It is very difficult (well, impossible) to be entirely "green", totally "eco-friendly", of course it is. I once worked alongside a "green maniac" who was forever berating people about their behaviour, nagging them about the smallest of green peccadillo's, what a pain and how much damage did she do by putting people off?
Anyway, it is difficult to forgo some things and indeed surely we have the wit to solve sustainability without wearing the old hair shirt. Never-the-less here is one of my many failings..... driving fast, can't help it, love it, try as I might. Drivers seem to fall into one of two schools; the tut tutting pain in the neck, bimbling in the middle lane, (might as well just have two lane motorways, hey!), creep up to junction (causing huge queues behind and burnt out clutches) types or, the far too quick, scare people silly, too close to the person in front, bordering on maniac kind.
Here's a thought; when I started driving cars it really did feel that you were flying at the (truly fast) speed of 50mph, 60 would really rattle and shake and 70 was supersonic. My little old Mini had a delightful "sweet spot" at 62 and was deliciously terrifying at 70.
Increasingly cars have become bigger, heavier, better equipped, include more "safety" features (ABS, stability control, EBD etc) and so, increasingly cars have become faster and, more worryingly, easier to drive faster with less impression of speed.
So, come on car manufacturers, make cars less like a moving house than can travel well over 100mph and more like the thing that it is, a machine that hurtles you along at 50 mph. Strip out a load of weight (great for fuel efficiency and low carbon), make it fun to drive and in doing so unlikely to exceed the speed limit because that's quite fast enough!
I miss my little old Mini.
Many thanks to Adam at "PeopleProfitPlanet" (check them out)... for this; Animals Save the Planet... very good;
http://bit.ly/3A3Psv.
Saturday 30 January 2010
Saturday 9 January 2010
Climate is What You Expect, Weather is What You Get
If you hear someone bleating on about how given the recent cold weather then climate change is nonsense ask them, "Next time there's a heatwave in summer or an unusually mild spell in winter will you accept you were wrong? If a cold snap means the weather is getting colder, surely a spell of hot weather proves it is getting warmer". Clearly all rubbish. A bout of extreme weather does not prove anything about climate change. Climate is the average weather over decades. Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.
That said, it is perfectly reasonable to ask why, if the World is warming, have so many places in the northern hemisphere been experiencing record lows? The answer is that for the past few decades cold Arctic air has mostly stayed in the Arctic over winter, trapped by strong winds spinning around the pole. This winter the vortex has weakened and in many places cold air is spilling further south than usual. The result has been freezing weather as far afield as Florida, China and the U.K.. However, the Arctic, Greenland and much of the Mediterranean and southern Asia have been warmer than normal.
Some areas could have more cold weather in the future as part of just such changes in weather distribution. That will not change the big picture, the World warmed over the 20th century and it is going to get warmer still. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either intellectually challenged or dishonest.
What's the best way to get two whales in a Mini?
You don't it's far better to get to Wales by train to save carbon emissions............. sorry!!
Here is a link to a talk (on the excellent TED website... bookmark it) with Rachel Pike explaining the science behind a climate headline, just a few minutes, cut and paste the link.
http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_pike_the_science_behind_a_climate_headline.html
That said, it is perfectly reasonable to ask why, if the World is warming, have so many places in the northern hemisphere been experiencing record lows? The answer is that for the past few decades cold Arctic air has mostly stayed in the Arctic over winter, trapped by strong winds spinning around the pole. This winter the vortex has weakened and in many places cold air is spilling further south than usual. The result has been freezing weather as far afield as Florida, China and the U.K.. However, the Arctic, Greenland and much of the Mediterranean and southern Asia have been warmer than normal.
Some areas could have more cold weather in the future as part of just such changes in weather distribution. That will not change the big picture, the World warmed over the 20th century and it is going to get warmer still. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either intellectually challenged or dishonest.
What's the best way to get two whales in a Mini?
You don't it's far better to get to Wales by train to save carbon emissions............. sorry!!
Here is a link to a talk (on the excellent TED website... bookmark it) with Rachel Pike explaining the science behind a climate headline, just a few minutes, cut and paste the link.
http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_pike_the_science_behind_a_climate_headline.html
Tuesday 5 January 2010
Terra Branco to Terra Preta
Gazing out at the snow falling on snow and listening to sun tanned cricketers in South Africa it almost makes you long for Global warming! Despairing of our inabilities to make even the simplest of agreements in the farrago that was Copenhagen it is tempting just to think, "tsch! Bring it on!".
Certainly the author of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock is of the opinion that it's too late now to do anything about climate change apart from adapt, and even then, adaptation will only prolong the agonies of massive World disorder for a very short time. All off to hell in that hand cart it seems.
Well no, still time to come to our senses, re build international cooperation, re double our efforts to improve societies through innovative and inventive alternatives to pillaging our fragile and only World. Still time to affect the global politics of haves and have nots by redistributing energy provision. Still time to discover how to move people and goods around, provide enough food for ourselves and yet maintain the habitats of all the other life. Big job, but someone's got to do it.
Actually, James Lovelock does consider that there could be one redeeming solution, along with others he proposes that we adopt the system of sequestering carbon in our soils, then if we (and it needs to be quickly!) enable the use of agriculture and land management to be the very significant solution to climate crisis that it could be.
The dependence on large scale industrial agriculture increases the amount of fuel required to transport the food from field to table, needs huge amounts of fossil fuel to drive the tractors and trucks, manufacture the fertilizers and herbicides, deliver the food (often from one continent to another), all the while degrading the land.
A dramatic shift in agricultural policy (and Hilary Benn MP has started that in today's release of the governments' agricultural policy going forward) and practices to focus on building soil organic matter, including the restoration of carbon to the soil, by organically managing and enriching soils. Currently, soluble nitrogen fertilizers are used which encourage very rapid and complete decay of organic matter, sending carbon into the atmosphere instead of retaining it in the soil as organic systems do. By using "no till" techniques and by enriching soils with natural sources of nutrients, farmers can cut costs and improve on both productivity and profitability.
Success will depend on two factors; A strong bottom up demand for change and a top down shift in national, European and Global policies to support farmers in this transition. Farmers should be paid on the basis of how much carbon they put back into and keep in their soil rather than how many tonnes of grain they can produce. Some experts consider that the potential scale of what can be accomplished by such a shift of agricultural practice could sequester nearly 40% of current CO2 emissions.
That's not all, one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils and sequestering significant amounts of CO2 for 1000 years and more is the use of biochar. Mr Lovelocks panacea. Biochar is a form of fine grained, porous charcoal that is highly resilient to decomposition in most soil environments. It occurs naturally but can be manufactured cheaply in large quantities by burning wood, grasses, manure, stubble or other biomass in an oxygen free or low oxygen environment. This transforms the biomass into charcoal more than 80% pure carbon. The process can also be designed to produce gas that helps fuel the process for making more biochar.
Burying biochar in soil replenishes the carbon content, protects important soil microbes and helps the soil to retain nutrients and water. It reduces the accumulation of greenhouse gas pollution by avoiding the releases that would occur by the rotting of the biomass on the surface, by sequestering the CO2 contained in the biochar, and by assisting the process by which plants growing in the soil pull CO2 out of the air with photosynthesis. Biochar also increases the organic health of soil by stimulating the growth of rhizobium bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi, improving the overall quality of the soil. Not much is new, Amazonian Indians were using biochar at least one thousand years ago to create fertile black soils that are still more productive than the soils around them. These soils, called terra preta by the Portuguese provide a unique way of assessing the benefits to soils by using biochar.
So, there you have it and to quote our old friend Mr Lovelock; ".... you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull CO2 down quite fast.... this is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it."
It's still snowing, terra branco.
Certainly the author of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock is of the opinion that it's too late now to do anything about climate change apart from adapt, and even then, adaptation will only prolong the agonies of massive World disorder for a very short time. All off to hell in that hand cart it seems.
Well no, still time to come to our senses, re build international cooperation, re double our efforts to improve societies through innovative and inventive alternatives to pillaging our fragile and only World. Still time to affect the global politics of haves and have nots by redistributing energy provision. Still time to discover how to move people and goods around, provide enough food for ourselves and yet maintain the habitats of all the other life. Big job, but someone's got to do it.
Actually, James Lovelock does consider that there could be one redeeming solution, along with others he proposes that we adopt the system of sequestering carbon in our soils, then if we (and it needs to be quickly!) enable the use of agriculture and land management to be the very significant solution to climate crisis that it could be.
The dependence on large scale industrial agriculture increases the amount of fuel required to transport the food from field to table, needs huge amounts of fossil fuel to drive the tractors and trucks, manufacture the fertilizers and herbicides, deliver the food (often from one continent to another), all the while degrading the land.
A dramatic shift in agricultural policy (and Hilary Benn MP has started that in today's release of the governments' agricultural policy going forward) and practices to focus on building soil organic matter, including the restoration of carbon to the soil, by organically managing and enriching soils. Currently, soluble nitrogen fertilizers are used which encourage very rapid and complete decay of organic matter, sending carbon into the atmosphere instead of retaining it in the soil as organic systems do. By using "no till" techniques and by enriching soils with natural sources of nutrients, farmers can cut costs and improve on both productivity and profitability.
Success will depend on two factors; A strong bottom up demand for change and a top down shift in national, European and Global policies to support farmers in this transition. Farmers should be paid on the basis of how much carbon they put back into and keep in their soil rather than how many tonnes of grain they can produce. Some experts consider that the potential scale of what can be accomplished by such a shift of agricultural practice could sequester nearly 40% of current CO2 emissions.
That's not all, one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils and sequestering significant amounts of CO2 for 1000 years and more is the use of biochar. Mr Lovelocks panacea. Biochar is a form of fine grained, porous charcoal that is highly resilient to decomposition in most soil environments. It occurs naturally but can be manufactured cheaply in large quantities by burning wood, grasses, manure, stubble or other biomass in an oxygen free or low oxygen environment. This transforms the biomass into charcoal more than 80% pure carbon. The process can also be designed to produce gas that helps fuel the process for making more biochar.
Burying biochar in soil replenishes the carbon content, protects important soil microbes and helps the soil to retain nutrients and water. It reduces the accumulation of greenhouse gas pollution by avoiding the releases that would occur by the rotting of the biomass on the surface, by sequestering the CO2 contained in the biochar, and by assisting the process by which plants growing in the soil pull CO2 out of the air with photosynthesis. Biochar also increases the organic health of soil by stimulating the growth of rhizobium bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi, improving the overall quality of the soil. Not much is new, Amazonian Indians were using biochar at least one thousand years ago to create fertile black soils that are still more productive than the soils around them. These soils, called terra preta by the Portuguese provide a unique way of assessing the benefits to soils by using biochar.
So, there you have it and to quote our old friend Mr Lovelock; ".... you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull CO2 down quite fast.... this is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it."
It's still snowing, terra branco.
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