rachel.blog

insignificant ramblings of a 50-something woman

  • Day 2 in Glasgow

    We have word from a Glaswegian that it rains twice a year in Glasgow: for three months over the summer and nine months over the winter. I like a city that can make fun of itself. Today was a rainy day so we took the city bus tour which was terrific and I highly recommend…

  • Glasgow

    We are in Glasgow. I’ve never been here before and have wanted to visit the city for some time so yesterday we caught the train from London to Glasgow which was a very fast 4.5 hour journey covering over 540km. I love Glasgow. It has quite a distinctive look to it with lots of grand…

  • London: Day 3

    Yesterday was a day of museums. Our plan was to visit the Natural History Museum but when we got there we found an enormous queue to get in. So instead we went into the Victoria and Albert museum which is right next door and was queue-free. We barely touched the surface of this museum which…

  • Burden of proof

    David Mitchell rants about global warming contrarians. Funny but true.

  • London: Day 2

    Before we left Auckland, we went for a walk to Butterfly Creek to fill in some time and Elizabeth found a stick on the ground which she was determined to take on the plane. We tried to talk her out of this idea and so we told her that the people at security wouldn’t let…

  • We're in London. Be afraid, be very afraid.

    We are finally in London after a gruelling 44-hour journey from door-to-door. It didn’t start off so well as there was a five-hour-delay for our initial flight out of Auckland. This in turn meant we missed our connecting flight in Hong Kong. They fortunately put us up in a hotel overnight in Hong Kong but…

  • Has global warming stopped?

    It seems that almost weekly there’s an article in the news with some climate change contrarian telling the world that global warming has stopped. It’s for this reason that I’m not surprised by the disconnect between what scientists know about global warming and what the general public thinks they know. 97% of climate scientists agree that…

  • More earthquakes for the shaky isles

    New Zealand is living up to its namesake – the shaky isles – with a string of earthquakes over the past few days. The biggest was a magnitude 6.5 this afternoon in Cook Strait, the channel of water between the North and South Islands. The location of the earthquake was 17km deep and about 50km…

  • The Curry test for ocean acidification

    There’s a recent post about ocean acidification on Judith Curry’s blog, Climate Etc. She includes the commentary from two opposing views on this topic and then weighs up the evidence herself and decides whose views she finds more credible.  The two points of view come from these two people: * Scott C. Doney – senior…

  • Physiological forcing

    I learnt a new word (or two) this week: physiological forcing. Sounds ominous doesn’t it? It’s like radiative forcing but relates to plants. I’m aware that some people who read my blog won’t know what is meant by radiative forcing so let’s deal with that first. The Earth gets energy from the sun in the…

  • Don't sleep with mean people

    This is the new campaign of Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman who is crowd-sourcing funding for a music video with the slogan don’t sleep with mean people.   His inspiration was an ancient Greek play called Lysistrata, in which the women collectively withhold sex from their husbands and lovers as leverage to get them to end the Peloponnesian…

  • Freud. 1999-2013

    We said goodbye to a dear, old friend yesterday. Freud is gone. The vet euthanized him peacefully at our home. About a month ago he started going downhill again – off his tucker, nauseous and vomiting. So we decided not to send him to Australia to live with family after all (we leave for a…

  • Art and nature

    Does the natural world have value in addition to monetary value? The Great Barrier Reef generates more than $5 billion per year to the Australian economy and about 63,000 jobs. Surely that’s worth saving in its own right, but what if it did none of those things? Would it be less worthy of preservation? Earlier…

  • Bossy three-year-olds

    A three-year-old is an entertaining beast. Our three-year-old always seems to be ordering us about. Here are some of these orders. To Daniel: * Hurry up Daniel or you’ll be late for school! * Don’t run across the road!   To Daddy: * Don’t put the orange skins in the compost because the worms don’t…

  • Has Murry Salby passed his Salby date?

    I really only wanted to create this post so that I could use the title. 🙂 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 2°C if we are to minimise the impact of climate change. This is known as the 2°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.…

  • Migraines and preservatives in food

    Recently I have been conducting some animal experimentation. The animal under investigation is me. I get migraines, frequently. They are not always terrible, but still unpleasant and usually accompanied by vision impairment. The vision impairment is debilitating because for the 30 minutes or so that it lasts, I cannot read, write or drive. A few…

  • Business ethics and the value of nature

    Most people are familiar with the Hippocratic Oath as a do-no-harm pledge for doctors and physicians, but not many will have heard of the MBA Oath. It is the do-no-harm oath for graduating MBA students and the world’s most famous school of business, Harvard business school, adopted it in 2009. Some of the promises made by students…

  • Photos from Christchurch

    Ben went to Christchurch for a few days this week and spent some time cycling around and taking photos. This is what he saw.