Kev’s climate column will also have a blog, at www.kevsclimatecolumn.blogspot.com/. You will be able to find all the articles here, as well as give your ideas on how to reduce your carbon footprint, discuss other ideas or let us know how successful our ideas for reducing carbon have been. You can also email on kevsclimatecolumn@btinternet.com.
First of all, how big a problem is climate change? To put it in perspective, the met office this month have released a long range forecast for Saharan weather conditions in England by the end of this century, with temperatures getting as high as 46oC. The worst of it is that this is not even the worst-case estimate and other computer models predict far worse. Changes this big will impact every single person reading this paper. We have already just had the hottest September and July on record. Climate change is not some abstract problem of the future that can be resolved by talking. It is a problem that is affecting us right now and needs all of us to act and think in very different ways.
One simple thing that you can do to save your carbon emissions dramatically is to drive less. Have you looked at lift sharing? If you do not have colleagues at work who live locally to you, then you could try one of the lift sharing web sites, or leave your journey details on our blog. We have looked at www.liftshare.org. It looks good and is free. There are even people logged on to it from this area. If everyone in Nailsworth who is interested in lift sharing went to this site, we could have a critical mass of people all at one place. Please let us know how you get on.
Would I use it? No, I bike to work!!!
Kev
PS.... Is this your gas-guzzler? If so contact us through the blog to claim your "I don't care about our kids" certificate.
7 comments:
this is just to check it is working
On the last day of October, I sat out on the patio in shirt sleeves and glorious sunshine. The birds were singing, horses were frolicking in the meadow across the valley, the honeysuckle was in flower, the roses in full bloom and the first daffodil shoots were peeping through the earth. I took a slurk of my scotch and soda and thought to myself, "This beats some poxy retirement home on the Costa Blanca; if this is global warming, then I'm all for it."
Shouldn't we be grateful for the warmer climate that seems to be coming to stay, instead of listening to all these prophets of doom? Think of the poor pensioners we heard about on the news yesterday, the ones who are freezing to death because they can't afford to heat their houses properly. Think what havoc winter weather wreaks each year, with traffic chaos, closed schools, broken bones resulting from falls on icy pavements, flocks of sheep cut off by snowdrifts ...
And just to lighten the mood a little:
Where do you weigh a whale?
At the whale-weigh station, of course.
But where do you weigh a pie?
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Somewhere over the rainbow ;-)
(Courtesy of ClassicFM)
Kevin - your comments in the NN were great and i fully support your thoughts and theories! Flora does as well - hope the day in London was great as well!
Did u know that Somerfield in Nailsworth get throiugh 2000 carrier bags a week!! appalling !!!!!!!!! wat u and Don gonna do about it?
love M and F xxxxxxxxxxx
Firedog,
Thanks for your comments. I am glad that you have taken advantage of the benefits of climate change, but consider that the benefits are likely to be short lived and localised. Look around the world for a wider perspective. Drought is afflicting many parts of Africa and Asia. Coral Reefs are bleaching and dying. Polar bears are on their way to extinction. The Amazon Rain forest last year suffered the worst ever drought. The permafrost is melting releasing tones of methane into the atmosphere. All our food chains are at the point of collapse. The list goes on. The biggest problem with climate change is that we have started something in motion that we can not stop and we don't know were it will take us.
So firedog, please continue to enjoy this brief and pleasant interlude, but do not for a minute think it is signs of better time ahead.
Kevin,
First of all, thanks for setting up this blog. It's a great initiative that hasn't attracted much comment yet, but let's hope it soon does. I should of course have said this last time, but my eagerness to be the first to react made me forget my manners.
Second, thanks for a sober and measured rebuttal of my last comment. You no doubt realised I was expecting an angry response like George Monbiot's in today's Grauniad of Monckton's Sunday Telegraph essays, and consequently managed to deflate me entirely.
Whilst I'm thinking about something constructive to say, and at the risk of being long-winded, let me pinch another thought-provoking piece from the same source :
I evade my personal responsibility for the things I choose to do. I blame the government, the oil companies, George Bush, the economy, the wealthy and anybody else I can think of for the destruction that my lifestyle causes.
I put my comfort, my convenience and my conformity ahead of the lives and livelihoods of thousands of future generations, and I try not to think too much about my daily contribution to the destruction of the world that was left to me by thousands of past generations. I put myself far, far ahead of my ancestors and descendents and take from them for the most trivial of reasons.
I ignore the real human pain, suffering and death that my behaviour causes. I turn the page, switch the channel and change the topic of conversation. I pretend that the science isn't definitive yet, or that there's no point in changing before others do, and I convince myself that 'scientists' will come up with a technological solution that will make my lifestyle and me OK.
I avoid, I deny, I justify and rationalise, I pretend, I project, I squirm and squeeze and do whatever I can to maintain my concept of myself as a good person while still doing what I do. I evade my moral responsibility a day at a time in the hope that reality will somehow be different tomorrow morning.
I steal from those who live far away from me, and who I do not know, because I see their pain as cartoon pain and not fully real. I casually destroy what future generations will depend upon to live because they have yet to be born and it is only me, my time and my normalcy that is important.
I am like those who, sixty years ago, did their jobs and lived their normal lives and didn't ask questions about where their Jewish neighbours had gone. I am like those who participated in slavery and other atrocities, except that the effects of my crimes will outlast all those others.
And it is OK, because today I am normal and busy and have other things on my mind and, if what I do is really so bad, so many people wouldn't be doing the same, would they?
But when, in the hours before I die, I think back upon my life and what it has meant, I must do one thing. I must hope and hope and pray and pray that there is nothing beyond life and beyond time and beyond myself, that there is no balance, no karma, no morality and no justice.
Because if there is, and I do what I do, knowing what I know....
Well, let's not think about that.
No further comment, my lord.
Firedog,
That is a humbling piece you have added.
Close down the internet and switch off all the millions of computers and save the output of two power stations.
Anon.
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