Patrick Medlicott was an Orthopaedic Surgeon for many years, before opening a vineyard.
A summary of “Increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy”
9 June 2025
I would like to discuss an article from Environmental Research Letters. The author is Gerrard Wedderburn-Bisshop,and he writes for the World Preservation Foundation. The title of the article is ”increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy”.
Charting a path to health for all at net-zero emissions
12 May 2025
There are so many things going on in the climate space at the moment that it is difficult to keep up with them all. My sources of recent information are Dr Catherine Dyer, Bernard Hickey, and Peter Bale from the Kākā - a weekly podcast on political economy, climate change, and international affairs (from Dr Robert Patman University of Otago), together with invited guests each week from other areas of interest including economists and politicians. I believe this is a worthy site of usually peer-reviewed information concerning these topics. I would like to make a plug for the Kākā, which unfortunately is a pay site (but most reliable news these days is). For under $20 a month, one receives a daily briefing and a set of links to other sites (also often unfortunately behind paywalls). Many people might say it is mildly left of centre, and it is certainly not particularly complimentary of our present government. It is available through a platform called Substack, interestingly enough run by a young expatriate New Zealander.
April Climate snippets
28 April 2025
I intend this episode to comment on several issues.
Three Climate Change Snippets
31 March 2025
Further to my previous articles on climate change, this week I will talk about several short topics from recent publications.
Two recent Climate Science articles
17 March 2025
This week I will comment on two articles. The first is an article from Science Advances by Richardson et al. 9 from 13 September 2023. This is a research article with the title “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”. This article is a collaboration between multiple climate scientists, including those from the renowned Potsdam Institute (Rockstrom et al).
Are democratic politics and capitalism suitable for dealing with climate change?
18 February 2025
The IPCC report of 2022 notes that climate change is a major risk to planet Earth. (IPCC 2022). New Zealand's Net Zero Carbon Act has been passed by parliament, and has been accepted by the National party, Labour Party, Green party, ACT party and Te Pati Maori. The NZ First Party is ambivalent. This would suggest that very urgent and far-ranging changes are necessary to our society in New Zealand within the next six years, to try to get to 1.5° C of global warming by 2050 - or preferably earlier. It should be noted that we are already close to that target in 2024, and atmospheric greenhouse gases have increased rather than decreased year by year since then. These have led to year-on-year increases in record temperatures, with associated increases in floods, droughts, wildfires, strength of storms, sea level rise and catastrophic effects in many countries including New Zealand. The most affected countries are in the “Global South”, yet they produce the least greenhouse gases. New Zealand is the 7th highest producer of greenhouse gases per person in the world.
Introducing our new Climate Correspondent
21 January 2025
I have been a member of this group for a few years. I joined because I was tired of ill-informed, anti-scientific nonsense in our media especially stemming from our politicians. I am a 78 year old retired Orthopaedic Surgeon who has worked in science since my initial Zoology degree in 1967. I do not belong to any (anti)social media.