Every year tourists flock to Brussels to sample its world renowned chocolate, beer, waffles and sprouts, but this fine city is also at the heart of European politics and business. As the effective capital of Europe, Brussels houses the European Commission (EC) where decisions are made every day on legislative issues, such as trade and… Read more »
CSAG Blog
Are we doing science right? Does anyone care when we get it wrong?
A recent article in The Economist titled ‘How science goes wrong’ got me thinking about what their assertions mean to Climate Science as we know it. In summary, the author of the article argues that the great success of the scientific method has bred complacency such that scientific hegemonies are rarely addressed. I guess we… Read more »
Mitigation, adaptation and development
(Feature image: Female Anopheles Freeborni (a species of mosquito responsible for malaria transmission) drawing blood from a human host; from Gathany, 2004) Last week Chris wrote a really interesting blog in which he drew particular attention to the defensibility of the actions of climate change scientists in light of their intimate knowledge of the… Read more »
Climate Change Apathy
Why is there such apparent disinterest and even apathy amongst people when it comes to responding to messages about climate change? Is “climate change fatigue” a real phenomena? This post is based on an email I contributed to an internal CSAG discussion. The discussion was prompted by a journalists comment that there is a real… Read more »
The Green Flash
The Green Flash The green flash or sometimes referred to as Neptune’s Wink has inspired literature, artwork and myths. In the 1882 novel “Le Rayon Vert” Jules Verne describes the phenomenon as “a green which no artist could ever obtain on his palette, a green of which neither the varied tints of vegetation nor the… Read more »
CSAG at SASAS 2013
This year the South African Society for Atmospheric Sciences (SASAS) conference took place in Durban at Salt Rock Hotel, hosted by the University of Kwazulu Natal under the Theme “Towards Quantifying And Qualifying The Earth’s Atmosphere”. The conference brings together a diverse research communities every year. It covered a wide range of topics including meteorology, agrometeorology, climatology,… Read more »
The state of the climate in 2012 and what’s going on in the Arctic
Since the late 1980s the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been releasing an annual report with a summary of the state of the global climate and this year was no exception. The release of this publication coincides with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) position statement on climate change entitled ‘Human-induced climate change… Read more »
Walking the climate change slack line
(A reaction to “Climate scientists must not advocate particular policies“) Tasmin Edwards states: “But I care more about restoring trust in science than about calling people to action; more about improving public understanding of science so society can make better-informed decisions, than about making people’s decisions for them. Science doesn’t tell us the answer to… Read more »
Clean energy shift driven by Climate Change could lead to additional stress on water resources
As the world gets hotter and, in many regions, dryer, thanks to our love of fossil fuels, the technologies required to reduce emissions might be too water dependent to be sustainable. The US Department of Energy last week released a report that looked at how resilient the US power infrastructure is to climate change, and… Read more »