As several readers have pointed out in comments on my previous post, and several more by e-mail, I made a schoolboy howler in this week's article about how rice yields are responding to temperature rise in Asia.
There are 101 reasons I could bore you with as to why it happened, but essentially it's my error for mis-reading a scientific paper. And I've been kicking myself ever
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Last year, there seemed to be an unwritten rule in enviro-circles: whenever two or more enviro-folks were gathered together in a place of meeting, talk must turn to biochar.
Accounts would be exchanged of articles half-read and half-digested...the pros would be arrayed against the cons...the words "local" and "sustainable" would be flagged up early and often.
A common reaction was "Good idea, but..."
The notion of biochar takes us back
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While listening to the latest briefing on the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, I've been wondering whether the questions being answered are the right ones.
The key factoid presented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) is that about three-quarters of the 4.9 million barrels that entered the Gulf waters has been dealt with.
About one quarter has naturally dissolved or evaporated, and another quarter was captured at source or
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The journal Nature this week debates one of the most important questions of our age: how can we feed the Earth's growing population such that no-one goes hungry and nature is left with some land and water of its own?
Being a science journal, you'll not be surprised to hear that one of the things it considers necessary in this whole arena is, er, science - in particular information about land use
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Apologies issued by two campaign groups, WWF and Oxfam, may or may not bring to a close one of the more bizarre yet telling episodes that have materialised within the UN climate convention.
At the convention's annual two-week session in June in Bonn, activists removed the nameplate of the Saudi Arabian delegation from the conference hall, broke it, put it inside a toilet bowl and took a
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Turn the clock back four years, and you could not have slipped a cigarette paper between the climate policies of the administrations in Washington DC and Canberra.
With the election of Kevin Rudd in December 2007, paths diverged.
Against the backdrop of opinion polls showing climate change as a major concern for Australians, Mr Rudd's Labor government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, unveiled new targets for cutting carbon emissions and announced that a new emissions trading scheme (ETS) would be
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It's not being touted as such, but the latest document from the United Nations climate convention (UNFCCC) is the clearest admission we've yet had that UN talks are in the mire.
Add it to the latest word from the US Senate, and "mire" hardly seems strong enough.
Let's take the global document first.
At the last round of UNFCCC negotiations in Bonn, the convention's secretariat was asked
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I didn't know Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist who has just died from an apparent heart attack, well enough to pen a comprehensive account of his life and works.
RealClimate has an appreciation by his close colleague Ben Santer; and the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have obituaries, among others.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has an In
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The fungal disease chytridiomycosis has sometimes been compared to a forest fire, sweeping through the world's amphibians and consuming them in its remorseless flame.
It's not a perfect analogy, not least because many species survive the passing conflagration; but it's not bad.
Just as you can see a forest fire coming (particularly now that "seeing" involves the use of hi-tech gadgets such as satellites), in principle you can
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It's an unusually well-structured week that begins with cause and ends with effect.
But that is one way of looking at what we've just had.
On Monday, the UK's Royal Society announced a study into the science of human population growth.
What they mean by "the science" is pretty broad, and the panel they've convened includes experts on law and theology; so clearly we're well into
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