rachel.blog

Tag: agw

  • Pumpkin and the Dog’s Bollocks

    Suppose there’s a planet called Dog’s Bollocks and the aliens on Dog’s Bollocks have been using something called pumpkin for all their energy needs. But pumpkin has several problems. One: it’s running out. There’s a limited supply of it and eventually there’ll be none left. Two: it produces pollution which when inhaled can cause asthma in young aliens and reduces […]

  • Scientists paying for advertisements to get message across

    Australian scientists have paid for a full page advertisement in a Queensland newspaper – The Courier Mail – because they felt the newspaper was not covering the coral bleaching of The Great Barrier Reef adequately. Coral biologist, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, is quoted in the Guardian today saying, One of the reasons we placed the ad in the Courier […]

  • Interview with Professor Kevin Anderson – part 1

    I enjoyed watching this video interview with Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research in Manchester (Thanks to Manchester Climate Monthly). It’s about the recent Paris climate talks. From what I understand, although the Paris talks resulted in a very ambitious target – 1.5°C – there’s no plan to actually reduce our […]

  • The age of science denial

    A commenter on the …andThenTheresPhysics blog has shared a terrific excerpt from a 100-year-old science book by Huxley and Gregory he found in his attic. It’s about the greenhouse effect and how we knew way back then that adding CO2 to the atmosphere would increase the surface temperature on earth. The atmosphere surrounding the earth […]

  • A four-year-old on climate change

    Elizabeth’s kindy teacher said she heard Elizabeth mention the words “climate change” earlier this week. She thought this was an odd thing for a four-year-old to be talking about so she asked her what it was. Elizabeth said, “It’s when the Earth gets very hot and all the animals die”. Haha. If I’ve been brainwashing […]

  • 2 Degrees

    There’s a new climate movie out called 2 Degrees which follows the failure of the UN climate negotiations while finding hope in the communities at the bottom (h/t HotTopic). You can watch the film online. Here’s an excerpt from their About page: The war on climate change has two major fronts: the fight against global deforestation and […]

  • It’s a conspiracy!

    I’ve finally finished reading Recursive Fury: a paper which studied blog comments written in response to the publication of NASA faked the moon landing-therefore (climate) science is a hoax. I’m not going to comment on the moon landing paper other than to say that it explored the connection between the endorsement of free-market economics and conspiratorial thinking. […]

  • Bjorn Lomborg economics

    I’ve just seen a tweet of Bjorn Lomborg’s from the other day (yes, I’m a couple of days behind) on the cost of climate change versus the costs of mitigation. Here it is: New IPCC: Cost of climate less than 2% GDP in 2070. Cost of policy higher than 6% of GDP. Need smarter policies. https://t.co/kzlsUsHfyi — […]

  • So this is it, we’re all going to die

    Ok, so we’re not really all going to die – not yet anyway – but the IPCC did release Part II of report number 5 last week and there’s lots in it which should be cause for concern. The first part – released last year – was about the science of climate change. This one […]

  • Can we trust scientists?

    I saw this video on New Anthropocene recently and think it’s worth sharing. It is mostly about climate change but also science more broadly and why people don’t always trust the scientific consensus whether it be a consensus about climate change, vaccinations or evolution. Many years ago I lived next to a young woman who […]

  • What we know

    I’ve just found this great interview with Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, and he is a delight to listen to. If I were making a movie about some impending catastrophic event which included a part for an honest and dedicated scientist whose role was to alert the human population, I would pick […]

  • Another post on blog moderation

    There’s not really any good resource on the web for how to moderate blogs; at least, not that I can find and I have looked. But I have come to learn a few things over the past few months which I want to write about for my own benefit and for anyone else who may […]

  • Is climate change responsible for recent flooding in the UK?

    I’m not going to answer this question because I can’t but you can help to answer another question which is has climate change made extremely wet winters like the last in the UK more likely? Oxford University early this month launched the weather@home project which seeks to answer this question. The winter of 2013/2014 was […]

  • Giant parasitic viruses

    I love science fiction as a genre. A little while ago I read a very old science fiction novel – written in 1938 – by John W. Campbell called Who Goes There? It has been made into a film a few times called The Thing. The story goes like this: A group of scientists are […]

  • Abrupt climate change

    I’ve just watched a good video on the andthentheresphysics blog about climate change that begs to be shared. It’s called Expecting the Unexpected and features scientists discussing the possibility of abrupt climate change which is something we should fear. Here it is: Climate science contrarians like to say that climate change is nothing to worry […]

  • Hypocrites, climate change, tragedies and solutions

    I’ve just had an amazing morning on twitter. I woke up to a tweet from someone basically saying that because I don’t pay the annual TV licence fee in the UK then I probably don’t have the right to complain about their service. So I jovially replied that I’ll be back in the UK come […]

  • An open letter to the BBC

    I have finally got around to writing my letter to the BBC to complain about their coverage of climate change. Here it is below for all to read. If anyone would like to copy it in part or full for the purposes of emailing the BBC as well, then please be my guest. The email […]

  • The denial of science

    Daniel’s recent battle with a Thai monkey got me thinking about vaccinations. He has had all of his rabies vaccinations now but it was quite a detailed process with lots of shots required and at very particular intervals and all of the same type i.e.there are a few options for rabies vaccinations I am told […]

  • The extraordinary words of Dr Roy Spencer

    I can’t resist writing about this because it’s jaw-dropping stuff for me. Dr Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama and a climate science contrarian, has written on his blog that, “When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it…..I’m now going […]

  • Possible return to El Niño?

    There’s a recent paper which is predicting a 75% chance of El Niño conditions returning late 2014. Should we be worried? I think so. The last major El Niño event was in 1998 and it was the largest ever recorded and caused global temperatures to spike. Since then global surface temperatures have been creeping up only […]