Even when you don’t agree with him, Monbiot remains essential reading. Whether you regard the Dark Mountain Project as a bunch of dystopian doomers, or simply realists probably depends on how you feel about peak oil (in the shorter term) and (in the medium term) just exactly what might happen when we do indeed succeed in doubling concentrations of atmospheric CO2 from their pre-industrial levels and usher in, as predicted, a brave new climatic order for the next few millennia… Continue reading
Can industrial civilisation and the biosphere both be saved?
Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Sustainability
Tagged Energy, Monbiot, Oil, palm oil, Peak Oil, Sustainability
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Exposed: climate change doubter with PhD only in spin
Looking to a statistician or economist for expert guidance on complex scientific matters makes about as much sense as consulting a neurosurgeon or a hairdresser for advice on investing in some arcane corner of the derivatives market.
However, when it comes to climate science, this is exactly what has been happening. A small band of people operating in fields entirely beyond their training or competence have, largely thanks to their skill in gaming the media, emerged as de facto international experts, advising politicians and shaping policy, with a patina of science jargon glossing over a hard core of ideology. Continue reading
Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics
Tagged Bjorn Lomborg, Climategate, CRU, deception, denial, Howard Friel, skeptic
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Higher emissions? Or empty roads and emigration?
Monday 26 April is the last day to make a submission on the public consultation process for the largest section of motorway yet to be proposed in Ireland – some 80 km between Cork and Limerick. Submissions must be with An Bord Pleanála before 5.30pm. Unless you are a statutory consultee, or are set to lose land to the proposed motorway, an “observer fee” of €50 is payable (for more details see http://www.corkrdo.ie/files/M20 CPO data/Newspaper Ad/Cork County Council 36882 CPO Examiner Advert R2.pdf)
Over the past few weeks I’ve been fielding queries on the proposed route – everything from how much agricultural land will be lost (more than 2,400 acres) to when An Bord Pleanala is likely to issue a decision (end of August 2010).
One gentlemen sent me a list of 6 questions. They focus more on the financial side than the environmental one. Below I reproduce his questions, together with my answers. Continue reading
Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability
Tagged Ireland's National Debt, motorway construction, policy coherence
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Argument versus Proselytising: Developing and defending a rational debate on energy and survival.
The debate on climate change faces a number of inherent handicaps. Human nature is perhaps the most important. At our best, we deal reasonably well with the present and the immediate future. If next Christmas seems remote, our abilities to grasp what the environment might look like ten or fifty years hence are severely limited. A limitation that is reinforced by our relative powerlessness – the “I’m happy to recycle but what about the Chinese coal-fired power stations?” argument.
A second handicap comes from the not insignificant resources some invest in promoting climate change denial. The most understandable of these come from businesses with a clear commercial interest in delaying, diluting, or derailing regulatory attempts.
Then come the (usually wealthy) benefactors who are ideologically opposed to any form of market regulation. This groups funds many of the more strident US think tanks and a range of other lobby groups whose job it is to rubbish climate change claims and scientific arguments. Continue reading
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Sceptics, Sustainability
Tagged Climategate, CRU, denial, Energy, Peak Oil
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Ireland among most vulnerable to peak oil
HERE’S A conundrum: restarting global economic growth will, by definition, push up energy costs. Rising energy costs will in turn choke off that economic recovery, leading to a fall in energy prices. Try to restart growth again, and the brick wall of energy costs magically reappears. Repeat ad infinitum.
It is hard to overstate the extent to which our daily lives are subsidised by cheap, plentiful oil. Every 24 hours, Ireland burns around 200,000 barrels. That’s the daily equivalent of the muscle power of 2.4 million men, each working for a full year.
Our entire way of life depends on abundant, inexpensive oil. This era is now drawing to a close. Five years ago, the Hirsch report published by the US department of energy concluded that the world has “never faced a problem” as difficult as peak oil, adding that: “without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary”. Oil peaking will be, it warned, “abrupt and revolutionary”. Continue reading
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability
Tagged Energy, Feasta, Forfas, Hirsch, Korowicz, Peak Oil
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Heavy weather for climate science
You would think that people whose business is the weather would be pretty informed about climate change. The reality is a great deal more complex. In the US, weathermen, for many the very public, trusted face of science, are split down the middle, with a prominent rump speaking out vociferously against human forcings driving climate change (assuming they even accept it’s occurring in the first place).
John Coleman is one of the most trusted faces on US television. He founded The Weather Channel back in the early ’80s and is something of an institution. Therefore, when Coleman in November 2007 blogged: “It is the greatest scam in history,” he began. “I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming: It is a SCAM”, he became an instant (septuagenarian) poster boy for the climate denier lobby. Continue reading
Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sceptics
Tagged forecast, John Coleman, Met Eireann, meteorology, Pat Kenny, sceptics, Sunday Times
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Suspend democracy to tackle emissions – Lovelock
From the Guardian:
In his first major interview since the climate-change emails scandal, James Lovelock says he is disgusted by the actions of some scientists, applauds ‘good’ climate sceptics, and warns that global warming could even lead to war
Leo Hickman
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 March 2010
As you travel along the drive to James Lovelock’s house, located in a remote, wooded valley on the Cornwall-Devon border, you pass a sign by a gated cattle grid. “Experimental station,” it reads. “Site of a new natural habitat. Please do not trespass or disturb.”
Thirty years ago, Lovelock planted 20,000 trees to create the much more biodiverse habitat around his home. But you suspect that, had this fiercely independent scientist and globally respected environmental thinker been around 3.8 billion years ago when life first erupted on this planet, he would have organised a similar notice to be placed somewhere prominent. Continue reading
Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability
Tagged carbon, democracy, emissions, Gaia, James Lovelock
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Low future price for carbon puts us on the wrong route
Transport investment is particularly expensive. And two points are emerging in Ireland. First, some facilities are significantly overcapacity. Second, there isn’t enough capacity in areas set to grow as the price of carbon emissions rise: the failure to adequately price carbon emissions links both.
During 2009 freight by road and rail each fell by 12 per cent while car traffic on national routes declined somewhere in the region of 2 – 4 per cent, with final figures awaited from the National Roads Authority.
Viewed against the road plans formulated between 2002 and 2008, which rested on the continuation of year-on-year growth, these falls are significant.
For the fourth river crossing under the Shannon at Limerick, due to open later this year, the National Roads Authority envisaged traffic growth in excess of 10 per cent during 2010. Under the public private partnership contract used on this project, the taxpayer, through the NRA, will need to make additional payments to the tunnel operator if traffic passing under the Shannon falls short of projected levels. A similar arrangement is in place on the M3, also due for completion shortly. Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus
Tagged pricing, roads, Shadow price of carbon, transport emissions
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Decreasing carbon emissions without affecting the quality of life
There are a couple of simple ideas, which if implemented could make deep and long term cuts in our carbon emissions, while maintaining (or even increasing) the quality of life for all.
In no particular order, they are:
1. Immediately Implement a 4 day week (with obvious exceptions for emergency services etc.)
In 2008 Utah,spurred on initially by high gas prices and later by impacts from the global fiscal crisis, decided to do just this. One of the most conservative states in the US (approx. 60% of the population are Mormons) implemented one of the most radical solutions to the problems it faced – a mandatory 4 day week for 80% of state employees. Hours were changed from a 9-5 5 day week to an 8-6 4 day week.The results have been startling. Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Energy, Global Warming, Sustainability
Tagged carbon, climate, climate change, CO2, emissions, global warming, Sustainability
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Doing our best versus doing what’s required
Yesterday afternoon, I was one of a panel of four from the ‘environmental’ field who met under the ageis of Common Purpose with a group of around 25-30 senior figures from the world of business, finance, the semi-state sector and beyond. The topic of the closed session was “exploring the ability of environmental leaders to effect change by inspiring others”.
The meeting is covered by the Charter House Rules (i.e. what’s said in the room stays in the room) but it was a useful opportunity to shoot the breeze with a spectrum of people well beyond the types who might usually find themselves discussing environment, energy and sustainability issues in Dublin on a Tuesday afternoon. On the positive side, there was a good deal less scepticism/hostility to climate science than has been portrayed in our media in recent weeks. Continue reading
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Sceptics, Sustainability
Tagged advocacy, Al Gore, climate, IPCC
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Attack on climate science has its OJ Simpson moment
Bill McKibben has been at the forefront of efforts to alert the public to the dangers of climate change for more than two decades. Today he fronts 350.org, a website dedicated to setting a global CO2 ceiling of 350ppm. Below, he turns his considerable talents to an in-depth analysis of the concerted attack on science, specifically climate science, in recent months, a campaign which has, he writes, been “enormously clever, and enormously effective”.
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Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” Continue reading
Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics
Tagged bill mcKibben, China, Coal, Energy, Monckton, sceptics
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Ireland’s looming bird crisis
Back in 2002, the parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity set a target of halting biodiversity loss by 2010.
It is now 2010, the declared UN Year of Biodiversity, and although some endangered species have been saved, notably within the EU, in general species of flora and fauna are being pushed into extinction at a faster rate.
There was really little hope of halting species loss in such a short time, even though the idea had its genesis as far back as 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio, though it didn’t get legs until the turn of the millennium.
But whatever hope there was then is now fast receding as climate change becomes the newest and most formidable driver of declines and extinctions. Continue reading
Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability
Tagged birds, egret, extinction, habitat, habitat loss
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Permafrost retreats further north
Buried in the ‘Weather Eye’ page of our paper of record again…
Climate change forcing frozen soil retreat
Mon, Feb 22, 2010
THE PERMANENTLY frozen ground known as permafrost is retreating northward in the area around Canada’s James Bay, a sign of a decades-long regional warming trend, a climate scientist has said.
When permafrost melts, it can liberate the powerful greenhouse gas methane that is locked in the frozen soil.
The amount of methane contained in permafrost around James Bay is slight compared to the vast stores of the chemical found in ancient, deep permafrost in the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia.
The southern edge of permafrost in the James Bay area has moved about 130km (80 miles) north of where it was 50 years ago, Serge Payette of Laval University in Quebec City said in a telephone interview. Continue reading
Now there’s an App to zap the sceptics
The always useful site Skeptical Science, with its handy list of the most common arguments used by climate change sceptics and detailed rebuttals of them, is now available as an iPhone app.
So next time a discussion occurs and one of the old reliable arguments like ‘it’s the sun’ is trotted out, this app will give you the information needed to rebut the argument, and also allow you to report the arguments used, so skepticalscience.com can maintain an up-to-date list of the most common arguments being used by sceptics.
The highly regarded site is operated as a pro bono public information service by Australian physicist, John Cook.
The handy iPhone widget is available for free from the App Store or www.skepticalscience.com.
Posted in Global Warming, Media, Sceptics
Tagged climate, climate change, climate hoax, sceptics
2 Comments
Do you believe in miracles?
Bill Gates is for many the Dr Evil of the corporate world. His Microsoft behemoth has had a stranglehold on the world’s personal computer market for the last two decades, and wrung hundreds of billions out of users in the process. All of which makes Mr Gates ridiculously rich.
So rich in fact that his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now possibly the world’s largest private charity. It recently pledged a staggering $10 billion to help develop and deliver vaccines for children in the so-called developing world. However, Mr Gates may have had something of an epiphany recently, in terms of his understanding of where the real threats lie. Continue reading
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear, Sustainability
Tagged climate, collapse, Energy, nuclear, Peak Oil, Sustainability
7 Comments
