Dr Chris McGrath, Barrister-at-Law and Senior lecturer, School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management

Burn it all. That is the plan in Australia’s new Energy White Paper.

Released yesterday by Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson, it talks about responding to climate change while planning the opposite.

It is true that the Energy White Paper plans to diversify energy production and includes initiatives for renewable energy but this is additional to burning all of our coal and gas reserves. Continue reading →

New satellite images show polar ice coverage dwindling in extent and thickness.   A report from the European Space Agency‘s CryoSat-2 probe adds worrying evidence  that we have grossly under-estimated the rate at which the Earth’s climate is changing.  The implications for natural ecosystems and human communities are extremely worrying.  

As Professor Chris Rapley of UCL puts it : “With the temperature gradient between the Arctic and equator dropping, as is happening now, it is also possible that the jet stream in the upper atmosphere could become more unstable. That could mean increasing volatility in weather in lower latitudes, similar to that experienced this year.”  This isn’t just about polar bears!

Robin McKie Science Editor (guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 August 2012 21.52 BST).  Sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far greater rate than previously expected, according to data from the first purpose-built satellite launched to study the thickness of the Earth’s polar caps.

Here is a novel way for responding to sealevel rise.  Just in legislate it out of existence!  This article by Bruce Henderson appeared in the News Observer on May 28.  If you look at the lobby group behind all of this, NC20, you will see that they also claim that internationally renowned researchers such as Stefan Rahmstorf  has been fabricating stories about sea level rise so that big companies such as Munich Re can raise their insurance rates!  This is nutty! Continue reading →

ABC Environment 8 AUG 2012; Michael Mann

THE FIRST SCIENTIST to alert Americans to the prospect that human-caused climate change and global warming was already upon us was NASA climatologist James Hansen. In a sweltering US Senate hall during the hot, dry summer of 1988, Hansen announced “it is time to stop waffling… The evidence is pretty strong that the [human-amplified] greenhouse effect is here.”

At the time, many scientists felt his announcement to be premature. I was among them.

I was a young graduate student researching the importance of natural — rather than human-caused — variations in temperature, and I felt that the ‘signal’ of human-caused climate change had not yet emerged from the ‘noise’ of natural, long-term climate variation. As I discuss in my book,The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, scientists by their very nature tend to be conservative, even reticent, when it comes to discussing findings and observations that lie at the forefront of our understanding and that aren’t yet part of the ‘accepted’ body of scientific knowledge. Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal, Aug 7, 2012

It’s time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost-effective climate solutions.

One scorching summer doesn’t confirm that climate change is real any more than a white Christmas proves it’s a hoax. What matters is the trend—a decades-long march toward hotter and wilder weather. But with more than 26,000 heat records broken in the last 12 months and pervasive drought turning nearly half of all U.S. counties into federal disaster areas, many data-driven climate skeptics are reassessing the issue. Continue reading →

ABC News. July 25, 2012 16:02:54

So far this month, 27.8 millimetres of rain has fallen in the metropolitan area.

The average for July is 169.6 millimetres.

The previous low was when recording first began in 1876 and the city received 61.5 millimetres. Continue reading →

Sydney Morning Herald, Opinion, July 15 2012.

EVERY so often a discovery is made which piques the public’s interest in science once more. A single proof captures the imagination by the significance and the scale of the advance. This week’s news that physicists had proved with near certainty the existence of the Higgs boson is such a point in the history of science.

The scale of the experiment matches the scale of the intellectual leap achieved. A huge apparatus, 27 kilometres in circumference, buried 100 metres below the French-Swiss border near Geneva, accelerated particles in a near-perfect vacuum to speeds just below that of light and measured the effect of their collisions. Minute variations in energy released prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which had been postulated in theory by Peter Higgs in 1964 to explain the mass of elementary particles. Continue reading →

From the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (June 2012).

After reaching near-average levels in late April, sea ice extent declined rapidly during the early part of May. The rest of the month saw a slower rate of decline. Ice extent in the Bering Sea remained above average throughout the month.