Just seen this in the papers: “Man-made volcanos may cool earth”. The idea being that now we’ve made it artificially hot by mistake, we should have a crack at making it artificially colder again, by releasing dust into the upper atmosphere.

This sort of thing scares and worries me. It’s like swallowing the spider to catch the fly. It’s all too easy to see us creating ever-increasingly serious problems in an attempt to regulate the temperature. What happens if we put too much dust up there? Headlines will read: “Scientists have told world leaders today that if the levels of carbon released into the atmosphere are not increased, the world will spiral into a new ice age.”

It’ll be like trying to work a shower that you are unfamiliar with – first you make it too hot, then too cold, then too hot again, then it doesn’t change, then too cold, etc, and by the time you find the happy medium it’s time to get out. I don’t much like the idea of our doing that with the planet.

In my house, running battles are fought over someone-who-will-remain-nameless’s insistence on boiling more water than she needs. It really upsets me. If only I lived somewhere where there is hard water I’d be able to make myself feel slightly better by getting one of these: A kettle descaler costing all of 95p (in normal shops – but rather more on the internet).

In my book you can’t beat simple gadgets like this. It’s just a merkinball made of stainless steel, but it knocks around inside your kettle descaling it, occasionally you have to squeeze it out in the sink but that’s it. As a result there’s less gunk on your kettle’s element, which means it’s on for less time, which saves you money and electricity – hurrah for that.

I see that the dodgy weather has brought out the blackberries really early round these parts (Bristol). They’re everywhere. I am a keen urban blackberrier and can’t believe that more people don’t nab them. Everyone loves free stuff, after all. Based on their price in Sainsbury’s I reckon my picking is worth almost the minimum wage, and that’s before you think about things like tax, the fun of doing it, and the carbon neutrality of it all.

So far I’ve picked 6lbs and ruined 1 pair of jeans, and we’ve made blackberry flapjacks (good) bloackberry sorbet (yuk) and summer pudding (awesome).

Recently I have also been stealing rosemary from a neighbour’s hedge. Does anyone else know of things like rosemary and blackberries which can be had for free out of hedgerows and the like? I can feel an obsession coming on.

I love gadgets like the realtime carbon calculator. It’s brilliant.

Some of us, like Phil, smugly pay extra to have a “100% green” carbon tarrif. Personally I think those are a load of rubbish because you aren’t actually changing the country’s energy mix, your power still comes out of the National Grid even though the utility company “pretends” it is giving you the green energy and others a bit more brown energy. But anyway, realtimecarbon.org is a poor-but-slightly-more-sensble man’s version of that.

It works on the basis that the energy we produce is greenest at different times, depending on the time of day and how much wind is blowing etc. So you can check it to see when is the greenest time to run your washing machine.

Will anyone use it to change the way they do things like that? I rather doubt it. It’s still pretty cool though. At time of writing it’s 309g per unit of carbon (below average) so I think I might go and put the kettle on…

I see Brazilians are being urged to pee in the shower to “Save the Atlantic Rainforest” (which reminds me of a German public service campaign of the 1980s that amused a mate of mine when he was over there -”Wasserlassen im frei soll gemutige verden” or something like that, which roughly translates as “Urinating in the open air ought to be encouraged”).

Anyway, the Brazilian thing raises an important issue.  If you pee in a bath, are you being good for the environment because you have saved a flush, or bad for the environment because you are having a bath instead of a shower?  I think we ought to be told.

Phil has texted me about about a letter in National Geographic this month (I assume he reads it for the pictures of naked Africans, and am surprised that he reached the letters page). The letter says “the idea that incremental savings by individuals could derail global warming is absurd. We need to solve the problem not mitigate it. Make energy production clean. No other action will suffice.”

I couldn’t agree with this more, and will blog about this in more detail another time. The difficulty is that at the same time I believe strongly in doing one’s own bit, and it is difficult to reconcile the two, other than by some woolly appeal to “doing the right thing” and wanting to be one of those who didn’t make it worse rather than one of those who did.

However, I can only agree wholeheartedly that trimming a bit of wastefulness is a drop in the ocean, even if loads of us do it. Much more needs to be done, and giving out messages that doing a bit of recycling and banning plastic bags is any sort of solution is surely counterproductive.

As everyone knows, all we have to do to solve climate change is to make a few really really unbeleiveably insignificant changes. Well here is one such unbelievably tiny change you can make: cut some holes out of your letters by using ecofont.  Go on, do it, it’ll make up for that fact you drive a gas guzzler – no need to feel guilty about that any more!

No it isn’t April fool’s day and yes I am being sarcastic . This reminds me of the captain of a racing yacht who my father used to know – he was obsessed with not carrying unnecessary weight on the boat, and used to insist that the crew drilled holes in their toothbrushes to save weight.   Drop in the ocean anyone?

I live in a flat.  There are many bad things about this – no outside space, and I hanker after my own staircase.  It’s not all bad, mind – low heating costs, so it’s reasonably green, for example – but one of the most annoying things is the limited scope for greening it up because it’s largely already there.  So when something cool like Solalighting comes along, all I can do is look on enviously, as I am the owner of a ceiling but not a roof.

This sort of thing is the key to green living in my book.   Using clever technology to make the most of what we’re already got – light – rather than making it all over again in an inefficient manner has got to be good.

Phil will no doubt be smug and remind me that he’s got his own roof – loads of roof  – and can install this sort of thing.  Well he should do.

Hurrah for the Food Standards Agency, who have just reported that organic food isn’t any better for you than normal food. I’ve always disliked the organic movement. It’s not just because it cons people into buying organic by an appeal to an unquantifiable “new-agey” sense of being somehow “good” without really explaining why (on the contrary, you could see that as a voluntary tax on the gullible, so I’m fine with that).

No, what irks me about it is the way it is just so silly and unsustainable.    We’ve barely got enough room to feed 6 billion of us as it is, we’re already chopping down rainforests to make more room to create more food – given that, how can it be sensible to promote a production method which is less efficient and takes up even more space?

The disappointing thing is the way the story has developed in the press and the organic lobby’s repsonse to the FSA report has been given such a prominent voice in the media. The Food Standards Agency says there are no “differences in the nutrition content, or any additional health benefits, of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food” so the Soil Association and the like change the goalposts, arguing that the reason you should buy organic food is because you don’t like pesticides and are worried about the environment. The papers have diligently reported this too.

The Soil Association’s response is pretty unimpressive. If the evidence challenges you, the right thing to do is to take time to consider it and if necessary have a think about whether your position is really the right one. What the Soil Association have done instead is to immediately come out making unwarranted attacks on the evidence (taken apart by Ben Goldacre here) and then saying “The evidence doesn’t matter anyway, I can’t hear you because I’ve got my fingers in my ears.”

Not very well done them.