The distribution, numbers and behaviour of birds in the UK are changing because of a changing climate according to a new report. The State of the UK’s Birds 2017 (SUKB) – the one-stop shop for all the latest results from bird surveys and monitoring studies – this year highlights how many of the UK’s species are already…
Category: Climate
Wind power and nuclear
I read today’s Guardian piece by Adam Vaughan about the cost of offshore wind energy dipping below that of nuclear energy. That sounds like good news, and news that I don’t think we all expected say 10-15 years ago when these issues were very live. Those who argued for renewable energy were right to say…
Book review – Climate Change by HRH The Prince of Wales
It’s a while since I bought a Ladybird book – but I still have a lot of the original series dotted around the house. This book, published today, is one of the ‘Expert’ series and the three authors can rightly be classed as such (but even if they weren’t, this book has been peer-reviewed by…
How ‘eco’ are Ecotricity’s plans for Green Gas Mills?
Last week Ecotricity, who supply my household electricity and gas, announced ambitious plans for Green Gas Mills which would produce gas from grass. The pitch is that green gas could replace or displace fracking (the environmentalist’s bete noir) and produce virtually carbon-free gas without affecting food production and by the way, help produce…
Biofuels – let’s dump them
The idea that up to 7% of the fuel you put in your vehicle could come from food crops – not waste but actual food crops – is obscene in a world where people are starving. It’s even more obscene where the calculations show that (for various reasons which I won’t go into now) this…
Climate change – what you think
Comments Off on Climate change – what you think
Readers of this blog are pretty convinced that climate change is happening (graph above), that it is caused by human activities (graph below)… …that it is a problem for us (below)… …but less confident that we can do much about it (below)… This is not surprising.
A world united?
To get 195 nations to agree anything is pretty good. To get them to agree something pretty good is exceptionally good. Six years ago I was one of many people, was it 40,000 or so (?), who marched on The Wave through the streets of London ahead for the Copenhagen climate talks. I was lucky…
Climate march in London today
Together we are powerful – that was the message that thousands of people sent to our politicians in London this afternoon – and others were sending the same message in other cities across the UK and across the world this weekend. How many of us were there? I don’t know. I’d guess 20,000-40,000 but maybe…
Climate plus one
Global temperatures are set to reach 1°C above pre-industrial levels this year (Daily Mail, Independent, BBC) and world leaders are going to Paris in a few weeks time to sort it out. Today the RSPB released an important report and some very interesting polling information. Let’s deal with the polling first. The polling suggests that…
An unfavourable climate for driven grouse shooting
If you had a rainforest, and slashed and burned it, you’d be putting a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, just as surely as if your nation ran a lot of gas-guzzling cars. Natural ecosystems often act as carbon stores which sequester greenhouse gases – forests are the obvious ones but peatlands are also…