Climate Change Science

Deforestation in Brazil

The inevitable backlash against climate change is gathering pace. First we had the revelations about exaggeration and bias in research on climate science from the University of East Anglia, then the disappointment of Copenhagen and now even more pressure on UEA about withholding emails and contravening the freedom of information act. Suddenly a cloud of suspicion is cast over all the science that so many have taken to be the incontrovertible evidence that the earth is warming and we are heading for disaster. The widely perceived failure of Copenhagen showed that the governments of the world could not agree on something they all say is of vital importance - so maybe it isn't? Perhaps the whole thing is hyped up?

Ever since I began to think about environmental issues I have worried about the intense concentration on a single issue, big as it is. Concern for global warming has taken such a precedence that it has dominated environmental news and the concerns of government and civil society alike. It is as if climate change=the environment.

Obviously a change in behaviour such as recycling and so on is excellent in many ways because our profligate western lifestyle has to change - but there is a huge negative side to seeing care for the earth as a single issue based on how much CO2 we emit.

A total consensus on any single concern is rare, but when that issue involves changing the economy, the balance between north and south and a huge shift in industrial and domestic energy use, then it is bound to create division. Vested interests become a driving force, camps for and against vie for column inches and attention and every aspect of the issue comes under scrutiny. And when the outcome of a warming earth is portrayed as utter catastrophe then those of us in the middle will, not surprisingly, find comfort in any doubts raised.

The main problem now is that because climate change is "the environment" it will become very much more difficult to raise concerns for other environmental issues if it is dismissed as mass fraud.

This was all so inevitable and all very depressing.

I don't know about the University of East Anglia and what it did and didn't do, but hopefully the legal process will sort that out. If it acted improperly then I hope those culprits are punished. But what I dread is that the dust thrown into the air about climate change will turn people away from the wider picture - that we misuse the earth on many levels, not just the amount of CO2 we produce - and that we have to change to put right what is going wrong.

Over fishing isn't to do with climate change, destroying habitats, degrading soils, pulling down forests to replace them with monoculture isn't to do with climate change. Putting pollutants in the fresh water systems and the oceans isn't climate change and building dams across most of the rivers of the world isn't climate change. Building on greenbelt, pulling down hedgerows, using large amounts of pesticides, concreting over wetlands isn't climate change. All of these do immense harm, wipe out species and degrade our earth. The effect of continuing to ravage the earth will be lack of fresh water for all, difficulty in producing food, a depleted ocean (and therefore fish to eat) and unknown problems with access to new medicines. We will not be able to pollinate plants or cleanse water - or carry out the many other "eco-system services" that we take for granted and that are provided free of charge by the earth.

E.O Wilson, the great Harvard biologist, talks about the evolution of the earth seeing the end of the age of the fish, then the end of the age of the reptiles and now we are now coming to the end of the age of mammals and entering the age of loneliness. We will live in an impoverished world where only humans relying on science and technology and a few scavengers will survive.

There is so much to care about and so much we have to do to change our perception of what the earth is for. Even if the climate change scientists have exaggerated, even if glaciers take a hundred years to melt not fifty and so on, we still have to change our lifestyles, reduce our consumption and undergo a dramatic change of heart, because all environmental issues depend on us reducing our assault on the ecosystems and resources of the earth.

And as for unscrupulous science - there have always been unscrupulous scientists, as we have seen with the MMR fiasco, but simply because some are charlatans doesn't make all medical research suspect and wrong. It is the same for climate change science.

I hope we won't be put off course by this worry over East Anglia and I hope we keep our eye firmly on the ball. Concern for the earth is not just acting on climate change, it is much, much more than that.

Mercury levels of whale-eating town

Good reason not to eat whales I'd say (if you need any more good reasons)

Mercury levels of whale-eating town's residents 10 times average › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Also - This whale (or what is left of it) survived being harpooned 100 years ago by whalers - but they got him/her in the end!


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Apple Pies and Crickets

The Independent revealed another reason to keep biodiversity rich and thriving - crickets pollinate plants. No one knew they did so until a researcher filmed a raspy cricket pollinating an orchid in Reunion recently. It would be so easy to allow critters like crickets to slip away, then too late, we lose an orchid and then what else in the chain? Everything is connected to everything else and we don't understand those connections yet. It will of course ultimately affect us. "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first of all create the universe".

The Sealed Box

A beautiful poem written by my 12 year old (13 next month, how did that happen) about the death of granny's dog. Dougal was bitten by a tick and got Lyme's disease poor thing, only 5.

THE SEALED BOX

The sealed box, never to be opened,
Made and carved with pristine wood,
Even dust won’t abolish its beauty,
Sitting there, in peace,

Trotting, running, sprinting,
Diving, curving, round trees into ponds,
For nothing more than what you hurl,
The naive mind, all of us,

But the day, time, place, bite,
Led to jab, flame,
After loss of legs,
Into black marking, painful dust,

Meaning…

The sealed box, never to be let out,
Made and carved with pristine wood,
Even dust won’t abolish his beauty,
Sitting there at peace.

Snowboarding Madness

Nutty madness in the snow in the last few days...

Curlew picture

My friend Chris Sperring sent me this picture he took of a curlew in flight.

Here is a recording of a curlew calling - one of the most beautiful sounds in nature, especially the bubbling call about 17 s in.

Get your own playlist at snapdrive.net!

My friend and blogger Tina Beattie is also photographing and thinking about curlew in Scotland at the moment - thanks for the pictures Tina.

Yeats wrote a rather sad and haunting poem about the cry of the curlew, you can imagine him listening to it over the moors and coastline of Ireland:

He Reproves the Curlew

O curlew, cry no more in the air,

Or only to the water in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.

I wrote an article in The Tablet on curlew - Call of the Wild - see Why a Curlew in my information column on the right.

Snowy Buddha

One of the good things about a Buddha in the garden is seeing how a point of stillness helps reveal the changing seasons. He looked very serene today covered in a snowy blanket, and just as happy in the warmth of a summer afternoon.

The city was absolutely silent this morning, especially before it was light. I love snow in street lights, silent but intense, like Narnia; revealing a different aspect to a normally noisy city.

Robin Pictures

I have added pictures to the robin podcast...

Shifting Plates and "Where was God?"

Over the Christmas break I watched again Mark Dowd's "Tsunami - Where Was God?" on Channel 4, a sensitive and wide ranging documentary on differing religious responses to the Tsunami in 2004.

In trying to come to terms with a belief in a God that could let such disasters happen Mark tried to question a Muslim geologist about the geological need for massive earthquakes that can cause tidal waves that then create so much suffering. He repeatedly asked the same question in different forms - is there an alternative design for the earth that God could have come up with that didn't require such violent outbursts that kill thousands? Is it possible, as a geologist, to think of an earth that is designed in such a way that negates earthquakes and volcanoes? If God created the earth and all that goes with it, why build into the system earthquakes that can wipe out thousands at one stroke? But no matter how he asked this question the same answer came back - the earth is designed so that catastrophes like this happen to force us to see our sin and teach us about our wrong ways - teach us a lesson.

Many, including myself, find this attitude hard to understand, but Mark's question is deep and profound because it goes right to the heart of what we are.

In short, the answer to Mark's question is no, there doesn't seem to be an alternative design - as far as we can tell one of the major reasons why there is life on this planet is because of the movement of the earth's tectonic plates.

(For those who need a geology brush up on what plate tectonics means there are many youtube videos and wiki type sites - but basically the earth's surface is made up of rigid plates that "float" on a hot fluid like mantle causing the plates the grind, crunch, slide over and under each other creating earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain chains, deep ocean ridges, island chains etc).

If we didn't have plate tectonics to recycle the earth's crust, bring new material to the surface, release gases into the atmosphere, build mountain chains and form deep basins that could be filled with water then the great diversity of life would not be present and could not have evolved. Everything about our shifting, changing planet creates niches and opportunities for life to take hold. It also forces change, driving species evolution and adaptation. Stability does not create burgeoning life - change, and often violent change, does.

Fascinating isn't it that pure energy on a scale we can barely imagine, is constantly at work in this astonishing universe, and on this particular planet in this little solar system, that phenomenal energy heaves around slabs of crust and creates the right conditions for life. But life doesn't come cheap and easy, it comes as a result of great forces and instability - life is a resilience born out of fragility that we see all around us in the natural world.

Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee describes the role of plate tectonics and the maintenance of life, it is a wonderful and insightful book that lays out the scientific reasons why life is so uncommon, "maybe we really are alone" says the strap line. And perhaps so because no other planet in this solar system has tectonic movement - and no life that we know of.

It is a pointer to the fact that God didn't design the universe for our comfort and prosperity; deeply embedded into its very fabric is energy that produces creativity and destruction, violence and quiescence, burgeoning and collapsing. For me this has nothing to do with teaching anybody any lessons and has everything to do with a God that defies our imagination and leaves us gasping with incomprehension at the audacity of a creator who has set in motion something so spectacular.

And we humans have to fit in where we can and recognise with humility what we are - beadlets of life born out of resilience and evolutionary drive - and with a capacity for greatness. We have to accept that a cooling earth will crack and shake, that volcanoes will erupt, that meteorites will bombard, that continents will shift, and we humbly acknowledge that is what it is to be a human on planet earth, with all its tragedy and horror as well as beauty and magnificence.

For nearly all our evolutionary history humans have been fighters for survival against changing climates, natural disasters, ferocious predators that want to eat us and against other creatures that vie for our resources. For all our hunter/gatherer existence (99% of the time we have been fully modern humans) we would have been only too aware of the fragility of life and the forces for good or ill that were a natural part of life on earth. Today most in the comfortable West are fed, warm and housed with little understanding of the earth we live on - but we still have the instincts to fight for survival - the adrenalin to fight or flee, the fear of the dark and of spiders and snakes, and the desire to understand forces beyond our control. And this legacy leaves us with a body that is ready for action but too often with too little to do - we find ourselves being warriors without a war. And therein lies many of our problems I suspect.

So Mark - thanks for a fascinating programme but the horror of the tsunami is not retribution for sin, it is a painful demonstration of the real place we humans have on this cooling, dynamic earth - and a reminder that not everything is arranged for us. The alternative scenario is a very boring creationist model where God waves a wand and ping! all is as it appears now - and then we run into real trouble when we try to understand disaster, because only a God of retribution could make a beautiful earth turn round and bite.

And thank you for a question that brings to the surface so much we rarely discuss about the very nature of humans and life on earth.