A Met Office model revision found its way into the skeptic-o-sphere a couple of days back and, from there, onto some BBC news outlets. Predictable cries of “warming standstill!” ensued.
Guardian environment correspondent Leo Hickman has started collating information on the fallout – it’s a great thread. The sanest quote, for me, from Prof Chris Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London:
… [more]
An old TED video from 2005. Among many highlights, some interesting things to say about growth. McDonough talks about one type of ‘growth as asphalt’ which is ‘destroying the Earth’s underlying operating system’. In McDonough’s vision of a technical metabolism as intricate and resilient as anything biological, “the question becomes not ‘growth or no growth’ but ‘what do you want to grow?’ ”
Yet here we are in 2012, seven years after this video’s impressive proposal for new Chinese cities built on these principles.
… [more]
Stephen Emmott’s sold out Royal Court show in London. Emmott is Microsoft’s head of computational science and part of the 2020science research group. In his show, ‘Ten Billion’, he lays out what we’re doing to the planet in an exact replica of his office ‘right down to the slowly ageing tangerine that he has left in one corner’. He doesn’t offer much in the way of the hopey-changey stuff. Much argument about ‘the message’ is thrown about – but is the problem that its too harsh and needs sugarcoating, or is it that Emmott and others’ work is a quiet but insistent squeak drowned out by a cacophony of comforting illusion?
… [more]