rachel.blog

Category: Climate change

  • Has Murry Salby passed his Salby date?

    I really only wanted to create this post so that I could use the title. šŸ™‚ But perhaps I should flesh it out a little bit. People who do not follow climate change news will be wondering who is Murry Salby. Murry Salby was a professor of Environmental Science at Macquarie University in Sydney and…

  • Climate change targets

    There is general international agreement that we must limit temperature increase to 2Ā°C if we are to minimise the impact of climate change. This is known as the 2Ā°C temperature limit. But in some respects, global temperature is a rather arbitrary figure. Why not, for instance, set a target for the maximum ocean acidification or…

  • Renewable energy expected to overtake coal shortly after 2035

    According to an article in the July 6th, 2013 edition of New Scientist magazine, the age of renewable energy is upon us. Data from the International Energy Agency predicts renewable energy will exceed energy from all other sources of electricity except for coal, by 2016. Renewables are then poised to outstrip coal shortly after 2035.…

  • The economic benefits of tackling climate change

    Last week I wrote about the health benefits of ditching fossil fuels for carbon neutral fuels but now I want to highlight the economic benefits of doing so. A University of Massachusetts publication – The Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy – Ā finds that investment in clean energy creates about three times as many…

  • Who is really being alarmist?

    People who accept what the scientists are saying which is that human carbon emissions are causing global warming are often called alarmist. But I think it is the people who protest the shift towards a low carbon economy who are being alarmist. I read a very biased article in the Washington Times this week –…

  • Global warming predictions spot-on

    Climate scientists have been getting a lot of flak. Something I repeatedly read is that their prediction of temperature rises have been wildly inaccurate and so therefore we shouldn’t believe anything they say. This is simply not true. One forecast made in 1999 by Oxford physicist, Myles Allen, has proved to be impressively spot-on. WottsUpWithThatBlog…

  • Great speech on climate change from President Obama

  • Wind turbines and birds

    Yesterday I wrote about the nocebo effect in wind turbine syndrome and a comment was made in that post about how windfarms kill birds. It is true that wind farms kill birds when they collide with the spinning blades but it is also true that the total number of deaths associated with wind farms is…

  • The nocebo effect and wind turbines

    You’re eating fish at a restaurant. Someone at the table next to yours starts complaining of nausea and fever. The person slips into delirium. You notice they were eating fish. You feel your forehead and think it feels hot. Suddenly you’re feeling nauseated. Chances are you’re not sick at all but suffering from a phenomenon…

  • Incivility on the web

    A recent post on the blog, Watching the Deniers, raises an important issue that I think is worth passing on. In February 2013, a paper was published in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication which examines the effect of uncivil discussions in the comments on blogs and the impact of those discussions on the people who…

  • Bill McKibben and 565 gigatons

    Bill McKibben – journalist, author and environmental activist – is currently touring Australia and New Zealand with a very simple message: We can afford to emit no more than 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide if we are to stay below 2Ā°C of warming, but fossil fuel companies have enough fuel in their reserves to emit…

  • Climate change and weather-related disasters

    Climate scientists have suggested that we will see more extreme weather as a result of climate change. Are there more weather-related disasters than there used to be? I have been wondering this recently but haven’t had the chance to verify it. The insurance industry ought to know the answer to this. So rather than trawl…

  • Insects, anyone?

    When my sister and I were little, our Thai nanny fried up some grasshoppers for us to eat. I can’t remember what they tasted like but I remember the experience well: it was fun and exciting. We caught the grasshoppers and she cooked them. There is a word for the practice of eating insects. It…

  • Can science predict the future?

    In 2009, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck L’Aquila, Italy, killing more than 300 people. Six Italian seismologists were later convicted of manslaughter for failing to adequately warn the citizens of L’Aquila of the deadly earthquake. L’Aquila had experienced a series of small tremors in the months leading up to the 6.3-magnitude quake causing the people to…

  • Should we care about people of the future?

    “Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?” Groucho Marx If we followĀ Groucho Marx‘s line of reasoning then future generations do not matter because while we are able to grant benefits to them, they are unable to return the favour.Ā A key requirement of Groucho’s ethic is that there must be some…

  • What does it mean to be skeptical?

    Here’s the etymology of the word: skeptic (n.)Ā alsoĀ sceptic, 1580s, “member of an ancient Greek school that doubted the possibility of real knowledge,” from French sceptique, from LatinĀ scepticus, from GreekĀ skeptikosĀ (pluralĀ SkeptikoiĀ “the Skeptics”), literally “inquiring, reflective,” the name taken by the disciples of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho (c.360-c.270 B.C.E.), fromĀ skeptesthaiĀ “to reflect, look, view” (seeĀ scopeĀ (n.1)). The extended sense of…

  • Fish and Al Gore

    I’ve had some comments on my blog in this post – Fish unaware of global warming hoax – that have raised too many points for me to address in a comment alone, so I am writing a new post specifically for this. In my post I wrote about a new paper by Cheung et al.…

  • Fish unaware of global warming hoax

    Someone forgot to tell the world’s fish that global warming is a hoax as they are now responding to warmer waters by swimming to higher latitudes and greater depths. A study published in the journal of Nature this week finds, Signature of ocean warming in global fisheries catch. The study measures the mean temperature of…

  • Do you live near a power plant?

    You’d think that scientists would know exactly where all of the world’s power plants are located and how much carbon dioxide (CO2) they emit but the truth is that they don’t. There are estimated to be some 30,000 power plants around the world but accurate locations for these and how much CO2 they emit are…

  • Is global warming good for plants?

    Another week and another incorrect news article about climate change. I’m starting to enjoy this – reading something, checking to see whether it’s correct (isn’t this what the sceptics are supposed to do?) and discovering that actually, the facts are wrong, biased, misrepresented or misquoted. The article in question is in the Wall Street Journal…