about the destruction of ocean seamounts via bottom trawling. Ill excerpt them below, but both are worth reading in full.

Blinded by the Noise
A new …

Shock!  Somehow that Sei whale meat from Japan’s “scientific” whale hunt has found its way onto the plates of an LA sushi bar!  And giving this story an odd twist is the fact that the bust was initiated by hollywood activists that produced The Cove.
From the NYT: Oscar winners try to keep whale off sushi plates
with video cameras and tiny microphones, the team behind Sunday’s Oscar-winning documentary film “The Cove” orchestrated a Hollywood-meets-Greenpeace-style covert operation to ferret out what the authorities say is illegal whale meat at one of this town’s …

Last week I made a post about a new paper on methane seeping from the Arctic seafloor.  Since then, there have been several new posts on other sites about the work, putting it into a broader perspective and also taking somewhat contradictory views of the implications of the finding. The fear is that rapid methane release is considered one plausible mechanism that could lead to abrupt climate change via various positive feedbacks in the climate system.  As Nick Sundt points out (here)
A report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Abrupt Climate Change, said in December …

Professor David Karoly (one of Australia’s esteemed ARC Federation Fellows) wrote to several of us recently in frustration over the recent misinformation in the Courier Mail and on Andrew Bolt’s blog. As usual, Andrew and the News Ltd papers have cherry-picked their way through the truth. Here is what David wrote:
“I don’t like responding to all, and saturating others’ email inboxes, but the misinformation in John’s emails and the Andrew Bolt’s blog is as bad as ever.
Yes, there is more ice in winter than in summer (no surprise).
The …

Evidence from Institute of Physics drawn from energy industry consultant who argues global warming is a religion
David Adams, Guardian , Thursday 4 March 2010 21.00 GMT
Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion, the Guardian can reveal.
The submission, from the Institute of Physics (IOP), suggested that scientists at the University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to support conclusions and that key reconstructions of past temperature could …

No, it isn’t yet April 1.  See here.  You gotta love the bit about this all being a “long post-mini-ice-age warming”. But still, I admire his (partial) intellectual honesty. Well, maybe that is overly generous since there never actually was a “break” in the warming.
The post includes this figure (from here):

A few things are worth noting:
1) Even accepting the faulty logic of a short-term lack of change in the global temperature measurements being a “break in the warming”, looking at the graphic above, it doesn’t look like a decade-long break to …

if you don’t believe it, see this, this, this, this…