FIrst hack, Now leak

A week or so ago it was hacked emails upsetting the Climate Change worldview people. This week it's a leaked text in which we learn that developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol, according to the Guardian.

In another article, Richard Tol talks about the Disaster of Climategate - following up on the hacked emails. Tol is a research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin and professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

He writes: From the outside, the impression is simple. Something fishy was going on. They do not want to talk about it; it must be a cover-up. The scale of the political fallout is beginning to emerge. Climategate has apparently pushed a few Australian senators to vote against the climate Bill, which failed to pass by a few votes. Saudi Arabia will table a motion for a full investigation at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen. The US Senate will probably start an inquiry also.

Last Friday, the university announced that an independent review would investigate whether data was indeed manipulated. It may not be sufficient to quell the outcry. Climate change is a complex problem. We will need 50, probably 100 years to resolve it. We will need global co-operation. We will need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars.

Tol is a supporter of the Climate Change movement. Mike Moore is more skeptical calling it the Theology of Green, and there's no doubt that there's a lot more philosophy floating around in regard to ecology, climate and such than science. Regrettably for the pro-climate change people, there's just as much of it in their camp as in the deniers....

Cool, Clear Water

Years ago it was the practice of our local City Council to send plumbers out free if anyone rang up to say their tap was leaking. Eventually some bean-counter decided this wasn’t profitable enough, even though it probably saved the Council hundreds of dollars in terms of water that wasn’t lost.
But in fact I’ve just been thinking today about an area in the water department, as it were, where water is wasted hugely, and not through anything dripping either.
Whenever we turn on a tap to get it to run hot, we waste several litres of water. I don’t know about other houses, but the water to our bathroom downstairs takes at last 30 seconds to come hot, and running the water upstairs takes even longer because it has to go a good deal farther. Of course some people have these instant heaters nowadays, but I would think plenty of other people don’t.
Wouldn’t it be good if somehow that water that we waste while we’re waiting for it to run hot could be set aside somehow? If we could somehow siphon it off and use it later to cool down the bath, or to brush our teeth in, or some other more environmentally profitable approach.
I’ll have to put my inventing cap on (such as it is) and see if I can come up with something.

Photo courtesy of Dan4th on Flickr.com

Tightening the Belt - severely!

In an article in the Otago Daily Times this morning Murray Grimwood says that for our survival as a species we’ll have to live within some tight parameters. He lists five particular things:

replacement population only;
total re-use of resources;
total elimination of pollution;
self-sufficient housing (linked together in energy terms like the Internet);
a halt to physical ‘growth.’

He adds that as a result of following these things we will work less and walk more, weigh less and live more, impact less, conserve more.
My problem with these points isn’t that they’re unrealistic, but rather that a huge percentage of the population, in the Western world anyway, isn’t interested in recycling, living conservatively or considering how they use the resources they have.
I’m fairly recycling-focused, but even I find it hard to think of living within restricted parameters.
And I’m not sure that I agree, if we were to go ‘conservative’ in our progress, (if that’s not an oxymoron), that we would work less. Rather we would work harder at better things, things that involve domestic manual labour for men and women, things we could do with our hands, creative things. And we’d definitely walk more.
My mother remembers walking to Blackhead Beach when she was a child, with her parents. This would be an all day trip, there and back, up hill and down dale, and no doubt they’d be carrying picnic baskets and all the beach paraphernalia.
The other factor is how to make total re-use of resources. Perhaps with oil running out we’ll have a huge amount less plastic to deal with. That would help immensely. It’s one of the least reusable material on the planet.

I can't show you a photo of Blackhead Beach on this blog, because of copyright restrictions, but if you click here, you'll see several professionally-taken ones.