Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
May 9, 2020
Listen to my conversation with Jonica Newby on the Science Show. Watch also for Jonica’s book on the emotional sides of climate change plus other of her other long form interviews on this important topic.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland. From The Conversation, March 14, 2014
With the approval of dredging as part of the Abbot Point port expansion, Australia has given the green light to an increase in coal exports. While opposition to the plan has focused primarily on the effects of dumping dredge spoil near the Great Barrier Reef, climate change has been missing from the discussion.
Increasing coal exports will play a significant part in the decline of the Great Barrier Reef, and will prove to be a very uneconomical decision for Australia.
Continue reading
UPDATE: Heat waves and broken records. This report could have been written right now. However, it is was produced by our Bureau of Meteorology exactly one year ago! Take a look at this report produced for The Conversation in Jan 2013. Welcome to the new norm! Any one for cricket?
Happy New Year!
Peter Hannam, SMH, ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
2013 will go down as the year that registered Australia’s hottest day, month, season, 12-month period – and, by December 31, the hottest calendar year. Weather geeks have watched records tumble. These tallies include obscure ones, such as the latest autumn day above 45C (Western Australia’s Onslow Airport at 45.6C on March 21), the hottest winter’s day nationally (29.92C , August 31), and even Wednesday this week, with the hottest-ever 9am reading (44.6C, at Eyre weather station near the WA-South Australian border). Continue reading
by CINDY on MARCH 15, 2012 (repost)
4 a.m. Bali, December 2007, the first Tuesday of the two-week UN climate talks. My phone rings, waking me up. Blearily, and a little crossly, I answer it.
I was in Bali to run Greenpeace International’s media for the meeting. The caller was someone called “John” who said he was an intern for a US NGO that I had never heard of. It was a small NGO, he said, who couldn’t come to the meeting, but “john” asked me for a copy of the UNFCCC’s media list for the meeting. Continue reading
By Simon Divecha, University of Adelaide
As Australia stares at “a once-in-20 or 30-year heatwave”, with temperatures over 40 degrees, it is likely that more extreme weather events similar to this are in store for us. The probability of this occurring is well researched. (For example, Professor Barry Brook has previously outlined Adelaide’s situation.)
Australia’s media largely fails to link climate change to the heat. There have been more than 800 articles in the last five days covering the heatwave. Fewer than ten of these also discuss “climate change”, “greenhouse gas”, carbon or “global warming” (from a 3 -7 January 2013 Factiva news source search conducted on 7 January at 4pm). Continue reading
As The Australian claims sea level rise is not linked to global warming, the world’s most influential climate scientist has called on “sane and rational voices” to speak out and correct the record.
Here is another piece from a journo (Graham Readfearn) who by contrast seems to always get it right! Murdering Science, the Graham LLoyd way.
Crikey.com.au, January 15, 2012
More than 250 scientists have gathered in Hobart today for a summit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s climate science body. The Oz marked the summit’s opening with a front-page “exclusive” story which claimed there was “no link” between sea level rises and global warming. Continue reading
Jo Chandler, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 2012
THE update of a 160-year-old global temperature record by British scientists, plugging in additional data collected primarily across the Arctic, has resulted in 2010 now being ranked as the warmest year on record, followed by 2005, and bumping the previously top-ranked El Nino super-heated 1998 to third place. Continue reading
AUCKLAND (AFP) – Pacific leaders identified climate change as the greatest threat to the region, ordering officials to start work on plans to help people forced to relocate by rising sea levels.
The 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum on Thursday said the impact of climate change was already apparent in countries such as Kiribati, where some villagers have had to abandon their homes as the seas rise, and finance was needed to help them. Continue reading
I found this post by Jim Dipeso (shown), from almost a year ago (October 2010). It reminds us that the carbon tax is not a left-leaning proposition, and in fact is much more consistent with conservative ideology. Here in Australia, we have it quite back-to-front in a spectacular way. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott from our conservative Liberal National Party coalition supports direct action (Government intervention), while Prime Minister Julia Gillard is pushing a carbon tax, which depends on the dynamics of business markets to solve the problem. Maybe they should elect for a re-start, shake hands and swap policies. It is too confusing otherwise!
There is what Jim Dipeso said on a Republican website in the United States:
As a climate change activist, climatologist Jim Hansen takes his activism a step beyond where most would be willing to go. Continue reading