Durban calling
London: I thought I’d mark my 3-year bloggiversary with an update post – a look back, a look forward, a look inward and outward (who knows, maybe I’ll find my lost Oyster card). This time last year, we were with giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. The year before, we were with mountain gorillas in the volcanic highlands of Rwanda. And this time 3 years ago, we were setting off on our extraordinary journey, heading for the Himalayas in Nepal - all highlights in an incredible 28 months. But for more than half a year, I’ve been fixed in London, where the everyday issues of the developing world are faraway and seldom mentioned.
Female gorilla in Rwanda
Now, I’m preparing to head for Durban in South Africa, where the world’s leaders gather next week to negotiate how we will reduce the anthropogenic climate change threats, including of melting glaciers in Nepal, drought in Rwanda and acidifying oceans around the Galapagos. Read more…
Why wait for 2015?
London: As we hurtle towards a 4-5 degrees hotter world, with all its inherent dangers, I have taken some small consolation in the fact that action on climate change is one of the few things that the British government has cross-party agreement on. In fact, the UK has been one of the few rich-world countries to consistently call for carbon cuts and, to some extent, led the world in demand for action – although its actions have not exactly kept pace with its words. So last week, when Chancellor George Osborne announced a regressive approach – UK businesses would not be cutting their carbon emissions any faster than their counterparts in Europe – my heart sank. Instead of providing the vital assurances that clean-tech investors are desperately seeking, instead of removing some of the perceived (and, perhaps, real) risk that is crippling the low-carbon market and delaying the inevitable move to green energy, the UK government has bowed to short-termist interests.
UNFCCC head Christiana Figueres has eyes of two different colours
What a way for my elected representatives (and that of 60 million other British Earthlings) to negotiate our future at Durban this December. The international climate talks in two months’ time are supposed to achieve Read more…
The future is a foreign planet
London: Later today, I’ll be hosting a live web chat with two fun and inspired scientists, ecologist Erle Ellis and geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, asking: Are we entering a new geological age? (based on my feature article in this week’s Science magazine). The Science Live chat starts at 3pm for Erle and those of you on east coast US time, 12pm in west coast US, and 8pm for me, Jan and everyone in the UK – do join us and ask some probing questions. (After the chat, you’ll be able to read the whole transcript of the discussion.) And I’m also interviewed about the Anthropocene in this week’s Science podcast (about 20 mins in).
Children of the Holocene or the Anthropocene?
The idea that we’re entering a new geological age – the Anthropocene, or ‘Age of Man’ – is something I’ve discussed before. It’s a fascinating time in our species’ history. As far as we know, Earth is the only living planet, and we are the only species – in the Universe – to be making system-wide changes to a planet; changes that are so profound, that they can be considered on a par with those made by Earth-shattering asteroids or planet-cloaking volcanoes.
Jan Zalasiewicz is a geologist exploring how we are making fossils
We’re taking our spinning lump of rock, and everything on it, on a journey into the unknown – into a hotter, less climatically stable future, with a vast and growing human population, but with rapidly diminishing biodiversity. And, we are now aware of the effects we are having. It’s the first time in the history of the Universe that an organised DNA-toting sack of chemicals has knowingly changed a planet.
Erle Ellis is an ecologist looking at the way we are changing Earth's covering
So join us, as we discuss how we’re changing Earth, whether we’ve entered a new geological age and how we might modulate our impacts to ensure the survival of as many other DNA bags as possible on this, the only living planet. In short: how can we become good ancestors?
Engineering water
London: It takes 17 bathtubs of water to produce one bar of chocolate, according to the Science Museum’s latest water exhibition; which seems excessive, not least because eating chocolate hardly slakes a thirst. In fact, it usually makes me reach for a glass of water – should that be counted in the bathtub analysis?
Solar concentrators are already used to distill seawater
The exhibition, Water Wars: fight the food crisis, which opened last week, is buried at the back of the museum, (handily opposite the café), in its shiny blue-glass Antenna ‘News’ Gallery. “We couldn’t use brown cracked earth or other classic drought images because they’d look bad against the blue wall. And besides, that would be a bit too Oxfamy,” explains Sarah Richardson, the exhibition manager. Read more…
If not nuclear, then what?
London: Last night I was at the Japanese Embassy on Piccadilly for an interesting seminar on climate and energy in post-crisis Japan. I say ‘interesting’, and it was, but this is very much despite it falling foul of my two biggest conference irritations: the 5-member panel was made up entirely of men; and it had speakers whose oratory style consisted of mumbling their power point slides word by dreary word… Nevertheless, the talks about how Japan and the UK will make the move to a decarbonised, secure and affordable energy system raised some interesting points. Japan is having to entirely rethink its plans for the next 20 years and beyond, because nuclear, which was supposed to be producing more than half of the country’s supply by 2030 (compared to 26% pre-Fukushima), with 14 new atomic stations planned, is now off the cards, and nobody knows whether it will be on them again. Meanwhile, Japan still wants to fulfil its commitment to reducing its emissions by 30% – something that from the one day to the next, from 10-11 March, became an entirely different and more uncertain task.
Perhaps the most encouraging note to come out of the talks was the fact that despite a very hot sticky summer, during which 43 out of 54 nuclear stations were out of use, with a corresponding slump in power production, Japan did not suffer a crushing powerdown. In fact, domestic and business efficiency measures rocketed. A general awareness of energy use was fostered with a social responsibility towards saving the nation’s electricity resource. And all in a matter of weeks. Read more…
Acting out climate change
London: If you’re in the Lake District next weekend, I recommend going to a performance of As The World Tipped, which is showing as part of MintFest on 4 September in Kendal. My review of the outdoor show in Mile End, London is here.
And the latest issue of Nature Climate Change is out today, featuring a thought-provoking commentary by Tom Crompton on how we might solve our stasis over emissions cuts by appealing to shared social values rather than financial incentives, and my interview with Britain’s palaeo star, Chris Stringer.
High Arctic
London: The unfortunate Horatio Chapple of Eton College was not the only one exploring the remote Svalbard archipelago a week ago, I was also there, albeit in a safer, warmer, more convenient way, and with my dad.
My dad navigates the high Arctic
High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is a unique and moving exhibition by United Visual Artist Matt Clark, who last year travelled to Svalbard on the Noorderlicht, a 100-year-old schooner. The Cape Farewell expedition team, consisting of scientists, artists, musicians and poets, set off to explore the warming Arctic landscape as its ice recedes, and Clark’s interpretation is a thought-provoking and haunting installation in the museum’s new basement extension. Read more…
The kids are not all right
London: We’re all now used to watching riots and violence flaring from the TV – the Arab Spring (now Summer) is just the latest in a continuum of civic unrest whose eruptions occur around the globe in human civilisation’s hot-zones. But, on Monday, I had the unusual experience of watching in stereo.
On the screen in my home in Lewisham, south London, dozens of gangs of 10 to 50 hooded youths were marauding through London’s neighbourhoods, smashing shop windows, setting cars ablaze, burning homes and businesses, attacking the few police around, attacking other Londoners… Meanwhile, black-clad kids in hats and hoods were running down my street outside the window, shouting about “the Feds” (I’m clearly not the only one watching too much TV), fires and smoke could be seen from the high-street, sirens were blaring and helicopters droning. At intervals, huddles of kids, high on adrenalin, euphoria and alcohol gathered at the corner with bags of looted booty and loudly discussed their next move.
It was the TV images that won out that night, and the next: scenes of such distressing violence, cruelty and pointless vandalism that moved me from incredulity to sorrow to anger. Who were these animals, tearing apart my city, murdering their neighbours, shaming us all? Why did so many young men and women think it’s okay to smash shops and steal stuff?
The kids outside my window ranged from 10-17-years-old. When I was a teenager, I would never have behaved like that. Then, I thought back to myself at age 10. Would I have joined in? Read more…
Gelada chatter
London: My interview with the fab gelada researcher Aliza le Roux, who I met in the Simien Highlands of Ethiopia, is being broadcast in a Discovery programme for BBC World Service. So I thought I’d show you how magnificent these endangered, chatty primates are in a slide show of Nick’s pictures. You can watch the slide show while you listen to the programme. (For some reason, I can’t display image descriptions in the slideshow, so I’ve put caption information below the slideshow.)
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Moving mountains – and the creatures on them
London: Spin a globe and what land you see among the vast blue swirl of our planet is the consequence of millions of years of geological battle. Plate tectonics has created mountains and valleys, plains and rifts – the land on which we and our fellow terrestrial species must live.
Incredibly, we’ve only really understood this process for the past 50 years, and it’s during that time that we humans have been doing our own Earth-shaping. We are moving mountains through mining and other extractions, for example, and global warming (owing to the carbon we’re releasing from fossil fuels) is causing low-lying islands and coasts to drown under sea level rise. Global warming is having a truly global impact: melting of ice in Antarctica and Greenland is squashing the planet – the Earth is less round because of us.
The Panama Canal is being widened
Plate tectonics has a big effect on life on Earth. As islands emerge through volcanic eruptions or other uplift, land becomes available for animals and plants to colonise, and over millions of years, they evolve distinct characteristics – they become new species. Read more…
