Some like it hot?

Posted on April 7, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 audience.

And who wouldn’t want to believe Bjorn? His Polyanna feel-good messages may fly in the face of everthing we know about climate; they even require a re-writing of the laws of physics, but hey, his messages sell lots of (his) books. Continue reading →

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The sweet smell of excess

Posted on April 2, 2008 by John Gibbons

‘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 a little bottle of perfume, I should add, not a Caravaggio or Mozart’s Requiem. And there’s more. Much more. Continue reading →

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ESB finally sees the light

Posted on March 27, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 the energy stakes to be among the OECD’s most import-dependent countries. This, with Peak Oil somewhere on the horizon and with ultra-volatile supply chains putting us totally at the mercy of the Middle East for oil and Russia for gas, is not where a modern economy or society wants to be. Continue reading →

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

Watch out, Gaia’s about…

Posted on March 22, 2008 by John Gibbons

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 scientist, he is most famous as the man who developed the Gaia Hypothesis. Briefly, this proposes that all elements on earth, living and inorganic, are part of a complex single organism whose unifying aim is to keep conditions on the planet optimal to support life. Continue reading →

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

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 →

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

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