rachel.blog

Tag: Climate change

  • Creepers against climate change

    I’m feeling a bit disheartened. There were not very many people at the Auckland climate march. Maybe a few hundred? I feel a bit disappointed about this. Don’t people care? It feels a bit like that right now. Perhaps I’m just down because it’s the end of a week with lots of disappointing news. The people…

  • My birthday, computer science, clouds, pauses, and helmets

    I’m 39 tomorrow, boo hoo. Only one more year and I’m 40. That’s scary. Apparently a new computer science curriculum has been launched in English schools as a replacement for the old ICT course. I think this is wonderful. Teaching children how to create software is far more useful than simply teaching them how to use it;…

  • Taking climate change to the streets

    How do we get the majority of the population engaged with the problem of climate change? Apparently some young Australians don’t even know what climate change is. How can this possibly be? There are plenty of websites about the topic: masses of them, in fact. But you can’t force a disinterested person to go and read…

  • What’s in store for your habitat?

    What’s going to happen to your habitat with a changing climate? I thought I’d skim through chapters 22 – 30 from IPCC report part II which deal with regional impacts. I actually wrote this quite a few months ago and never finished it but a recent post about the impacts of climate change at …and…

  • I will be a hummingbird

    This is a nice story with an important message. The world needs more hummingbirds.

  • Rejecting the advice of experts simply because you don’t like it is unwise

    Today I took Daniel to the same paediatric dentist Elizabeth saw last week. He’s been seeing the school dental nurse since he was four but I couldn’t help wondering whether they had missed something with him as well? After all, they only discovered one cavity in Elizabeth’s teeth when the dentist found four. Thankfully, his…

  • 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…

  • Hot Air: New Zealand climate change documentary

    Another day, another climate change documentary. This one follows the story of New Zealand’s climate change negotiations which were first born back in 1989. Since then, like in most other places, New Zealand’s emissions have grown. However the challenges here are slightly different to those in other nations as renewable power already makes up more than half of the domestic…

  • 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…

  • The difference between weather and climate

    This is a great two-minute video in which Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the difference between weather and climate (h/t HotTopic). It’s a preview from National Geographic Channel’s Cosmos series. The difference between weather and climate is important to understand because people have a tendency to see variations in the weather as a reason to dismiss climate change. For instance,…

  • 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.…

  • Gavin Schmidt: The emergent patterns of climate change

    This is a great TED talk given by Gavin Schmidt about how scientists use climate models to learn more about our climate (h/t Hot-Topic).

  • 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 —…

  • The consequences of climate change

    The science journalist, Peter Hadfield (aka Potholer), has a great new youtube video about the consequences of climate change (in our lifetimes). I have to give credit to Moth from New Anthropocene for bringing it to my attention. This to me is good science communication: it’s simple, clear and interesting.   Here’s a quote from the very end…

  • The impact of climate change on human health

    Chapter 11 of the IPCC report (yes, I’ve skipped a few chapters since my last post on this topic) is about Human health: impacts, adaptation and co-benefits. This is all about us so I think it deserves a post all on its own. Climate change will affect human health in three ways: Weather: Directly through…

  • 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…