Archive for February, 2010

Attack on climate science has its OJ Simpson moment

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Bill McKibben has been at the forefront of efforts to alert the public to the dangers of climate change for more than two decades. Today he fronts 350.org, a website dedicated to setting a global CO2 ceiling of 350ppm. Below, he turns his considerable talents to an in-depth analysis of the concerted attack on science, specifically climate science, in recent months, a campaign which has, he writes, been “enormously clever, and enormously effective”.

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Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal.  It was a mixed and judicious appraisal.  “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.”  And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” (more…)

Ireland’s looming bird crisis

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Back in 2002, the parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity set a target of halting biodiversity loss by 2010.

It is now 2010, the declared UN Year of Biodiversity, and although some endangered species have been saved, notably within the EU, in general species of flora and fauna are being pushed into extinction at a faster rate.

There was really little hope of halting species loss in such a short time, even though the idea had its genesis as far back as 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio, though it didn’t get legs until the turn of the millennium.

But whatever hope there was then is now fast receding as climate change becomes the newest and most formidable driver of declines and extinctions. (more…)

Permafrost retreats further north

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Buried in the ‘Weather Eye’ page of our paper of record again…

Climate change forcing frozen soil retreat

Mon, Feb 22, 2010

THE PERMANENTLY frozen ground known as permafrost is retreating northward in the area around Canada’s James Bay, a sign of a decades-long regional warming trend, a climate scientist has said.

When permafrost melts, it can liberate the powerful greenhouse gas methane that is locked in the frozen soil.

The amount of methane contained in permafrost around James Bay is slight compared to the vast stores of the chemical found in ancient, deep permafrost in the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia.

The southern edge of permafrost in the James Bay area has moved about 130km (80 miles) north of where it was 50 years ago, Serge Payette of Laval University in Quebec City said in a telephone interview. (more…)

Now there’s an App to zap the sceptics

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The always useful site Skeptical Science, with its handy list of the most common arguments used by climate change sceptics and detailed rebuttals of them, is now available as an iPhone app.

So next time a discussion occurs and one of the old reliable arguments like ‘it’s the sun’ is trotted out, this app will give you the information needed to rebut the argument, and also allow you to report the arguments used, so skepticalscience.com can maintain an up-to-date list of the most common arguments being used by sceptics.

The highly regarded site is operated as a pro bono public information service by Australian physicist, John Cook.

The handy iPhone widget is available for free from the App Store or  www.skepticalscience.com.

Do you believe in miracles?

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Bill Gates is for many the Dr Evil of the corporate world. His Microsoft behemoth has had a stranglehold on the world’s personal computer market for the last two decades, and wrung hundreds of billions out of users in the process. All of which makes Mr Gates ridiculously rich.

So rich in fact that his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now possibly the world’s largest private charity. It recently pledged a staggering $10 billion to help develop and deliver vaccines for children in the so-called developing world. However, Mr Gates may have had something of an epiphany recently, in terms of his understanding of where the real threats lie. (more…)