This is unbeleiveable: “Public scepticism prompts Science Museum to rename climate exhibition“. Talk about putting the cart before the horse!

I had always thought the Science Museum’s function was to tell the public about science. It’s incredibly craven of the Science Museum to allow itself to be told what the science is by the public. I mean, you might have thought they would ask the scientists (who, by the way, are overwhelmingly of the view that climate change is a serious and immediate threat) wouldn’t you?

As one of the commenters quite rightly says, “we are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and CO2 causes warming. Basic physics, known for a hundred years … It’s up to climate ’sceptics’ to show why this CO2 isn’t causing warming “, i.e. not vice versa!

Pandering to minority views like this is the worst kind of relativism. When an institution like the Science Museum doesn’t have the courage of its convictions it’s no wonder nothing significant is getting done.

Watch this space for the Natural History taking a “neutral stance” on whether evolution happened or not.

Had this email from my mate Hannah the other day:

Last week I went camping in Carmarthenshire, it was -5 degrees C on the first night! I didn’t stay in conventional tent but a Mongolian Yurt, positive luxury in the camping world, which had a wood burning stove and was absolutely essential on the first night.

Top marks to the campsite it was extremely green, they’d thought of everything from a composting toilet, electric generated by wind and solar power and even the washing up liquid and the soap was Ecover.

A green paradox which has bothered me for some time, is that wood is often described as carbon neutral.
Well I’ve never really understood that one, surely the number of trees on the plant has to remain constant or increase, for that to be true?

The neutrality of biomass (like wood) is a bit of a counter-intuitive one, but I disagree with Hannah on that one, as I’ve mentioned before when wittering on about offsetting. Carbon in trees is already in the carbon cycle, it goes round and round being in trees for a bit, then hanging around in the air for a bit when the tree rots, and so on. We had a fairly fixed amount of carbon in the system doing that until the 1850s.

What’s bad is the new carbon we are recycling into the system, the stuff that was “sequestered” underground in coal/oil deposits. That’s the “new” carbon and it’s the new carbon we need to avoid. But burning the carbon in trees is only as bad as the tree rotting itself – on the assumption, of course (as Hannah says) that a different rree grows in its place.

As Phil says, “It’s not often I agree with Alex Salmonds…but ROAR!” He’s talking about this: ‘Milestone’ for wave energy plans .

Wave energy has go to be the way forward – especially for us in the UK. It doesn’t have nearly as many detractors as other renewables seem to – probably because it’s not noisy, it’s more reliable, it doesn’t take up too much space, and the only people whose fun is spoilt by it are surfers, who are a fairly green lot anyway. Even WWF doesn’t seem to mind judging by the quotation in the article (and weirdly it’s always the groups like that who whinge about these things the most – like Greenpeace’s curiously wrongheaded attitude to nuclear power for example, or the RSPB’s opposition to the Severn barrage).

1.2 Gw doesn’t sound like a huge amount but it’s a pretty good start. If 1.2GW is actually achieved then that’s about a fiftieth of the UK’s demand at peak time, which is currently around 60GW. Good luck the Scots.

I missed this the other week, but it’s a nasty piece of news: Antarctic spits out iceberg the size of Luxembourg.

Sceptics can claim that this sort of thing always happens, but all the climate change models tend to point to this sort of thing happening with increasing frequency. The disappointing thing is that people may use it to undermine the reality of global warming by pointing to the fact that it’ll make the Atlantic colder.

I couldn’t help but have an amused smirk at this line though:

Although the impact will not be felt for decades, the iceberg could block the production of cold, salty water, known as “bottom water”, which could lead eventually to cooler winters in the North Atlantic…The Mertz Glacier Polynya accounts for about 20 percent of the bottom water in the world.

Is it wrong of me to ignore the global calamity aspect of the story and to focus on the inherent hilarity of the term “bottom water”? It reminds me of the Viz Profanisaurus term for chronic diarrhea, namely “sitting on the gravy rocket.” Chortle.

How cool is this? Nokia patents the first self-charging phone.

I’d read about these here “piezoelectric crystals” before, if we can make them affordable I think they should be used everywhere. All new roads and pavements should come with them installed as standard – think of all that kinetic energy we’re wasting which coudl be turned into electrcity?

Also (and this is something of a deviation) I look forward to the day wehen everyone has a few little water wheels inserted into their arteries, which are attached to a capacitor, so that current is generated by your heart pumping blood round your system. Everyone could have a special plug in their home or at work which would allow them to download into the national grid every so often. It would be brilliant.

The expansion of Bristol International Airport has been given the thumbs up by the local bigwigs, which gets the thumbs down from me. It’s just one of many assaults that the government is making on the green belt round ‘ere, although this one is a particularly severe one.

On the news someone said “Bristol shouldn’t be penalised economically for decisions that need to be taken on a national and global level,” which had me spitting bile into my breakfast cereal – It’s like saying “Why should I have to do my bit just because everyone needs to pull together?” The counterpoint to what he said is “Why should Bristol be exempt from difficult decisions that need to be taken on a national and global level?”

Also, what does “penalising Bristol economically” actually mean? That it doesn’t get to grow more? I’d be fine with that – I don’t want lots more of our green belt destroyed for housing developments!

I always enjoy it when people find new thing to green-obsess about. As someone whose first ever freelance article was about the greenest way to have sex*, the pointlessness of it just amuses me. I mean, who cares about the destruction of a footballpitchsworth of rainforest every minute, when you can worry instead about the greenest way to pop your clogs?

Well done to Ecocoach though for raising this key issue. And to be fair, as they say, 50m of us do it every year, and it all mounts up.

*Interested? Get off the pill, it turns fishes transexual. And condoms won’t decompose in water unless they’re made out of lambs instead of latex.

I’m off on holiday for a week, which means this blog will be quiet for a week (other bloggers get software which allows them to line up blogs to publish in the future – I don’t).

It is a holiday on which I will be delivered by short haul aeroplane to a place where hydrocarbon-fueled machines will take me up mountains repeatedly, to no discernable purpose other than my own pleasure.

It always surprises me how un-green skiing as an activity is. Given that skiiers/snowboarders love skiing/snowboarding, you might have thought that they would care a bit more about the environment – after all, the whole pasttime would be impossible in most places with only a few degrees of climate change. But the patio heaters still blaze away at the apres ski venues so that people can sit outside in a cold place for an extra hour.

I guess it’s just another example of wilful blindness to the possible consequences/putting ones own interests first. I can’t claim to be any different on that, to my shame.

Well, it isn’t exactly algae like I asked for, but here’s something to be going on with: The electric cactus: Tomorrow’s clean energy source?

Researchers at France’s Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal (CNRS) recently developed a biofuel cell that can generate power using the two main products of photosynthesis: sugar and oxygen. They then inserted the cell into a living cactus … and measured an energy output of 9 watts per square centimetre.

Am I reading that right? Have they really plugged an extra battery into a cactus? So they’ve turbo-charged it? Pimp my cactus?

Well done them. I would never have thought of bothering to do that.

This isn’t actually a pint of a Guiness, it’s a “Juice point” – I noticed one of these while in London on a stag do the other weekend. Good to see these sprouting up, and in general it’s got to be a good thing.

One carp, of course, is that electric cars aren’t green because in the UK they run on electricity which, according to fuelmix.co.uk, is 70% fossil-fuel generated at the moment. That should, we hope, improve as time goes on, and obviously compares favourably to a normal car which is 100% fossil-fuel driven. What would be interesting to know, though, is whether burning fossil fuel and converting it into energy, transmitting it to the cars is more or less efficient than just burning it in the car direct. Anyone know the stats?

Bad chat this, but: gawd, isn’t the news boring at the moment? All “hoaxed data” this, and “can we trust scientists” that, and even the odd “Ooh look I found some data was a bit wrong” story.

None of which do anything to undermine the thrust that global warming/climate change is happening and needs to be acted on. The debate over the stats at the moment just goes to arguments as to how quickly it’s happening, not whether it is happening.

And frustratingly we seem to be back where we were 5 years or so ago with a significant proportion of people even doubting climate change altogether.

Isn’t it time for some good news, like “Scientists discover wicked algae which absorbs loads of carbon and then tastes better than beef when you eat it?” If we’re going to fake stuff, please can we fake that?

Interesting post on Energysavinggadgets about a device that you screw over existing light switches so that the lights switch off automatically after there’s been no movement for some time.

Will they save you any money though?

I can’t find them in the UK but they are on ebay.com in the US for $25 – say £15. Assuming we’re talking about a nice bright 20W bulb, and your electricity costs 15p per unit. 5 hours of wasted light costs 15p, so for £15 you could get 500 hours of light (about 21 days). How long does it take you to waste 21 days worth of light? I think it takes me a pretty long time! And that figure, of course, doesn’t take into account the cost of the 3AA batteries it costs to run it, and the carbon costs it takes to create it.

They haven’t come out in the UK now, but I’m not exactly champing at the bit to get one…