The WMO Global Atmosphere Watch Programme released its 2010 bulletin this week, showing that 2009 reached another new high in greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 parts per million hit 386.8ppm, which is 38% higher than pre-industrial times. The report also shows an increase in methane emissions. These had stabilised, but have grown in the past three […]
Tag Archives: global warming
Global warming: the evidence
I can understand how some people might want to debate why the climate is changing, but denying the earth is warming at all is not a tenable position. Last week NOAA brought out their annual State of the Climate report for 2009. It uses more sets of data than any report on climate change before […]
The consensus debate: who believes in global warming?
The climate change debate has been shunted into a whole variety of tangents, but one of the most pointless is the debate over whether or not the debate is over – is there a consensus or not? The IPCC process, while not perfect, was the one of broadest and most thorough reviews in the history […]
Define ‘spin’
Both of the following statements are true: 2008 was the coldest year of the century 2008 was the tenth hottest year on record Depending on your journalistic bias, you go with the first and get a headline like ‘Climate change questioned after 2008 tipped to be the coolest year of the century‘, and get lots […]
Reframing the climate debate – honesty
There are plenty of climate commentators with a very clear agenda, and that means that data is often used not just badly, but in a way that is deliberately misleading. To pick on the Telegraph again, in another of their articles professor of geology Bob Carter claimed that global warming stopped in 1998. He did […]
Why I don’t mind being wrong on climate change
Some opinions don’t matter very much – is the new Coldplay album any good, should the UK be proud or embarassed of its Olympic divers, does the Yeti exist. Being right or wrong on such things is either subjective, or inconsequential. Climate change is another matter altogether. The consequences of being wrong on climate change […]
groundbreaking global semantics
Having promised strong leadership and urgent action on curbing emissions at last year’s G8, yesterday’s statement gives us an unusual opportunity to measure the pace of international change. The G8 decisions are an annual precis of the worst climate culprits’ progress in facing up to the task. 2007: In setting a global goal for emissions […]
Trialling personal carbon trading
One idea for controlling co2 emissions is to make it personal – give people a quota, and charge them for going over it, or reward them for emitting less. People who don’t drive could sell their carbon credits to those who drive a lot, and so on. It’s not an impossible system. It fixes one […]
Tesco launches products with co2 footprint labelling
UK Supermarket giant Tesco launched a new labeling system last week to indicate the carbon footprint of various products. With hopes for wider adoption and even a new industry code, the symbols will start out on just 20 different items. But would you know what the numbers mean? Read the report on Celsias…
Carbon footprints – what makes the biggest difference?
Following last week’s adventures in carbon footprinting, I thought it might be good to run through the things that make the biggest difference. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. Plastic bags, for example, keep coming up in the context of climate change. Plastic bags represent 1/5000th of an adult carbon footprint. They need to […]
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