A visit to the Eden Project August 15, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Environment, Food, Gardens, Peak Oil, Permaculture, climate change , 1 comment so farThe Eden Project in Cornwall was established 7 years ago and has become a world famous visitor attraction with its iconic huge bubble-wrap domes providing the closest you’ll get to an experience of the rain-forest this side of the Amazon.
I was visiting my sister this week, who lives nearby in Bodmin, and got the opportunity to visit, with my father. (more…)
Climate Swindles July 22, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Science and Rationaltiy, climate change , 4commentsAl Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” seemed to bring to a close some of the misinformation about climate science. A small coterie of climate skeptics- not scientists themselves- had managed to hold the planet to ransom by claiming to represent a marginalised but legitimate climate-skeptic position within the scientific community. In fact, these people were in general paid by Big Oil and Big coal to spread this misinformation: there has been no significant dispute amongst climate scientists for more than 10 years. (more…)
Welcome to the Anthropocene June 28, 2008
Posted by Graham in : Environment, climate change , add a commentHuman’s effect on the planet has now reached geological proportions and as a species we are having a more significant effect on the Earth’s climate, geology, biodiversity and, hence, even evolution than any other single factor.
We are now officially in the Anthropocene, according to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London. This is presumably the first time in the Earth’s 4-billion year history that a new geological epoch has begun while being marked and recorded by the species that is responsible.
Essential reading:
Living on the Ice Shelf- Humanity’s Meltdown By Mike Davis
To the question “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.
And supporting evidence can be found in this report suggesting that the rate of arctic ice-melting is once again confounding even the worse-case predictions and the Arctic could be ice-free for the first time in human history this summer.
