Forty shades of brown?

Posted on March 18, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 and cultural impacts of climate change in Ireland.’

This report has been produced by the Irish American Climate Project, a group working in tandem with the ICARUS science team headed by Prof John Sweeney in Maynooth, and it makes for extremely interesting reading. Continue reading →

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

The most dangerous man in Europe?

Posted on March 14, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 we face a planetary climate, energy and sustainability emergency of a scale and intensity never before experienced. Yes, pretty much everybody gets it these days, and most of our political and corporate leadership at the very least know how to mouth soothing eco platitudes.

No so Mr Vaclav Klaus, President of our fellow EU state, the Czech Republic, and currently the inhabitant of an alternate reality. Continue reading →

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Ssssh, don’t mention the ‘E’ word

Posted on March 10, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 the end of the war).

Pandemonium ensues after he receives a blow to the head, and the concussed and now entirely uninhibited Fawlty goose-steps around the hotel in imitation of Der Fuhrer, to the consternation of his guests. So much for his plans that, at all costs, we “don’t mention the war”. Continue reading →

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Drowning in an ocean of rubbish

Posted on March 7, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 marched on a local animal rendering factory to protest against its plans to develop an incinerator. However we may feel about it, rubbish is the flip side of our high-consumption throwaway society. And it’s got to go somewhere. Continue reading →

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

Feast or famine

Posted on March 3, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 probably has 10 or more varieties of coffee beans from the furthest reaches of the world to tempt us, the very notion of food being scarce seems in the realm of the fantastic.

What’s more, haven’t we been hearing for decades about EEC and then EU Food Mountains and Wine Lakes. After all, aren’t Irish farmers paid to not grow food? Continue reading →

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There Will Be Oil!

Posted on February 28, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 pearls was also recently made famous, this time by Al Gore, when he recalled one of the author’s quotations in his film, An Inconvenient Truth. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Continue reading →

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

Friends, countrymen, lend me your processors

Posted on February 25, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 as this correspondent, whose science career careered to a halt after Leaving Cert Chemistry and Biology.

All is not lost, it turns out. I have in fact been running my very own climate modelling study – so far I’m 38 hours and 46 minutes into it, with only around another 1,541 hours left to run. Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Sustainability | 2 Comments

The China Syndrome

Posted on February 23, 2008 by John Gibbons

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. It can handle 60 million passengers a year.

China is, quite literally, taking off. In 1985, total air passenger numbers were 7 million. By 2007, this had skyrocketed to 285 million. The government has announced the commissioning of an additional 97 airports by 2020. Thirteen of China’s airports are being built with a capacity of 30 million passengers each a year. Continue reading →

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A vision of beauty

Posted on February 20, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 it mildly, pretty bleak. Many of the postings on this blog are similarly downbeat. The waves of bad news seem to push further inland all the time.

Today, rather than battle with words, I’d like to let this short video clip below do the talking. The music, ‘Comptine D’un Autre été’ is by French composer Yann Tiersen. This piece was made famous in the film ‘Amelie’.

It lasts barely two minutes and 12 seconds, and has been overlaid with some sublime aerial photography. The clip is from a Discovery Channel series called ‘Planet Earth’.

For me, it’s a moment of rare harmony between the overwhelming perfection of nature and man’s capacity to create, rather than destroy. Enjoy.

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Time to put a lid on bottled water

Posted on February 18, 2008 by John Gibbons

‘Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former’. That’s the view of no less an observer than Albert Einstein.

Though his judgement may seem a little harsh, the strange story of bottled water may well bear him out. Barely 30 years ago, nobody bar a few oddballs drank bottled water. Most people rightly scoffed at paying for something that came straight from the tap, free of charge. Continue reading →

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Corporations get in on the Green act

Posted on February 15, 2008 by John Gibbons

‘Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world’s dominant economic institution. Today corporations govern our lives. They determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work and what we do’. That’s how author Joel Bakan opens his famous 2004 book, ‘The Corporation’.

Bakan’s book paints a singularly unflattering portrait of the average corporation – grandiose, manipulative, deceitful and ruthless in pursuit of its objectives – to make as much money and exert as much power as possible. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability | 2 Comments

Getting some real wind in our sails

Posted on February 12, 2008 by John Gibbons

You only have to look at a map of Ireland’s rugged western seaboard to get some idea of the power of wave and wind in shaping our coastline. In Connemara the sparse tree cover leans away from the sea at unlikely angles, such is the power of the prevailing winds that batter the coast.

Tree bent

Continue reading →

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Forget chocolate – 40 steps to cut carbon for Lent

Posted on February 8, 2008 by John Gibbons

The Tearfund is a UK-based development agency which has come up with a novel idea for this Lent. Instead of cutting down on treats, how about reducing your carbon instead?

They are clearly placing the effects of climate change as a justice issue, as right now, people in the Third World are paying for our excesses in droughts, famines and other climate-driven crises. Continue reading →

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At the edge of the Olduvain abyss?

Posted on February 7, 2008 by John Gibbons

The year 1900 is little more than two generations ago. It’s the year before my maternal grandmother was born. At that time, she was one of some 1.6 billion people then alive on the earth.

A hundred years, two World Wars and countless other setbacks later, and global population is edging towards seven billion. That’s more than a quadrupling of the planet’s population in a single century. There has never been a (human) population explosion like it in the history of the world, and there never will be again. Continue reading →

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Under pressure

Posted on February 5, 2008 by John Gibbons

Our closest living relatives on this planet are the 625 species of primates. We share over 98% of our DNA with them, so the similarities are more than skin deep. In the whole of the turbulent 20th century, not a single species of primate went extinct. Things now look a good deal less certain for our evolutionary first cousins.

In 1996, 15% of all primate species were listed as ‘critically endangered’. Four years later, this figure had risen to 20%, and by 2005, a shocking 162 species were on the critical list, that’s 26% of all primates. Continue reading →

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