Category Archives: Global Warming

Global Warming

Food shortages come home to roost

It’s been said that a recession is when your neighbour loses his job; a depression is when it’s your job that goes. This comes to mind as reports have been pouring in over the last while about soaring food prices … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Let them eat cake

It takes around 230 kg of corn to feed a child in the ‘developing world’ for a year, according to UN estimates. By a ghoulish coincidence, that’s around the same amount of corn as is needed to produce enough biofuel … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Some like it hot?

Climate sceptic Bjorn Lomborg was in Dublin last Friday telling the folks at the IMI national management conference that everything’s just honky dory on the climate front – a business-as-usual message that was no doubt eagerly lapped up by that … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The sweet smell of excess

‘Fused with idealism, heritage moulded to modernity, classicism reinterpreted through originality…inspired by a search for balance and harmony in a chaotic and contradictory world’ The above verbiage is taken verbatim from the current Aer Lingus Sky Shopping magazine. It’s describing … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

ESB finally sees the light

Ireland, it appears, is at last starting to get serious about tackling our huge energy requirements, and the dagger that our massive dependence on imports of oil and gas in particular holds to our collective throat. We are reckoned in … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Nuclear, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Watch out, Gaia’s about…

At 88, James Lovelock is for many people the Grandfather of the modern ecology movement. He today is admired and despised by people in the general ‘green’ movement in about equal measure. Apart from a highly successful career as a … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Forty shades of brown?

Climate change is set to change the very face of Ireland in the coming decades. This is the conclusion of a study published to coincide with St. Patrick’s Day. The study is called ‘Changing Shades Of Green – The environmental … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | 9 Comments

The most dangerous man in Europe?

Gordon Brown gets it. Kevin Rudd gets it. John McCain gets it. Bertie Ahern (sort of) gets it. For goodness sake, even George W Bush is beginning to get it. It, of course, is the realisation sweeping the world that … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Ssssh, don’t mention the ‘E’ word

There’s an episode of the 1970s comedy, Fawlty Towers, in which German visitors come to stay in the hotel. Basil Fawlty goes to great lengths to avoid any references to World War 2 (it was then barely 30 years after … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Drowning in an ocean of rubbish

Nobody likes living near a rubbish dump. Fewer things are quicker at getting Irish people out to protest than the prospect of a new dump or incinerator opening anywhere near them. Earlier today, around 400 people in Nobber, Co. Meath … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Sustainability | 4 Comments

Feast or famine

Food, or more precisely the lack of food, is deeply ingrained in the Irish psyche. Small wonder, having been victims of the worst western European famine of the last 250 years. In today’s world of plenty, where the local Tesco … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

There Will Be Oil!

The prolific American author Upton Sinclair died 40 years ago, but his novel Oil, published in 1927, has recently had a second coming, being the book upon which the Oscar-winning film There Will Be Blood is based. Another of Sinclair’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Friends, countrymen, lend me your processors

Writing regularly about climate change and related issues is great – up to a point. However, the prospect of being able to chip something in to the actual science part might seem a little far-fetched for those of us such … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Sustainability | 2 Comments

The China Syndrome

Beijing has a shiny new international airport. Built in just four years by an army of 50,000 workers, the terminal is 3km long, with floor space a fifth bigger than all of Heathrow’s four existing and fifth planned terminals combined. … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

A vision of beauty

Nature is under relentless assault, entire ecosystems are being obliterated, an area of natural forest the size of Croke Park is burned or cleared every second. Around every 12 minutes, yet another species goes extinct. The news is, to put … Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Sustainability | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments