Sunday 17 November 2013

Sunday 21 November 2010

Every person in UK uses equivalent 125 lightbulbs (40W) every day

Key Points by www.withouthotair.com - David McKay (Physicist)
  • Every person in UK uses the equivalent of 125 lightbulbs (40W) on all the time every day
  • Coal, Gas & Oil will run out eventually
  • Transport is 1/3 of energy used
    • average car driven 50km a day = 140 lightbulbs
  • 1 wind turbine powers 200 people = 25,000 lightbulbs (4')
  • Wind farms today power 4 lightbulbs per person in Britain (4' 11")
  • Sizewell B nuclear power station produces 0.4 lightbulbs power of everyone in Britain = > all wind farms in Britain today = 2000 wind turbines (4'23")
  • If all of coastline were covered with Wave power machines = 4 lightbulbs for all in Britain (4' 59")
  • 90% energy today is generated by fossil fuels, 10% by nuclear/wind/wave & other renewables (5'33")
  • Renewables must be be increased 10 fold if we replace fossil fuels by 2050
  • 125 lightbulbs per day for everyone in UK requires 300 Sizewell B power stations OR 600,000 wind turbines which would cover half of Britain (5'58")
  • There are 10 nuclear power stations and 2408 wind turbines today in Britain, 11 new nuclear power stations & 4462 wind turbines have been approved (6'4")

GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION - 4th December 2010



GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION
INTERNATIONAL DEMONSTRATIONS ON CLIMATE CHANGE
DECEMBER 4TH 2010
AT THE TIME OF THE UNITED NATIONS TALKS ON CLIMATE CHANGE (COP16/MOP6)
IN CANCUN, MEXICO

This webpage has been set up to publicise and promote plans for demonstrations on climate change, to coincide with the annual United Nations Climate Talks which are taking place this year (COP16/MOP6) in Cancun, Mexico on November 29th to December 10th 2010.

We intend synchronised demonstrations around the world on Saturday December 4th 2010 - in as many places as possible - to call on world leaders to take urgent action on climate change.

After the dissapointing results from the Copenhagen conference last year it is clear that the job of acheiving a fair and effective global agreement on climate change is far from done.  The consensus among scientists is that we have ten years or less to stop and reverse the global growth in greenhouse gas emissions before 'runaway' climate change becomes uncontrollable. The need for fair and effective international collaboration to achieve this becomes more urgent every year. Our next chance to achieve an agreement that will deliver this is during the Cancun Talks in December. We feel therefore that there is an overwhelming need to demonstrate a global will for urgent and effective action at this time.
The 'Call to Action' for the demonstrations is as follows

“We demand that world leaders take the urgent and resolute action that is needed to prevent the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate, so that the entire world can move as rapidly as possible to a stronger emissions reductions treaty which is both equitable and effective in minimising dangerous climate change.

We demand that the long-industrialised countries that have emitted most greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere take responsibility for climate change mitigation by immediately reducing their own emissions as well as investing in a clean energy revolution in the developing world. Developed countries must take their fair share of the responsibility to pay for the adaptive measures that have to be taken, especially by low-emitting countries with limited economic resources.

Climate change will hit the poorest first and hardest. All who have the economic means to act, must therefore urgently and decisively do so.”

ENGLAND & WALES



Organization name:Campaign against Climate Change
Contact name:  info@campaigncc.org   +44 (0) 2078339311
Website: 
www.campaigncc.org





Organization name:Stop Climate Chaos coalition
Contact name: 
info@stopclimatechaos.org   +44 (0) 207 324 4622
Website:www.stopclimatechaos.org/


Global Day of Action 2010

March on Parliament for a Zero Carbon Britain
ImageSaturday
December 4th

 
On the Saturday midway through the UN Climate Talks in Cancun, Mexico.
Challenge the government to take the action we need to meet the climate threat.

12 noon: Assemble at Speakers Corner, Hyde Park.

Timetable:
10.30 am Protest Bike ride assembles at Lincoln's Inn Fields - to join the main protest at Hyde Park later. See here for further details and route map.
11.00 am Climate Service at the Church of the Annunciation, Bryanston Street organised by Christian Ecology Link,  see here.
12.00 noon  Assemble on North Carriageway Drive (just West of Speaker's Corner), Hyde Park.
12.00 - 1.00 pm Help us spell out a message for Zero Carbon by 2030 - with hundreds of people in a photo taken from above in Hyde Park.
Zero Carbon March to Parliament
via Park Lane, Hyde Park Corner, Piccadilly, Piccadilly Circus, Lower Regent Street, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall.
2.30 pm: Climate Emergency Rally in Parliament Square.
The failure of the international Talks in Copenhagen doesn't mean the threat of catastrophic Climate Change has got any less grave or less urgent. Don't let them think last year's big climate demo was just a 'one-off wonder'.   Tell them we need urgent action NOW and take to government a message and vision for a Zero Carbon Britain that wont just stop with this demo but that we can build on afterwards!
And remember building a Zero Carbon Britain means Climate Jobs Now: we have a positive vision not only for addresing the global threat of climate catastrophe but also for the economic crisis.

March with us for…
Climate Action and Climate Justice….


A Zero Carbon Britain by 2030
One Million Climate Jobs Now!
Ten percent cuts in one year
Real Cuts not offsets
Green Energy Revolution
Moratorium on Agrofuel use
End Domestic Flights
Expand Public Transport
55 mph speed limit

Sunday 28 February 2010

U.N. to create science panel to review IPCC


NUSA DUA, Indonesia
Fri Feb 26, 2010 11:29am EST



This news was cited by Richard Black here.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - An independent board of scientists is to review the work of a U.N. climate panel, whose credibility came under attack after it published errors, a U.N. environment spokesman said on Friday.
SCIENCE  |  GREEN BUSINESS  |  COP15

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) accepted last month that its 2007 report had exaggerated the pace of melt of Himalayan glaciers, and this month admitted the report had also overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.
The report shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and has driven political momentum to agree a new, more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
The remit and process of the review panel would be disclosed next week, said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the U.N. Environment Programme, on the sidelines of a UNEP conference of environment ministers and officials from more than 135 countries in the Indonesian island of Bali.
"It will be a credible, sensible review of how the IPCC operates, to strengthen its fifth report," he said.
"It should do a review of the IPCC, produce a report by, say, August. There is a plenary of the IPCC in South Korea in October. The review will go there for adoption. I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue."
The latest, fourth IPCC report was published in 2007 and the next is due in 2014.
HUMANS TO BLAME
All options are on the table for the review, Nuttall said, including, how to treat "grey literature" -- a term for academic papers which are not published in peer-reviewed journals.
The IPCC had said that the Himalayas could melt by 2035, but an original source spoke of the world's glaciers melting by 2350, not 2035. The IPCC report had cited the 2035 year from a non-peer reviewed WWF paper, which in turn had referred to a Scientific American article.
Public conviction of global warming's risks may have been undermined by the panel's errors and by the disclosure of hacked emails revealing scientists sniping at skeptics, who leapt on these as evidence of data fixing.
Pachauri told Reuters on Wednesday that the IPCC stood by its main 2007 finding -- that it was more than 90 percent certain that human activities were the main cause of global warming in the past 50 years.
Governments and ministers attending the conference this week in Bali reaffirmed their confidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were stoking climate change, said Nuttall.
"There was absolutely no government, no minister of environment who attended that meeting who said that the IPCC was the wrong vehicle for understanding the science of climate change," Nuttall added.
The IPCC's 2007 assessment report on the causes and impacts of climate change was over 3,000 pages long, cited more than 10,000 scientific papers and is policymakers' main data source.
(Additional reporting by Gerard Wynn in London; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

Monday 8 February 2010

Rising scepticism - a chill wind?

Richard Black (The Reporters)Feb 05, 2010 17:52:20

Over the last few months, a number of British commentators have been trumpeting an increase in scepticism about climate change.

The cold weather (often claimed - incorrectly - to be a hemisphere-wide phenomenon), the University of East Anglia e-mail hack, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's lack of rigour over projections of Himalayan glacier melt, the weak outcome from the Copenhagen summit: all these and more have been proclaimed as factors that are said to be deflecting the public away from climate concern.

An unusually hot summer - and globally, January was the warmest on record, in case you missed it, and El Nino conditions pertain in the Pacific - and fickle opinion might turn again.


more....

Sir David King: IPCC runs against the spirit of science

The science of climate change appears to be under siege.

By Professor David King, former Government chief scientist
Published: 7:30AM GMT 06 Feb 2010
Comments 78 | Comment on this article

Following leaked emails from the University of East Anglia and evidence for sloppy referencing in the IPCC’s 2007 report, the work of thousands of remarkable scientists is now being questioned, not just by the public but also by other members of the scientific community. To understand the implications, it helps to consider how this parlous situation has arisen.

First, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produced the landmark reports in 2007 showing that climate change is real, and has been at the heart of this storm. Faced with the social need to tell the world what the science says, the IPCC was set up as a means of seeking consensus. My concern has always been that it runs against the normal spirit of science.


In science, people are supposed to rock the boat. If someone challenges your findings, you make measurements, check the arguments, and see if they might be right. Well-established theories such as evolution and relativity have survived this process. The ideas you don’t hear about are the ones that didn’t make it through this ordeal by fire.

If you depart too far from this in your desire for consensus, the consequences can be disturbing. The emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia suggest that certain members of the IPCC felt that the consensus was so precious that some external challenges had to be kept outside the discussion. That is clearly not acceptable.

Moreover, this leads to the danger that people will go beyond the science that is truly reliable, and pick up almost anything that seems to support the argument. The dodgy dossier saying that all ice would vanish from the Himalayas within the next 30 years is an example of that. When I heard Dr Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, declare this at Copenhagen last December I could hardly believe my ears. This issue is far too important for scientists to risk crossing the line into advocacy.

However, it’s not all the IPCC’s fault. Climate scientists have been forced into this corner by a disastrous combination of cynical lobbying and a misguided desire for certainty. 

The American lobby system, driven by political and economic vested interests in fossil fuels, seeks to use any challenge to undermine the entire body of science. The drive for consensus has come to some extent because the scientific community (me included) has become frustrated with this willful misuse of the scientific process.
This is exacerbated because—as the lobbyists know only too well—

people and governments hunger for certainty. The problem is that science doesn’t work that way. Nothing can ever be 100% sure; we use science to draw conclusions about how probable it is.

When cigarette manufacturers paid lobbyists to try to discredit the scientific theory that smoking causes lung cancer, they used the argument that it wasn’t a proven fact. Well it wasn’t then, and nor will it ever be, but would you now bet against it? We have built many successful enterprises by going with the balance of probabilities that science deals us. And in the case of climate change, the scientific probability that the world is warming, and that humans are the chief cause, is overwhelming.

That’s why I believe that this set of so-called scandals will be little more than a temporary setback to the state of climate science. For one thing, there are more than 3000 pages to the IPCC’s 2007 report. Lobbyists have thrown an enormous amount of effort at discrediting this and have so far come up with very little—and nothing that touches the foundations of the problem. Of course the Himalayan glaciers will not vanish overnight, and the report should never have suggested that they would. But if they continue at their present rate of melting, they will be around for a mere 300 years. That’s still a pretty short span on humanity’s timescale, and the run-up to that loss will make life very uncomfortable for the many hundreds of millions of people who depend on the water they provide.

What’s more, this is only one manifestation of a very broad and robust set of evidence. We know from thermometers and satellites that temperatures have risen at least 0.8C. There is now massive monitoring of the loss of land ice around the planet, including the ground-breaking double satellite gravitational measurements. We have robust data on rising sea levels, the acidification of our oceans, and the spectacular multidimensional details of how climate has changed in the past.

Given all this evidence, it’s ridiculous to say this that human-induced climate change isn’t happening, absurd to say we don’t understand why, and any suggestion that we have nothing to worry about is like making a very bad bet.

Enough already. Instead of vainly trying to pretend that the waters are not rising, let’s get on with the opportunities for innovation and wealth creation that this climate challenge brings. We in the UK have a fantastically strong science base, but in the past few decades manufacturing has fled our shores and we have been steadily losing our ability to capitalize on science. Now is the time to turn that around.

We know that we need to decarbonise our economy, so let’s do it. Let’s work to create a new, smart manufacturing sector in this county that is fit to tackle the carbon challenge while stimulating our economy back into growth.

New errors in IPCC climate change report

The United Nations panel on climate change is facing fresh criticism today as The Sunday Telegraph reveals new factual errors and poor sources of evidence in its influential report to government leaders.


Researchers insist the errors are minor and do not impact on the overall conclusions about climate change.
However, senior scientists are now expressing concern at the way the IPCC compiles its reports and have hit out at the panel’s use of so-called “grey literature” — evidence from sources that have not been subjected to scientific ­scrutiny.

Sunday 7 February 2010

Climate scepticism 'on the rise' - BBC poll


BBC graphic (Image: BBC)
The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests.
The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, an increase of 10% since a similar poll was conducted in November.
The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month.
And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and "now established as largely man-made".
The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.
In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus - commissioned by the Times newspaper - showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities.
BBC graphic (Image: BBC)

"It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period," Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.