Journal of the Plague Years

We Have Seen The Enemy, And He Is Us. (Walt Kelly, through Pogo.)

• Vince Cable on bee-keeping.
• Nightmares of the Future.
• Extinction. (The Living Planet Index.)
• One piece of news today may soon eclipse all the rest, even the earthquake in China... (The Living Planet Index.)
• A purely Meldrewesque rant about the endless and inescapable noise all around us, even in the sticks.
• 'Aviation is a benchmark of environmental responsibility for others to follow.' (IATA spokesman.)
• Read the Daily Mail for intellectual rigour and a clear understanding of science. Then again, perhaps not.
• The Forgotten Chorus.
• The ocean currents and a gift of time...
• What does it take?
• 'Anaerobic Digestion'. Such fun...
• Plastic Waste In The Ocean - Thirty Five Years Of Evidence.
• Dominic Lawson come home, all is forgiven.
• Coal is the New Clean.
• I'm filing a patent for a battery-driven, self-opening beer bottle.
• Pie in the Sky.
• LloydsTSB: Never Mind The Profits, Feel The Heat...
• Brown Isn't Green.
• Circle The Wagons!
• How To Save The Planet!
• The River Wandle (South London)
• They Simply Don't Get It.
• Even if it isn't too late, I don't think we have the political will.
• Green Watch.

Vince Cable on bee-keeping.

1 June 2008 .

I'm not so dead-set against the Mail as I was. It may be that it's mellowing in its old age; it's certainly winning some respectable medals for investigative reporting, and something from Amnesty International for opening up the scandal of the young footballers in west Africa. It may be that society's moved - more into the target area of the Mail's imprecations. Or it may simply be me as I grow older, more Meldrew-esque, more into the Mail's natural constituency.

Or it may just be that I want to be nice about them because I want you to read an article by Vince Cable MP (Lib, and rather good value) in today's Mail on Sunday: 'Beemergency; Mail on Sunday, 1 June, p27.' (Link to follow as soon as I can find one.)

The decline in bee population and even of entire species (three so far in Britain, with seven more under immediate threat) is beginning to have a damaging effect on our entire plant (and dependent animal) ecosystems, since so many plants depend on the bees for pollination. It's becoming a matter of concern for more than just fruit farmers, too, because the bees also have a role in pest control. Suggestions are that this is rapidly growing into a crisis a great deal more damaging - even in simple economic terms - than Foot-and-Mouth.

Britain's statistics are sombre, but at the moment they pale by comparison with what's happening in the US and parts of Europe (Italy lost half of all its bees last year and may lose most of the rest this year.) Unfortunately what is happening abroad is on recent form only anticipating what happens here by a short time.

I've mentioned the bee problem as an indication, which we're ignoring, of troubles to come, elsewhere on this site. Vince Cable is, fortunately, likely to be heard more clearly.

As he says, we have a government which is penny-pinching and pound profligate. In the wake of the agricultural department's (DEFRA) fiasco in the recent Single Farm Payments reform, they are cutting their budgets everywhere - flood defence work stopped (at what price?), old people lost their help in insulating homes, and so on. Down at the end of the line, the research into the decline of the bees (250,000 out of a budget of several billions) was cut by another 20%. So fairly vital research into a possibly imminent ecological collapse affecting our power to feed ourselves will be allocated less than Mr. Speaker Mammon and his wife's claims for redecoration of their homes and for taxi rides to the shops (not cleared up, even if he thinks it is). Less than the fee for a small Cherie Blair lecture tour.

Easy, I suspect, to think, 'who cares about a few bees?' Anyone with any scientific understanding at all beyond about first-year undergraduate knows better. Find 'Beemergency' and read it.

"If bees disappeared off the surface of the globe then Man would only have four years of life left." (A calculation attributed to A Einstein.) "No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more life."

Einstein 'Vince Cable' Beemergency DEFRA 'Speaker Martin' CCD 'Colony Collapse Disorder'

Nightmares of the Future.

4 June 2008 .

Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and 'futurist', has been presenting 'Visions of the Future', a programme on BBC TV in which he shows us how 'quantum physics is giving us the almost God-like power to manipulate the fundamental building blocks of matter.'

This guy is ageing greybeard (or at least, long-haired) version of the South Korean teenager with an IQ of 312 and no friends, whom we imagine to be designing the technological toys which are too complicated for most of us to use properly. His optimism and enthusiasm for the potentials of science are inspiring, shades of the New Scientist stuff with which my science teachers propagandised me when I was young... except... he has veered into a kind of anticipatory triumphalism which seems to blind too many scientists much as visions of Heaven blind the Christian evangelists. (There; now I've offended both houses.)

He nods toward the problems we face - climate change, food scarcities, resource exhaustion. But he 'knows' that the onward march of science will simply sideline or dismiss these difficulties. We will become a type 1 civilisation (harnessing all the energies of our planet), then a type 2 (harnessing etc. of the sun) then 3 (of the entire galaxy). No boring doubts there.

Or, on a more quotidian level, he sings the praises of, say, nano-technology and how it will deliver everything from a 'space elevator' to introducing medicine into the very capillaries of our blood-system. Scarcely a mention of dangers. (None of, for example, the [almost self-evident] damage that small nano-tubes do to our lungs - exactly like the damage done by the similarly sized and similarly indestructible fibres of asbestos which cause one of the most nasty, painful and incurable cancers you can get. Prince Charles' fear of 'grey goo' gets a mention... but not even a nod towards a rebuttal.)

He's only one man on one programme, and science needs all the good PR it can get... but this level of evangelism is dangerous because it infects too any scientists, who build dreams and fail to see the destruction their dreams are inflicting.

Added later: I realise that I haven't actually demonstrated the destruction I've claimed - that I've assumed the adverse, sometimes nightmarish, (side-)effects of the scientists' dreams to be self-evident. I'm not sure how I would argue my point... write endless examples about nuclear power, or private transport, or cheap food, or TV/CCTV, and go to great lengths to explain my point? I guess you either see things my way or you don't...

'Michio Kaku' 'Visions of the Future' nano-technology 'scientific triumphalism'

Extinction. (The Living Planet Index.)

17 May 2008 .

Looking at all the ominous reports which fill the media (and at what we can sometimes see for ourselves), I've asked on this website what it's going take to make us wake up to the damage we're inflicting on our world; I guess I've accepted that it's been the cry of the evangelist since forever: why won't they listen?

I very much doubt that the report, The Living Planet Index (One piece of news... previous item, ie next below), was spot-on in every respect; I have no doubt at all that it was broadly correct in its conclusions.

The next paragraphs, in colour, are just the rantings of an evangelist... probably best to skip them...

We each develop our world-picture through our own experiences. I was probably sensitised as a child as I came across the (human-inflicted) horror of myxied rabbits - it may seem a small thing to those of you who regard wildlife as no more than vermin but, seen almost daily for several years by this six- seven- and eight-year old child, it was a shattering example of the cruelty that men will do to achieve a goal (no matter how necessary it might seem to be). My Damascene moments, however, came when I was in my twenties and thirties, when I travelled to some fairly remote, uninhabited places (African bush, Arctic tundra, desert in the Middle East, mid-Atlantic, in the 1970s and '80s) - and found them covered, even then, in the visible detritus of human activity. It was everywhere: out in the Atlantic, when I was several hundred miles off any major shipping lane or (so far as I know) from any other ship - I could still watch the rubbish drifting by. Damascene because there was even worse invisible damage - most obviously, for me, in northern Finland, my place of peace and escape until it was swamped by fallout from Chernobyl so intense that it effectively put a stop to aspects of a (Sami) culture thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years old... in just five days. (If you feel that Chernobyl was an exception, then so was Seveso, and Flixborough, and Windscale, and a hundred by-passes built through irreplaceable sites, and all the other places we know about, and all the places we don't know about, just in Europe.)

And, before Chernobyl, my own son, who died of a leukemia... quite probably caused by a speck of (intensely) radioactive material (which was discovered during an abdominal x-ray)... possibly related to his proximity to the Russian border (his mum was Finnish) and the dirt that came from there in a fairly steady stream, but still not a way I expected my child to go...

[Well... after six months of discretion, I've disclosed one of the most personal matters in my life: I hope you will accept it as an earnest of my concern about the whole topic of the damage we're doing. You are justified in reaching one of two conclusions, so far as I can see: (a) I'm so wrapped up in my own past and my son that I've become an eco-nutter, albeit understandably, I hope, or (b) I have every reason to know what I'm talking about because I've had precisely the sort of experience which enables (or forces) me to see very clearly what's happening. So, your decision... If you're still with me, read on...]

When I was an Economics teacher (back in the 1980's when there was still a bit of space in schools for education, says the grumpy old-timer), I used to discuss with older students the real-life down-side of some of the glittering theory:

• because of my own experience, my particular thing was pollution; but since, at that time, it wasn't clear how overloaded the natural system was becoming, I didn't talk about it with such great urgency as perhaps I should have;
• population was clearly becoming a problem, but since the wisdom then was that the planet could cope with up to 15 billion souls (a figure which is now seen as impossibly over-optimistic) and since a levelling-off was predicted somewhere around six to nine billion, we didn't see the urgency there, either... Malthus was considered by all the conventional wisdom to have been refuted completely by the history of the past 200 years... but the writing was already on the wall...
• climate change was in the air (if you'll forgive the expression), for example with droughts deepening, but the information in the public domain was not yet clear even then as to what direction it would move (warming or cooling), when it would happen (hundreds of years?) or what the day-to-day effects would be (we didn't realise there'd be any, to speak of); and
• while extinctions were happening, and being reported, they were more important then on an emotional level (or sentimental, as colleagues said) than as a matter for serious alarm.

There were two things which I was already clear about:

• resource exhaustion was going to be a problem in our own life-times:I use to quote oil beginning to become scarce by around 2010, and the metal and mineral markets becoming harder during this decade; and, most importantly
• the planet had reached a tipping point, in its ability to sustain our use of resources and in its ability to deal with our waste, in the early 1970's, (around 1972).

I don't remember now what my sources were for these last two, but I'd accepted them as core knowledge: I just didn't realise how quickly the birds were coming home to roost. The death of my son rather focused my mind...

By the 1990's, with a reasonable degree of interest driving me to some reasonably diligent research, I was beginning to grasp that the picture was a great deal darker and more immediate than I'd realised. The problem is that once you've taken that sort of step, it's very difficult to understand why the rest of the world hasn't walked with you: the importance of The Living Planet Index ought to be that it's beyond ignoring...

But I suspect the world will ignore it, on the whole... but read with fascination about Madame Blair...

So, a simple personal statement, then I'll leave the subject, for now (like so many things I'm writing, this seems to be just for the record): I find it easier to live in a world where my son was taken from me too soon than I do to live in a world that watches over a quarter of its fellow species (and over a half of its fellow creatures) extinguished in half a lifetime and still thinks self-serving memoires more worthy of attention.

We aren't at risk of our world dying. It is dying.

On this item, I am reserving the right to break my own rule, to come back and revise, re-write or delete it later.

Malthus Sami 'resource exhaustion' 'tipping point' extinction 'political memoires'

One piece of news today may soon eclipse all the rest, even the earthquake in China... (The Living Planet Index.)

16 May 2008 .

The Zoological Society of London, along with WWF and the Global Footprint Network, has published a report today, The Living Planet Index, a census of the species of the Animal Kingdom. (The Independent, p26.)

It states that the following falls in diversity - the numbers of species - have taken place in the last 35 years:

Marine species : 28% lost;
Freshwater species: 29% lost;
Terrestrial species: 25 % lost.

Such a sharp fall is "completely unprecedented in terms of human history... You'd have to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs to see a decline as rapid as this." (Jonathan Loh, editor of the report.)

The Indy quotes scientists as suggesting that the current extinction rate is in the order of 10,000 times faster than the historical norm.

I understand that the conclusions given are statistically based on the study of about 4,000 species between 1970 and 2005, and since I don't know what the level of peer review or outside agreement/supporting evidence there is, I accept (hope!) that the reality may not exactly match what's suggested. Unfortunately, I suspect that even if the detail is questionable, there's regrettably little need for a pinch of salt in accepting the enormity of what we're being told.

The report identifies five reasons for species decline:

• climate change,
• pollution,
• destruction of habitat,
• overexploitation of species and
• spread of invasive species (which I take to mean both competing and predating).

All of these can be traced back to human behaviour, it says. [The Lawson/Mail/SEPP tendency will argue against the first, Exxonmobil against the first and second, but most sane folk who aren't blinded by greed will admit that the five factors listed are caused by human activities, even if they're dubious of the links from them on to species extinction.]

I'm mildly surprised that there isn't a sixth factor listed, disease (which may or may not be traceable back to human activity), which seems demonstrably to be affecting bees and sparrows, inter alia, in this country alone - examples I choose simply because their declines have particularly featured in the media here.

"Reduced biodiversity means millions of people face a future where food supplies are more vulnerable to pests and disease... No one can escape the impact of biodiversity loss because reduced global diversity translates quite clearly in fewer new medicines, (and) greater vulnerability to natural disasters..."

[The report might have mentioned Burma, where Cyclone Nargis is now thought to have had massively more impact than necessary because of human destruction of natural eco-systems over the past century: the impoverishment of mangrove systems meant (a) that the physical protection afforded against unusual storms no longer exists and (b) the fish and prawn food source which would have alleviated some of the rice shortage has disappeared.]

Personal reaction over the next day or two.

Mangrove Burma eco-system 'Zoological Society of London' 'Global Footprint Network'

A purely Meldrewesque rant about the endless and inescapable noise all around us, even in the sticks.

15 May 2008 .

I'm staying out of London for a while; I'm getting too old for the din, not least Blair's Jets and endless helicopters - roll on the moment when we realise we can't go on wasting energy with quite such profligacy!

So, down to the leafy wilds of (suburban) Hampshire for an extended break. Sadly, the aeroplanes and helicopters seem to have followed me (or is every part of the country allocated a ration of air-sickness?) Nevertheless, a pleasant walk in the wooded park this evening with Max the Weimaraner, noble dog (and presumably good democrat). The endless 'planes are a pain (never less than five in view or audible at any one time) but at least the road traffic is muted and in the comparative quiet I enjoyed the birdsong - until an ice-cream van started with 'If you go down to the woods tonight' at such full blast that it swamped everything else - and was equally loud all over the park; it turned out to be sitting in a residential street nearly half a mile away.

I'm not just being old, now; I'm being me: I found that noise a thorough pain when I was a child and in my teens (although I never minded - in fact liked - the street cries which were still, residually, around in those days, mainly the rag-and-bone men). Why are ice-cream vans uniquely allowed to make such a noise - certainly so loudly?

Meldrew noise 'ice cream van' 'rag and bone men' 'aircraft noise'

'Aviation is a benchmark of environmental responsibility for others to follow.' (IATA spokesman.)

11 May 2008 .

At a US Federal Aviation Authority conference (2007), we're told that:

• estimates of what emissions airlines are pumping into the atmosphere have been far too low - by, conservatively, at least 20%;
• despite improving technology, CO2 emissions will increase by two-and-a-half times in the first 25 years of this century; with currently predicted rates of growth in air traffic (the figures for 2025 have had to be upwardly revised since 2004 - just three years ago - from 1.03 to 1.48 billion tons of CO2);
• the increases in emissions by airlines are going to swamp savings made elsewhere, and could lead to the 'worse-case-scenario' outcome with regard to climate change.

In response to this, and in the face of a couple of decades of scientific consensus on climate change, what does IATA (International Air Transport Association) come up with? "With fuel costs doubling in the last year, airlines already (!) have an incentive to work toward greater efficiency."

That says it all, really, doesn't it?

The report to the conference, 'Trends in Global Noise and Emissions from Commercial Aviation for 2000 to 2025', was funded by the governments of the US, UK and France. The decision was then made by those governments that it shouldn't be published. Its existence was uncovered by the Aviation Environment Federation.

FAA 'Trends in Global Noise and Emissions' 'Aviation Environment Federation' IATA 'aircraft emissions'

Read the Daily Mail for intellectual rigour and a clear understanding of science. Then again, perhaps not.

03 May 2008 .

To the news (from the Leibnitz Institute and others) that temperatures in Britain may be cooler for the decade or so because of cyclical climate fluctuations masking the general trend, the Daily Mail's response was so predictable that I can take no credit for having predicted it here. Quicker off the mark than I expected, though - two columns yesterday (which, it being the 2nd May, means they were written the day the report came out), and even a short leader.

Littlejohn, in a column fulminating against government attacks on the motorist: 'The truth is that the Earth has actually been cooling for the past few years. But that won't stop the eco-nazis. Nor will it prevent politicians using dodgy climate change hysteria to keep increasing taxes.' Where he gets the 'cooling' from, I don't know - there's only one 'scientific' source that makes that claim, so far as I know (quoted frequently by Andrew Neil and, I believe, by the Lawsons), a source discredited both by peer review and the fact that some (much?) of it's funding originates from oil. I believe his comment about eco-nazis is unjust - although there certainly are plenty such - because those who do take the scientific evidence of climate change seriously are becoming increasingly agitated, and there's not a lot they can do without appearing fascistic, or at least evangelical. Unfortunately, Littlejohn does also make a valid point, which is that both government and local authorities are perceived (which is a large part of what matters) to be using climate change as a cover for revenue-raising (along with plenty of businesses increasing their profits) - a perception which despite myself I share. Assuming that he's right on this (along with the rest of us), then I would argue that it speaks for a government more criminally stupid than even I give it credit for, since government 'profiting' from climate-change fears will lead to yet more disillusionment with the whole issue, by society in general, at exactly the moment when we should all be becoming more engaged.

*SEPP (The Science and Environmental Policy Project): www.sepp.org, funded by ExxonMobil. Critics of this project (which prefers the term 'climate realists' to 'climate deniers') include www.exxonsecrets.org.

Whereas I would characterise Littlejohn as misguided, I'm not sure how to describe Andrew Alexander, as evidenced by his column on the following page... the words manic, paranoid and possibly psychotic rather spring to mind. 'Oh happy day, what joy,' he starts, as he launches in to a rhapsody over how the Leibnitz findings have left egg on the faces of all us gullible fools who were actually taken in by fairy tales about global warming. To get the full flavour of this man's weirdness (and this is no ad hominem attack; the evidence is internal - it's there in the article itself), I have suggest you find a copy of the article itself (no doubt on the Mail's Website), although, on the whole, I wouldn't bother. [Let's be clear; neither Leibnitz, nor NASA (convinced of man-made climate-change), nor anyone else who's come to the same conclusions, has suggested that the findings negate the long term upward trend in temperatures. In fact, changes in the Meridional Overturning Current - the issue under discussion - are temporary, and do not even suggest a cooling outside parts of the northern hemisphere; La Nina, which may cause some world-wide cooling, will affect us for an even shorter period, of a year or two.]

The paper's leader was mercifully brief, and rather more temperate; but it still misses the point. 'So no need to move to higher ground just yet, then,' it concludes, with a heavy humour which risks being - and probably is - dismissive.

None of what the Mail has to say on the issue of climate change should greatly matter, since in my sourer moments I doubt if it has much influence on those still amenable to reason - except that some observers believe that the present prime minister is as much in thrall to Dacre of the Mail as his predecessor was to the baleful Murdoch of the Sun and Times. A Labour prime minister taking his cue from the Daily Mail... would you credit it? I'd be inclined to treat the idea with a pinch of salt (and I'm sure that Brown would claim that the opinion of the Mail merely reflects broad public support for his policies)... except again that those who are making the claim have produced fairly convincing evidence of their case, and in the last few weeks Brown has backed down on his chosen issues where the rag has disagreed (abolition of the 10p tax band) and stuck to his guns in the face of everyone else where it has supported him (changing the drug rules, refusing the miniscule extra earning power to prisoners which might just help them to keep in touch with their families, trying to introduce the 42 day detention rule, to mention a few). In view of the government's woeful action on climate change (as opposed to words) when there was no indication of a breathing space, the Lord only knows how (un)committed they'll be with a decade in hand (forever, to a politician) and the Mail telling everyone there was never anything to worry about after all.

On the same day, The Independent published some far more cogent, and sobering, notes of its own ('Britons will not foot bill to save planet, poll shows', front page). More than 70% will not pay higher taxes to fund projects to combat climate change... but then, if central and local government are seen to be using the climate as a threat in order to raise revenue (as they are by two-thirds of Britons), who can entirely blame the taxpayer for baulking? - which is what make those authorities so culpable. [Added later: On the other hand, the way that shops and offices abuse lighting when they're closed, heating in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer, and the continuing epidemics of ridiculously oversized cars, patio heaters, flying, and so on ad nauseam by the rest of us, suggest that we don't need excuses to refuse to recognise or act on the facts facing us. So now I'm being an eco-nazi... We had better just hope that it's SEPP and the Mail who are right, not me.]

[That 34% of people believe that recent examples of extreme weather are unconnected to global warming may be worrying; that 10% believe that climate change is not man-made is encouraging: it implies general acceptance that it is*.]

Statistics from Opinium, quoted by the Independent.

* In 1944, after four years with Churchill as war leader against Hitler, Mass Observation (the great polling system of the time) found that over 5% of the adult working population could not name the prime minister of Britain. Mass Observation was highly respected, and people did not on the whole muck them around; it was also very careful. Since coming across that finding, I've been inclined to feel that views on facts expressed by small minorities, up to about 10% of the population, may be the ignorance of the terminally stupid... adopting that inclination, with some care, has proved workable; I tend not to mention this in polite conversation!

I may be wrong in my belief that we are threatened by climate change (I wish it were the 90% chance of being wrong that Mr. Alexander posits...) but I'm not a fool for looking at the science and accepting it within the limits of my understanding (which are vastly greater than Mr. Alexander's). If I'm right, then on the evidence of yesterday's papers quoted here, I think we're b*****ed. I think we're going to throw away the 10 year breathing space, and our great-grandchildren (if we have any) are going to hate us for it. But then, I wouldn't count on their being around to hate us...

Added later: Substitute 'climate' and 'science' in place of 'race' and 'politics', and SEPP actually has quite a lot in common with the BNP. (Retreat into a mythical safe place; inability to argue to the facts, or distortion of them; aggression; hysterical accusations; paranoia... see what you think.)

SEPP Exxonmobil 'Leibnitz Institute' 'Mass Observation' Opinium 'The Independent' 'Andrew Alexander' Littlejohn 'Breathing space' 'Paul Dacre' 'Rupert Murdoch' 'climate change' 'Daily Mail'

The Forgotten Chorus.

02 May 2008 .

One of the reasons why The Independent gets its Brownie points is that it sticks with issues which need to be stuck with: among the many which it's been keeping in the public eye is the decline of our bird populations - an issue sustained over the months and years with a grim and ongoing accretion of careful and cogent statistics.

I was lamenting the fading dawn chorus, here, the other day. Since then, there was a letter from Robert Parry of Malvern, (who I take it must be in his eighties, at least [it's all that healthy water!]), in which he says that the relative decline was even greater between the 1920s and the 1960s. It led me briefly to wonder if the dawn chorus might be like colour, something we perceive more brightly when were young; I almost wish I could believe that... but it isn't true, as my memory and any number of old films where the dawn chorus is heard simply as background will attest. Mr Parry finishes that while the Indy's figures are of the gravest concern, 'they give no indication of how much of the natural world of the Elizabethan poets, of John Clare and Edward Thomas, and of the prose writes Gilbert White, Henry Williamson and Richard Jefferies, has been lost forever.' He's wrong. of course: we could get much of that world back (as least so far as the dawn chorus is concerned) if there were the will... which means, he's right.

How right!

'Dawn Chorus' 'Robert Parry'

The ocean currents and a gift of time...

01 May 2008 .

It's reported in Nature today that climate warming is to likely relent in the Europe and North America for the next 10 years or so. It seems that a (the?) major carrier of warmer water up to the North Atlantic, the Meridional Overturning Current (MOC), has a cycle of about 80 years, and it's entering the weak part of this cycle: the effect of this will be enough to obscure longer-term trends for a while. The science behind the finding is increasingly well understood, as is the science which says that as the MOC strengthens again, in the next decade, it will bring the effects of global warming north once more with renewed force.

There are two ways to look at this. The rational route would be to hope that our part of the world is being given a breathing space, and to use the time and the chance we're being given (by God or Nature) to get our act together.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the more likely outcome will be that the Exxon/Mail/Express/Lawson family/Andrew Neil axis will leap on the report and the relenting climate as proof that there's no climate change crisis at all. In fact, I'm willing to bet on it. If I'm right, look for the science in their arguments before you accept them...

'Meridional Overturning Current' 'Dominic Lawson' 'Andrew Neil' Exxon 'Climate Change'

What does it take?

27 April 2008 .

It's a question I've asked on this site before, but it never goes away: what does it take to move us to real action, as opposed to using less bags or sorting our rubbish (so that it can all go to landfill together anyway)? I can see that even ten of the hottest years on record - probably in human history - may be welcomed as 'lovely summers'; but surely not even when chunks of the polar ice caps the size of whole countries are melting and there are food riots in a dozen capital cities? That there may be a few less bees isn't going to be noticed by most people, but the falling numbers of migrating birds (particularly, it seems, because of rapid hardening of desert conditions over a growing area in N. Africa) are becoming obvious in parks and gardens (the dawn chorus being almost a ghost of what it was just forty or fifty years ago). The weather, wild animals (or birds) and the price of food are the (only) direct contact we have with the natural world and what's happening to it: all three of those points of contact are sending us such signals as they can that we're in trouble. What on Earth does it take for us to really sit up and take notice?

'Rubbish bags' landfill icecap 'food riot' 'dawn chorus' 'natural world'

'Anaerobic Digestion'. Such fun...

15 April 2008 .

It seems that one of the reasons why local authorities are

• not investing in 'anaerobic digestion' plants (which have an ameliorating effect on disposal of our food waste) but are instead
• continuing to send this waste to landfill (which is a growing environmental disaster)

is that

• they are spending all their money on the penalty rates demanded by the government for the landfill (designed, of course, to discourage that landfill) and so
• have nothing left to invest in aerobic digestion.

The government really ought to invest in a minister for unintended consequences.

'anaerobic digestion' landfill 'local authority'

Plastic Waste In The Ocean - Thirty Five Years Of Evidence.

27 March 2008 .

It looks as if the UK is going to do something about its contribution to the worldwide plague of the plastic bag; Brownie points for the Mail for its campaign, but it's only a beginning and it's vital that the ball keeps rolling (we're still a long way even from catching up with the other side of the Channel, thus far). The BBC news is doing a series of short but pretty clear-cut items about plastic waste and pollution all this week. Here's hoping...

I've acknowledged that raging on this website about the corruption of environment and politics may be little more than a self-indulgence; but the waste-plastic issue's reminded me that it may still be worth doing.

In 1970, I spent a few months on a banana boat, between Europe and Central America. It was extraordinary experience, of course, but it was also a disturbing eye-opener in too many ways. Just one, for now:

Mid-Atlantic, 1,500 miles from land and (since we were not on a usual shipping lane) perhaps 250 miles from the nearest other ship, on a beautiful, sunny, calm day. And the sea was speckled with litter: not plastic bags - there weren't so many then - but glass and plastic bottles, boxes, fertilizer bags, lumps of expanded polystyrene and plenty more... and ping-pong balls... It was, if you'll excuse the word, impressive. Well, it certainly impressed me. I talked about what I'd seen when I got home but, while it made a good story, nobody took the baton. Because it didn't seem to bother anyone, and I didn't know what I could usefully do, I let it go... to my shame. I may still not be doing anything very useful, but I'm damned if I'll let my opinion on this issue, and others, just disappear from view any more.

'Plastic Waste' Polystyrene

Dominic Lawson come home, all is forgiven.*

13 March 2008 .

Michael Portillo, semi-reconstructed Old Tory on BBC's This Week tonight, said that there is 'some evidence' that human activity may be contributing to climate change, but that the population crisis promised fifty years ago never happened and that in fact there aren't enough people in Europe; that there are always catastrophe huffers and alarmists, and that good economic policy will solve all our problems.

Andrew Neil supported him, pointing out that the polar ice shelves are growing in extent.

Yeah. Right.

*Dominic Lawson is a contributor to the Independent and is a proud, self-professed, climate-change-denier; he writes extensively on the subject with a refreshing lack of any reference to the facts or understanding of the science.

'Dominic Lawson' 'Andrew Neil' 'Michael Portillo' Climate-change denial'

Coal is the New Clean.

11 March 2008 .

"For critics, there's a belief that coal-fired power stations undermine the UK's leadership position on climate change." This is John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business (and responsible for energy), speaking to the Adam Smith Institute, suggesting that the go-ahead is about to be given. He goes on to say that the opposite is true, because our new technology will show developing economies how it's possible to keep coal 'clean'. And he accuses the green lobby of 'gesture politics' in opposing such plants.

If I don't keep a tight rein on myself, this speech and the baggage which comes with it are going to be another temptation for me to go over the top, so I'll limit myself to one aspect of the 'leadership' - although Hutton is just plain wrong on so many levels.

The Adam Smith Institute is a voice of Thatcherism and a pretty unrestrained free market, and not a place I'd look to for either a realistic or a responsible approach to pollution or climate change, never mind that they'd say the opposite. So, I guess it is the sort of place where Hutton could talk about 'the UK's leadership position on climate change' without being furiously heckled. But do our leaders really believe that they (and by extension the country) hold some sort of moral high ground here? The push for aviation and airports, with the main beneficiary thereof, the BAA, doing much of the environmental impact assessment work? The continuing manipulation of cost-benefit analysis by differential pricing in order to favour the car over public transport? The endless favouring of 'choice' and 'the free-market' when(almost)ever the interests of business and the environment clash? The token public consultations? Do they really think that the world is unaware of the weakness of our credentials. Apart from being close to insanity, it's also shaming. And I haven't even begun on our poor performance compared to western Europe on pollution (and banning plastic bags - which is 'gesture politics' - is not going to make a dent there).

Incidentally, the low-carbon technology simply isn't developed yet - it works in the lab, but there's no certainly how effective it'll be in practice.

We probably do have to employ our coal if we're not to be entirely reliant on shaky foreign supplies of gas and oil - in fact, it would be madness not to try to find and develop the best methods. Let's just be honest about what we're doing where we have to do it, go all out to limit the damage, get our act together in all the areas we haven't touched yet, and stop making fools of ourselves.

I await the budget with bated breath. I wonder why I expect 'gesture politics' there, too.

Added later: Sometimes I completely miss the blindingly obvious, and it's infuriating. While I was writing this item, I identified Hutton as Secretary for Business and, then, as responsible for energy - taking it for granted that the two roles would naturally be conflated... Why should they be so? With the problems we face, might it not be more rational to have, for example, a 'Secretary for the Environment and Energy'?

'Adam Smith Institute' 'clean coal' 'energy dependence' BAA

I'm filing a patent for a battery-driven, self-opening beer bottle.

02 March 2008 .

In December I made a despairing little posting about battery-driven watches (as in, why not just wind them up?) (Green Watch - this page)

The other day, I picked out the wrong toothbrush by accident and didn't notice until I was home. The new brush looked just like any other, apart from two little buttons on the handle; it turned out to be a disposable electric brush - to be chucked when the sealed battery runs out.

Since these brushes look like any other, I don't think it takes much guessing how a lot of people will get rid of them - viz, with the household rubbish. So the plastic will contain the toxic muck inside for years, maybe centuries: then, as the plastic deteriorates, like a slow release medicine, the contents will gently leak out and the landfill will be able to continue its deadly work for even longer.

Lovely.


Pie in the Sky.

02 March 2008 .

Massive evidence that we won't need more airports for our prosperity and competitiveness, that the quality of our lives is being substantially damaged by the noise and pollution caused by aircraft, that we don't and won't have the technology to enable all those planes to be in the air over the UK at the same time, that if we follow the government's plans for aviation, we'll have to have zero carbon output through the rest of the economy in order to meet our international obligations, that the fuel needed may no longer even be available...

Referring to the proposal which has re-emerged that a new airport should be built in the Thames Estuary (to the distress of wildlife in the largest and one of the last areas of refuge near London), the following letter appeared in the Sunday Times today, in Murdoch's finest tradition. (In full):

"People, jobs, economic prosperity and competitiveness take priority over estuary birds, much as I love them." (John Thomsett; Seaford, East Sussex.)

There you are, then.

'John Thomsett' 'Thames Estuary Airport'

LloydsTSB: Never Mind The Profits, Feel The Heat...

16 February 2008 .

I've been a loyal customer for nearly four decades, but latterly my opinion's been in free fall. Most of my grumbles with LloydsTSB are about their insouciance with customers; this is about their insouciance with the planet, so there's a nice change.

During the recent cold weather, the doors of a branch I visit have been wide open. Inside, as well as the heating being full on, employees - including a manager - have had extra heaters beside them at their desks.

Presumably they've got to make up for all the cold they've put out into the street during the hot weather. Each time it's been hot in the last couple of years (and at times in 2006 it was baking), the doors have again been wide open... while the air-conditioning worked itself silly (cooling the street).

I've tried having a word with the manager - in a very conciliatory manner, I promise. Life on Mars at best: I didn't just come from a decade she's never seen, I clearly came from a different planet.

Obviously I'm still the nutter with the sandwich-board (q.v.).

So much for corporate awareness of climate change.

(I suspect, by the way, that some of these managers were trained in the same institution as Jacqui Smith... or is the way they talk with that particular complacency simply the fashion now?)

LloydsTSB 'energy waste' 'central heating' 'air-conditioning'

Brown Isn't Green.

04 January 2008 .

Whether or not the new coal fired power stations in Kent go ahead is being seen by some people as a test of the Father of the Nation's green credentials (on the basis that local permission has already been given, and the Great Leader will have, in effect, the ultimate say in the government's sanction).

Why?

With airport expansion (which may be obsolete before much of it is even built) going ahead hand over foot; with a minute saved on a road journey valued up to 50% more than on other forms of land transport (so that cost/benefit analysis always favours investment in roads - cynically, in that headline decisions conceal this grit in the mechanism by which the decisions are made); with government carbon release targets proving a will-o-the-wisp that always retreat as we approach them; with even home energy-saving grants being cut; and so on and so on and so on: why does anyone think that this government has very much in the way of green credentials at all?


Circle The Wagons!

03 January 2008 .

With another hike in the cost of heating, combined with the current cold spell, friends living on tight budgets are becoming really quite frightened. However, amongst one or two wealthier acquaintances (still running their 4x4s and SUVs, and with their Christmas lights blazing), I'm fairly certain that I'm beginning to detect a laager mentality...

Is that how it's going to be?


How To Save The Planet!

03 January 2008 .

If we were all to use twice-as-strong Lenor Concentrate, we could run 14 000 fewer lorries, or something. So the ad tells us all to buy the stuff in order to help the environment.

I may have said it before: the marketing-suits are bottom-feeders.

'Lenor Concentrate'

The River Wandle (South London)

17 December 2007 .

I saw the Wandle when I was a child... well, I suppose I must have done so - I can remember a stretch of slimy greenish-black mud. What I've never forgotten was the smell, a metallic, burnt rubber with a touch of diarrhoea. For years afterwards, I assumed that any waterway in Britain must be dead and dangerously poisonous (an impression reinforced by evening visits to my Grandmother's by the Thames near Lott's Road power station; if you ever smelt that, you'll never mistake it).

It seems, however, that decades of work had rehabilitated the Wandle, filling it with plant and wildlife. Until September, when Thames Water released something ghastly into it, killing (all?) the life in it all over again; Thames Water has been fined, and has promised to restore it (again). No doubt that's the last we'll hear until the next leakage, or fly-tipping, or bureaucratic bungle.

These disasters - seemingly local, but still disasters - just go on happening. A few local stalwarts, with resigned tenacity, start again while the rest of us forget (and probably go on dumping our plastic bags, beer cans and supermarket trolleys).

It's good, therefore, that the people of Camelford, poisoned by a massive dump of aluminium into their water supply by the supplying company, have ensured that their case continues in the public eye, 20 years on. Despite the still unquantifiable damage to their health, it seems that they haven't been fully informed about government findings even now. There have been accusations of a cover-up. (I seem to remember that they were told that they should draw a line under it, too. I couldn't and wouldn't, in their place.)

The problem is that these things are usually forgotten so quickly.

Here's one that's so completely forgotten that I can only sketch the outline: I think that it occurred about 15 years ago, on the river Wey near to where it flows into the Thames above London. The 15 years is almost a guess and, since I can't find any reference to the event on the internet under 'Wey', I may even have the river wrong. What I do remember is a report in the paper that swans and fish were dying, followed a day or two later another report, that an estimated 100lbs (or 100 kilos?) of PCBs had been dumped in the river by an unknown party, and that booms and emergency pumps had been put in place to try to deal with the pollution. I knew enough about PCBs to know that this was an extraordinary quantity of an unbelievably unpleasant chemical, and enough about London's water supply to know that some of this stuff was inevitably going to end up in the taps.

Then, nothing. There was no more in any of the papers I saw and when, a few weeks later, I telephoned the water company, they could tell me nothing about any such spillage.

If you happen to know anything about this PCB event, or anything like it, (and if I have managed to work out how to let you contact me on this site,) please let me know.

A mystery!

'River Wandle' PCBs Aluminium pollution

They Simply Don't Get It.

14 December 2007 .

The Bali climate summit. In the face of American pressure over targets, Europe has backed down, say the news reports. [Again!] But, says another faceless brit politician whose name I realise I should know (but who, I notice, always prefaces any comment he makes on TV with "Look..."), it's good news: discussions are starting about discussions possibly being held in 2009 that will involve the US.

If the overwhelming consensus among relevant scientists is correct, then it is months that are critical now.

In fact, even if this site becomes the world's No 1 opinion blog, there really can't be anything useful I can write here. It is so self-evident that there a more than moderate chance that human society is headed for disaster... not a certainty - I don't think anyone's saying that, but. realistically, somewhere in the range 20%-80%, let's say... it is so self-evident, that nothing I can write can add anything to the world's awareness. But surely, if it were only 10%, or 5%, or 1% - even allowing for the political realities of the world - there should be an overwhelming sense of urgency in Bali.

• Perhaps there is the necessary sense of urgency... then it is no longer utopianism to say that the political setup is demonstrating that it is not fit for purpose; to say that the system has to change. (Though it would be utopianism to imagine that it actually would change...)

• Perhaps the politicians don't really believe what the scientists are saying. If that's the case, what can anyone do? They've been told often enough; they've been given all the evidence.

• Perhaps they know, but care about other priorities more.

Society faces one of three likely possibilities, a century or two from now (active and viable; continuing on a very limited basis in a state of collapse; or catastrophically reduced or effectively terminated). Whichever of those pertains in the future, it is surely the case that of all the problems of the early 21st century, it will be how we deal with this one that most interests the people of that future.

Words are failing me. How can they be happy to wait another two years?

Not, after all, that I actually think that the targets being talked about are actually more than a tiny part of what's needed, after all.

For the first time since starting this journal, I truly wish that I had the gift of argument.

'Bali climate summit' 'climate targets' politics of expediency'

Even if it isn't too late, I don't think we have the political will.

11 December 2007 .

The WWF is presenting the perilous situation of the penguins to the climate summit in Bali. I have a sense that at the very least it is already too late for the most threatened species, including the emperor.

Bali WWF penguins

Green Watch.

01 December 2007 .

I have a couple of wind-up torches, one with a radio. I'm wondering how green they are, if at all. At a time when we are trying to use less toxic materials, we should be reducing our dependence on batteries, whether single-use or rechargeable: we're using more and more, and there's certainly no separate disposal for them around here.

We use a vast number of small but very nasty batteries in our un-windable watches. Ironic, really.


Please take a look at ' Pollution and Global Warming'.

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