Tag: global-warming
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A History of the Climate Change Controversies
After obtaining and analysing the documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit email controversy (the so-called Climategate emails), Der Spiegel “reveals how the war between climate researchers and climate skeptics broke out, the tricks the two sides used to outmaneuver each other and how the conflict could be resolved”. The result is an exceptional and…
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Seven Threats to a Sustainable ‘Food Future’
In a hugely captivating and comprehensive look at the food supply chain in Britain, Jeremy Harding provides a look at “the future of food and its supply”–including food ethics, food security and the dire need for a sustainable future. Harding’s case is the most cogent I’ve read and it offers much more than a condemnation…
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Long-Term Thinking and Climate Change
One of the reasons the general public are slow in acting on climate change in the manner the situation’s importance demands is our reluctance to think too far beyond our immediate time horizon. However this shouldn’t stop us. That is the suggestion of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term thinking more eloquently than…
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Creating Effective Messages
Nature has published a short interview with psychologist Robert Gifford looking at the “interface between psychology and climate change”. Noting the problem of pubic distrust of scientific messages that are delivered with uncertainty, Gifford proposes five elements of effective messages*: It has to have some urgency. It has to have as much certainty as can…
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Environmental Assumptions
Big business is environmentally destructive: a widespread and almost unquestioned assumption. A false assumption, according to Jared Diamond, noting that profits often arise from green initiatives and environmental concern is of inherent importance to many large corporations. The story is told through the lens of Wal-Mart’s transport and packaging initiatives, Coca-Cola’s concern “with problems of…
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Environmental Effects of the Shipping Industry
I don’t usually give much credence to Daily Mail articlesâgiven the paper’s editorial stance and propensity for junk food newsâbut I made an exception for one penned by Fred Pearce, New Scientist‘s environmental consultant. Still not completely free from sensationalism, Pearce looks at the pollution emitted by the shipping industry, particularly some of the world’s largest…
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How Congestion Pricing and Traffic Jams Help the Environment
When us laymen think of ways to solve traffic congestion we typically think of two ways: congestion pricing to force those who are most price sensitive off the roads and on to public transport (which should be improved using the funds gained through said pricing), and adding capacity to the roads. But do these solutions…
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Computing and the Climate
In what appears to be a bit of an advertisement for climateprediction.net–a distributed computing project to test the accuracy of various computer models of climate change–The Economist looks at the impact of computing on the environment; specifically carbon dioxide emissions. According to a report published by the Climate Group, a think-tank based in London, computers,…
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The Most Important Century
The next 50 years will bring technological, social and geopolitical change greater than we can imagine, says Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, but the emerging problems of population growth and climate change make this century arguably the most important in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, even from the perspective of an astronomer. It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that…
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Can Technology Solve Our Climate Problems?
After reading Cambridge physicist David MacKay’s much lauded Sustainable Energy (free download available), the FT Economist Tim Harford worries that we are “too complacent about technological fixes for the twin problems of climate change and finite oil and gas reserves”. Harford suggests that if we contemplate the idea that technological progress may not solve these…