How much does climate change cost? What will be the impact on our wallets? The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group II has concluded that global warming…
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Climate change – Analysis and Comment
The IPCC’s latest climate change report has made it clear that global temperature rises will be the cause of more extreme weather events around the world. Indeed, weather disasters increasingly provoke…
Biofuels have come under scrutiny in the latest IPCC report, which outlines some of the emergent risks associated with their production. In principle, biofuels seem to be an ideal solution to reducing…
Instead of costly levees and seawalls, coastal ecosystems could offer an alternative way to protect Australia’s coastal communities from rising seas, saving money and storing carbon along the way. Sea…
We find ourselves in an era of what we might call creative self-destruction. We’re destroying ourselves – it’s as simple as that. Economic growth and exploiting nature’s resources have long gone hand-in-hand…
Climate change is a serious threat to human safety and security according to the latest report from the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change. But also coming through loud and clear is that adaptation…
Despite the mounting evidence, there are still some who would deny the veracity of human-caused climate change and its potential to disrupt and harm our communities. Most dissenters rely on non-expert…
Australia’s coral reefs and mountain-top ecosystems are set to suffer from climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest summary of the research. The threats to these…
Climate change is a problem for democracy. The scientific modelling is compelling and the evidence alarming. The problems begin when the science crosses into the democratic sphere of politics and public…
Climate change is already having a major impact on the planet, with impacts forecast to worsen significantly, according to the latest summary of peer-reviewed climate science from the Intergovernmental…
Every day there seems to be more confusing (and sometimes downright misleading) news about climate change. Depending on what you read and whom you listen to, climate change is getting worse, or not happening…
Senior scientists and government officials are meeting in Japan to finalise a new report on the impacts of climate change. It will be the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in…
Scientists are meeting this week in Yokohama, Japan, to finalise and approve the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group II – the part of the IPCC process that…
The new World Meteorological Organization statement on the status of the global climate of 2013 highlights a fact that some still wilfully prefer to ignore – climate change is already making many extreme…
Recent floods in the UK have awoken the country to the possibly severe impacts of climate change. Like many other parts of the world, including Australia, the UK will see rising temperatures and increasing…
Rod Keenan: What do you see as the challenges of adapting to climate change in the UK? Lord Krebs: In the UK we’ve done what we call the Climate Change Risk Assessment, which is a formal analysis of all…
“The optimist”, wrote American fantasy fiction writer James Branch Cabell, “proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” Reading about the global food…
A colleague of mine recently received an invitation to a Climate Council event. The invitation featured this Tim Flannery quote: “An opinion is useless, what we need are more facts.” My first thought was…
The Conversation is running a series, Class in Australia, to identify, illuminate and debate its many manifestations. Here, David Peetz and Georgina Murray look at divisions within capital over the future…
A warmer climate is likely to result in fewer large waves along Australia’s central east coast, according to Bureau of Meteorology research that predicts a decline in the frequency of storms known as East…
Have you ever been snorkelling or scuba diving on a windy day when there are lots of waves? Did you notice how much that flow of water against your body affected your ability to swim and control your movements…
The resurfacing of the idea of developing northern Australia is akin to making a sequel for an old cinema classic. It evokes familiarity and the repackaging of tested and yet-to-be tested concepts. It…
It is difficult to make a conclusive link between human-caused climate change and the record drought in California, record freezes in parts of Canada and the US, Britain’s wettest-ever winter and Australia’s…
The State of the Climate 2014 report, released today by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, confirms that Australia is heating up. It has warmed by 0.9C since 1910, with more in store thanks to the…
The era in which humans have had the power to alter the conditions for all life on Earth is widely thought to have begun with the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This era has been dubbed the “Anthropocene…