TalkClimateChange

Time for more climate talks, as the world inches towards an agreement on a replacement Kyoto protocol through a long and drawn out series of largely unproductive talks which contribute little except to boost profits of the international travel industry.
This weekend, talks have been taking place among international leaders in Kobe, Japan. Setting expectations […]

Continued – read Part I here. 
Similar to climate change, World War II was a disaster which could have been prevented through decisive and early action. However, having failed to avoid climate change, we will need to fight it, and like WWII climate change will require the development of new technologies, the mobilization of millions of […]

World War II can certainly be marked as one the biggest catastrophes ever to befall mankind. Whilst it might not be appropriate to compare this tragedy directly with the potential impacts of climate change in terms of human and financial costs, there is another potential similarly between these two events: They were both predictable and […]

When former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern released his report of the same name last year, he brought about a fundamental shift in the climate debate – moving from an environmental to an economic focus.
Essentially, the Stern report concluded that the impacts of climate change are likely to far outweigh the cost of […]

Whilst I have written on occasion for the Red Team on TalkClimateChange, I am predominantly a Green Team writer – generally believing that environmental concerns should be at the forefront of our agenda. With increasing population and consumption I believe that we are driving down a cul-de-sac, blind to the consequences of our reckless […]

Philip Pullman, author of the excellent “His Dark Materials” trilogy, was recently quoted as saying with respect to energy and carbon rations, “We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year“.  That doesn’t sound so good, but since […]

For some reason the announcement yesterday that George Bush planned to give a speech making new US commitments to tackle climate change completely failed to register with me. So familiar have I become with grand political statements on climate change that instead of eagerly awaiting the news I instead forgot all about it until reading […]

There is a popular body of thought within the climate change debate which says that we would be better off focusing on adaptation to climate change rather than trying to prevent it. Focusing on our current problems, they say, and on those that might be brought about in the future as a result of […]

It’s worse than we thought, say scientists Roger Pielke (University of Colorado), Prof Tom Wigley (National Centre for Atmospheric Research) and Christopher Green (McGill University) in a paper published in the journal Nature this week.

  Bill Gates once suggested that if the auto industry had advanced as quickly as the computer industry we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.
The auto industry was quick to respond to this, arguing that if they developed their products in the same way as the computer industry […]

Did you know, that by reading TalkClimateChange and other climate change related information widely discussed on the Internet, you are likely to feel less responsible and less concerned about the whole problem in the first place?
In a recent New York Times article, John Tierney reports on the curious results of a recent survey conducted by […]

I think we can all agree the unintended consequences of mandated levels of bio-fuels have had some really devastating results globally. The World Food Programme says the increase in food costs has devastated their 2008 hunger relief programs. Mono-agriculture has reduced crop diversity and added to the problems of nitrogen contamination of water systems as […]

Is tackling climate change the responsibility of world governments, or is it the responsibility of the individual? Are we guilty of protesting too loudly, and demanding government action and policy change, whilst doing little to address the problems through our own behaviour? And what role should businesses play in reducing emissions as the largest […]

This post hopes to demonstrate that environmentalism and common sense are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
People want cheap air travel, yet they don’t want additional runways. People want cars, but they don’t want traffic jams. They also want mobile phones without antenna masts, fast food without calories and a whole host of other benefits […]

La Marguerite, an environmental psychology blog, writes a great post today which identifies the real challenges that we face from climate change. I’ve borrowed from it extensively in this post because it provides such a neat summary of the issues that TalkClimateChange ‘talks’ about.
Marguerite refers to a recent article by John Tierney of the […]