Bury your head in the (tar) sand
from the what-you-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-you-department: One year after plans were announced for a new system to monitor the environmental effects of the Alberta tar sands, there is still no sign of any…
Planet3.0
Melting permafrost
Allie Wilkinson writing in ArsTechnica brings us some bad news: Evidence from caves in Siberia indicates that a global temperature increase of 1.5° Celsius may cause substantial thawing of a…
Another pipeline proposal
In my recent post on the Keystone XL pipeline I mentioned that until digging up the bitumen becomes unprofitable there will be an endless parade of proposals to ship the…
Thinking beyond pipelines: A rebuttal
My latest post on the Keystone XL pipeline was, unsurprisingly, not well received by some of the Planet3.0. I argued that I don’t think the fighting the Keystone XL pipeline…
Thinking beyond pipelines
The Keystone XL pipeline proposal, which would transport diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the gulf of Mexico coast, is in the news again because of…
Canadian Environmental regulations are falling behind
Scott Vaughan, Canada’s departing Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, released his final report. In it he describes how the development of Canada’s natural resources is running dangerously ahead…
Jon Foley on why environmentalists disagree with each other
I think a lot of debates we see in the environmental community boil down to people having different “theories of change”. A theory of change is simply that: a theory…
Obama on Climate
Having the leader of the free world state so clearly that we must respond to the threat of climate change is absolutely a good thing. Having him state that the…
Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity -Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013 The past weekend open-access advocate and…
The colour of hot or inadequate heatmaps
The recent Australasian heatwave has been so unprecedented that the Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has had to add a new colour (purple) to represent the hottest region:
Richard Alley: Ice sheets and sea level in a warming world
(h/t Peter Sinclair)
Santa’s regret
via Skeptical Science
About that IPCC cosmic rays game changer…
… or nothing to see here. Move along folks. All of this cosmic nonsense was pre-debunked by Richard Alley in his great AGU talk from 2009 titled: The Biggest Control…
The largest iceberg break-up ever filmed
I find it hard to fully comprehend the scale of it
Quote of the day
We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it. –Jean-Claude Juncker Talking about financial reforms, but the exact same situation applies…
TEDx on spotting pseudoscience
TEDx has recently been used as a platform for pseudoscience, and in response they have published an open letter full of good advice on how non experts can spot pseudoscience.
How many gigatons of CO2?
Check out the Guardian Data Blog for the whole infographic