Michael Gove has asked moorland owners to be good boys (and girls – although all the landowners in the room at the time were actually men) and to stop damaging blanket bogs through burning them. Burning is carried out so that men (and a few women) can shoot lots of Red Grouse for fun as…
Category: Climate
Climate change and birds revisited
Last week I was thinking a bit about climate change and birds and thought I’d had a good idea. And I had had a good idea – it’s just that others had had it too and published a paper on it two years ago! The good idea was to look at the ‘envisaged potential’ bird…
Climate and UK birds
The focus on climate change in the SUKB report published today is a very useful stock-check. It has prompted me to go back and look at one of my ‘favourite’ books, published 10 years ago, A Climatic Atlas of European Breeding Birds by Rhys Green of the RSPB and Brian Huntley, Yvonne Collingham and Stephen…
Impacts of climate change on UK birds
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…
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…