Agriculture and Climate Change: Transformation or Decline

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Joseph Curtin

The Irish agricultural sector accounts for 40% of domestic sector emissions (those emissions not covered by the emissions trading scheme), or 27% of overall Irish greenhouse gas emissions. This is much higher than any other EU country, and among developed countries only New Zealand compares internationally.

Although EPA projections forecast a marginal decrease in agricultural emissions by 2020, the abolition of milk quotas combined with higher global demand may limit any reductions. A recent Department of Agriculture Paper states that the increased output envisaged in the national dairy herd could increase emissions by 12%.

The uncomfortable reality is that an increase in emissions from Ireland’s largest polluting sector would scupper Ireland’s climate change policy and render achieving Ireland’s target impossible. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming | 2 Comments

A new champion for climate justice

Posted on September 27, 2010 by John Gibbons

Below is the interview as published over two pages in the main section of yesterday’s Sunday Tribune:

Mary Robinson doesn’t scare easily. In the course of more than four decades in public life, it’s easy to forget that she has been pilloried at least as much as praised at home and abroad. The radical young lawyer and Senator in the Ireland of the late 1960s could hardly have picked a more incendiary set of issues upon which to challenge the status quo than contraception, gay rights, women’s rights and the status of children.

Decades later, as the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, her highlighting of atrocities and ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinian civilians in particular earned her the wrath of the Bush administration and the powerful US Jewish lobby (one conservative publication suggested she be indicted for ‘war crimes’). Washington was reportedly apoplectic that this fiercely independent figure doggedly refused to come to heel. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sceptics, Sustainability | 11 Comments

Two scientists, a journalist and a duck

Posted on September 24, 2010 by John Gibbons

In an episode of the acerbic TV series, Yes Minister, The Minister for Administrative Affairs has to respond to an awkward scientific finding (smoking causing lung cancer, or something similar). His cynical senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey has the perfect advice:

“Say there is disagreement among the scientists. Say more research is needed. Scientists are always disagreeing with each other, and there is always room for more research”.

This in turn brings to mind a terrific little allegory, compliments of the estimable Dr. Boli’s Fables for Children Who Are Too Old to Believe in Fables.

———————————————

Once, two scientists – it hardly matters what sort – were walking before dinner beside a pleasant pond with their friend, a reporter for the Dispatch, when they happened to notice a bird standing beside the water. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sustainability | 2 Comments

Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson

Posted on September 15, 2010 by John Gibbons

It has been a bruising couple of days for the image of politics in Ireland. Yesterday morning, of course, we had a tired-and-emotional performance on RTE radio by Taoiseach Brian Cowen. A few hours earlier, junior minister Conor Lenihan had sent the squirm factor off the charts with his bizarre decision to preside at the launch an anti-evolution tirade authored by an obscure constituent suffering from an acute case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Regular mortification was of course compounded by the fact that Conor Lenihan is Science Minister. It was a bit like sending our education minister to a book burning, or catching the justice minister laundering red diesel. Lenihan did back down as the firestorm broke over him, but still planned to attend the ‘book’ launch in Dublin earlier this evening, pointing out that “diversity of opinion is a good thing”. No matter how dumb, ill-informed or just plain wrong that opinion may be, it appears. The assault on science and the scientific method is, it appears, by no means restricted to the Tea Party lunatic fringes of US politics. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media | 71 Comments

Six degrees to annihilation

Posted on August 29, 2010 by John Gibbons

Below is a news feature as appears on page 14 of this weekend’s Sunday Tribune. Given that global emissions are and will continue to run at or perhaps beyond the IPCC’s ‘worst-case’ (A1F1) scenario, I felt it useful to try to translate likely real-world impacts into a language that is more widely understood. The degree-by-degree structure broadly follows the model of Mark Lynas’ excellent ‘Six Degrees’…

Climate, wrote Oscar Wilde, “is what you expect. Weather is what you get”. And weather is a chaotic beast. In the last 12 months alone, Ireland has endured some of the worst flooding in a century, followed by the hardest freeze in four decades, and, in recent months, near-drought conditions.

With both environmental activists and climate change deniers attempting to use one extreme weather event or the other to ‘prove’ their completely contradictory positions, small wonder that the public and large sections of the media do not know who or what to believe. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | 42 Comments

For whom the (Angelus) bell tolls

Posted on August 15, 2010 by John Gibbons

Now here’s a genuinely novel idea. “Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas. In my state of Arizona, Sister Margaret McBride, a senior administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, recently authorised a legal abortion to save the life of a 27-year-old mother of four who was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from severe complications of pulmonary hypertension; she made that decision after consultation with the mother’s family, her doctors and the local ethics committee”.

The bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, immediately excommunicated Sister Margaret, saying that the mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s. “Ordinarily, a man who would callously let a woman die and orphan her children would be called a monster; this should not change just because he is a cleric”.

So writes Lawrence Krauss in the current edition of Scientific American. “I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo. To do so risks being branded as intolerant of religion”, he continues. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability | 29 Comments

Driving an Electric Car

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Paddy Morris

I was fortunate enough to test-drive the Nissan Leaf this week, and thought I would post some first impressions.

The car itself is very comfortable, and for anyone used to a Prius (or any automatic), it drives exactly like a normal car. The car is comfortable, acceleration is quite quick, and overall the car performs perfectly for city driving – my test drive was relatively short and was city based, but I am sure it would perform perfectly for mid-range journeys as well.

The range is stated to be 160km – certainly more than enough for the daily commute in a city. The car comes with Sat-Nav built in, and the available range is highlighted on the map. Obviously depending on how the car is driven, this range can change, but this is all reflected on the map  in real time so you can see clearly what affect different driving styles have on your range. The car also has an eco-drive mode which reduces the rate of acceleration and hence increases the range. Continue reading →

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

A safer future? Don’t bank on it

Posted on July 22, 2010 by John Gibbons

“Disaster myopia” was a new phrase to enter the lexicon of Irish political life this week. This condition manifests itself in an “increasing tendency to discount the probability of a disaster occurring, the longer the interval of time that has elapsed since a disaster last occurred”.

Disaster myopia is, we also learned, reinforced by competitive pressure: “Dealing with the threat from competitors and defending or increasing market share is real, but disaster is an abstraction until it breaks.”

“Was the scale of risk-taking such as to be reckless? Looking back from a point in the middle of the wreckage, recklessness seems like a reasonable word to use but, of course, this is hindsight bias at work.” At the time the future looked different. …Undoubtedly the sceptics could have and, with the benefit of hindsight, should have, articulated their doubts much more consistently. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | 26 Comments

Dear Willie: when in a hole, stop digging

Posted on July 15, 2010 by John Gibbons

Well hallelujah! We’ve been waiting years to read something bordering on sensible from UCC’s ‘Public Awareness of Science’ officer and Irish Times columnist William Reville on the subject of climate change and by golly, this week’s offering was very, very nearly there.

Reville did a review/critique of sorts of Duncan Stewart’s excellent recent RTE documentary, ‘A Burning Question‘ (though he didn’t actually manage to get the title right). Regarding Climategate, Reville has had little short of an epiphany. Today he writes: “…it soon became clear that most of the suspicious e-mail content was just insider jargon and “macho” posturing and did not weaken the overall scientific case for climate change”.

What a fascinating volte face from the ‘Public Awareness of Science’ expert! In the same column in the same paper last December, Reville was, well, revelling in the exposure of the great climate swindle: “The e-mails appear to reveal scientists on the majority side of the debate massaging data to suit their anthropic global warming (AGW) hypothesis, dragging their heels on freedom of information requests, and conspiring to block scientists who oppose AGW from publishing their results”. This was, he breathlessly reported, an “explosive development”. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

EU “may adapt” 10% biofuel target

Posted on July 6, 2010 by James Nix

The scientific perspective could “kill biofuels” – that’s what the head of the EU’s agriculture unit said to colleagues in response to data showing the global ramifications of dedicating land in Europe to biofuels.

The new Commissioner has said “if it is confirmed … that there is a serious problem related to indirect land use, we may adapt our legislation”; more below.

SPECIAL REPORT-Europe finds politics and biofuels don’t mix

* Environmental damage from land use change sparks debate
* Commission split over science behind biofuel goals
* Scientists disown reports they say were doctored
* Has Brussels tweaked studies to fit pro-biofuels policy?
* New German Commissioner hints at change

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6641FD20100705 Continue reading →

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

Ming shows our bogs no mercy

Posted on July 4, 2010 by John Gibbons

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. So wrote novelist Upton Sinclair, and boy, did he have a clear understanding of human nature.

Last Thursday’ PrimeTime on RTE featured a report on what it called ‘Turf Wars’, the latest skirmish in the ongoing east-west battle to define what country we really are, and perhaps, what century we see ourselves in. I wrote about this at length last August – one para from that article is below:

“Ireland doesn’t have any significant coal deposits to burn. What we have instead are some of the world’s most important bogs. Peatlands comprise almost a fifth of Ireland’s land cover, and lock away a massive 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon. They are also home to around half our endangered bird species and around a quarter of endangered plant species. Peat bogs are amazingly efficient carbon sponges. A healthy bog typically stores 10 times more carbon per hectare than any other system, including forests. Peatland protection, according to the UN Environment Programme is “among the most cost-effective options for mitigating climate change”. Damage to peat bogs is now producing the equivalent of over a tenth of total global fossil-fuel emissions.” Continue reading →

Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | 8 Comments

A burning question

Posted on June 28, 2010 by John Gibbons

Fair play to Duncan Stewart. He was in combative form on Saturday’s Marian Finucane Show on RTE radio. The subject of his interview was the one hour documentary film special, ‘A Burning Question’, which airs this Tuesday (29th) at 10.10pm on RTE 1 and featuring many of the great and the good in the field, from the UN’s Ban Ki Moon to Mary Robinson, Prof John Sweeney and economist and late eco-convert David McWilliams (I’m in there somewhere among the interviewees). Click here to view the film online (in two parts).

The documentary promises to take a forensic look at the ever-expanding chasm between what the science of climate change is telling us and how this critical issue is being presented (and misrepresented) via the media. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sceptics | Tagged , , , , , | 12 Comments

Sunday Times shows its hand. Again.

Posted on June 23, 2010 by John Gibbons

Last April, I gave a lecture to the Met Society of Ireland in Glasnevin. A Sunday Times reporter was in the audience, though she did not make herself known to me, ask any questions or attempt to speak to me afterwards. However, five days later I got a call from said reporter, picking up on some choice observations on my part about the, em, quality of journalism on display post-Climategate/Copenhagen and the winter cold snap.

It must have been a veeery slow week, because two days later, a whopper of a ‘news’ article appeared in the ST, covering around two thirds of page 3 (appropriately enough, for a Murdoch title). I covered this incident on this blog back in April.

And now they’re back. From outer space. Those irrepressible Sunday Times hacks, ever eager to please their billionaire publisher, just couldn’t wait for another juicy ‘climate’ scandal story, they just galloped ahead and made up their own! Continue reading →

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Oil: supply shortfall & getting a sense of the scale of BP’s spill

Posted on June 21, 2010 by James Nix

We’re now beginning to see government agencies put figures on the oil supply deficit in coming years.

The US Department of Energy information agency say that current data points to a supply deficit of 5 million barrels a day by 2015, rising to 20 million barrels a day in 2020. This estimate, calculated in April 2009 after the economic crash in western countries, is based on slowly rising global demand, largely on foot of increased consumption in China and India.

But rather than translating into queues at petrol pumps, the deficit is expected to prompt price increases over time as demand runs ahead of supply.

Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency advises that “we have to leave oil before oil leaves us”. Signs of that remain thin on the ground, the car park of Leinster House being a case in point.

And the ill-fated attempt to drill for oil one mile below the ocean surface off the coast of Louisiana is testament to the complexity, even desperation, brought on by peak oil. It’s not easy to manage oil exploration 1,500 metres underwater where divers can only operate locked inside submarines.

What’s more, gaining a picture of just how much oil is escaping every day in the gulf is very difficult. In a ‘worse-case’ scenario, the spill could rise to 100,000 barrels a day, according to BP. The current estimate is 60,000 barrels a day, according to the US government. Let’s take the lower figure.

Some 60,000 barrels converts to 9.6 million litres. What would that be in terms of Irish dairy production, for example? To produce 9.6m litres of milk a day would take a staggering 420,000 cows. Or put it another way, the standard home delivery oil truck carries 20,000. Now picture 480 of these trucks circled on the beaches of a small island spilling their contents into the sea every day.

Posted in Economics, Global Warming | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Lloyd’s of London on Peak Oil and Climate Change: Business as usual is no longer an option

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Paddy Morris

Lloyd’s of London recently published a white paper called “Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic risks and opportunities for business (PDF)“.

It would appear business as usual is no longer an option. The paper is available for free online and is essential reading.

The executive summary is worth quoting verbatim:

1.  BUSINESSES WHICH PREPARE FOR AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE NEW ENERGY REALITY WILL PROSPER – FAILURE TO DO SO COULD BE CATASTROPHIC

Energy security and climate change concerns are unleashing a wave of policy initiatives and investments around the world that will fundamentally alter the way that we manage and use energy. Companies which are able to plan for and take advantage of this new energy reality will increase both their resilience and competitiveness. Failure to do so could lead to expensive and potentially catastrophic consequences. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming | 2 Comments