The Week That Was - May 24 2013

This week the US have a new Energy Secretary, we find out what happened to the Sydney trained Suntech founder, the EDO goes to bat for the glossy black cockatoo and the aviation industry  might have found a way forward.

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"I just don't see the solutions to our biggest energy and environmental challenges without a very big demand-side response. That's why it's important to move this way, way up in our priorities."
- Dr. Ernest Moniz, newly appointed Energy Secretary for the US

Hours after being appointed to the top energy job for the Obama administration, a professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr Ernest Moniz, who once served in the Clinton administration, has made strident statements implying that the US has to prioritise climate change action.

Now that Obama is retweeting  the work of friend of TCRP SKS.com founder John Cook, a whole bunch of people know that  recent research out of Queensland Uni shows that 97 per cent of  scientist confirm climate scientists believe climate change is real and human induced.

It seems that there is always another opinion on how the climate is or will be changing. Meantime a new study led by Oxford University shows that despite a warming pause in the last decade, the rate of climate change is consistent with conventional estimates of the long-term warming. So it’s not as bad as it could be – but it’s not good …

Meantime a Gold Coast academic is telling the world we need a long term united approach to deal with climate change. So true.  Especially when new read more news like the prediction that Manhattan is on a deadly path as heat predictions rise.

NSW University graduate turned Sun King , Shi Zhengrong, told a ballroom full of Sydney Uni students about the peaks and troughs during his time in China as owner of Suntech. The company, once the one of the world’s largest makers of solar panels has a debt of $2.2 billion.

And the Environment Defenders Office, here in Victoria, has taken the matter for those species who cannot speak for themselves - to court. It alleges that the government is in breach of state environment laws because it has not prepared recovery plans for four threatened species - the glossy black cockatoo, long-nosed potoroo, eastern she-oak skink and large brown tree frog.

And senior officials from business and commercial aviation voiced cautious optimism that a long-sought worldwide framework to reduce aviation's carbon emissions could be in place by 2020.

A national conference on mining and coal seam gas in the Hunter Valley has heard that the world is past the point of preventing climate change. And that Australia will be hardest hit by climate change.

New research found that all glacial regions lost significant mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas. The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the study period. That’s a lot of water which has to go somewhere.

And finally a new report from the States shows that 87 per cent of Americans say the President should prioritise developing sources of clean energy.  And here is a book review of a book authored by someone we all know. See you next week!