Environment

Electronic cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were supposed to provide us with the means to destroy our corrupt banking and finance system without destroying the essential payments system that the global economy depends upon.  Bitcoin has the potential to take down the current system in two ways.  First, the blockchain technology that …

For most people, climate change is about the fossil fuels we burn to generate electricity, heat our buildings and fuel our transport.  But these activities are not the only ones that contribute to climate change.  Nor is the carbon dioxide that they produce the only greenhouse gas we need to …

In an open letter to Jeremy Hunt, The UK Health Alliance on Climate Change warns that the NHS is unprepared for the impact of climate change, and that the government needs to act now rather than follow the usual practice of waiting until disaster strikes. The Alliance says that the …

The amount of Arctic ice at its annual high point – the “maximum” – was 5.607 million square miles this year; the lowest on record according to NASA. With 13 of the smallest maximums recorded in the last 13 years, Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space …

It is time to face up to what should have become obvious by now…  Westminster has had it day.  The time has come to see it as the folly it always was, and bring it to an end. No, this is not a call to grab your pitchforks and burning …

If we could stop climate change where it is now, UK citizens would enjoy several benefits according to the mainstream media this week. First, there is the story that we have been enjoying highly favourable wine producing conditions.  As Time magazine (among many others) observes: “If you find yourself a little …

For all of the talk about emissions reduction, we are now adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere ten times faster than at any time in at least 66 million years according to new research in the journal Nature Geoscience: “Given currently available palaeorecords, we conclude that the present anthropogenic carbon …

Writing in the Guardian, Michael Slezak lists nine ways in which climate records were broken in 2015: 2015 was the warmest year on record, “0.76C above the 1961-90 average” (note that commentators no longer use the start of the industrial revolution – 1750 – as this would provide a more …

China is now responsible for 10 percent of global warming according to a new report in the Journal Nature. The most obvious manifestation of the amount of pollution generated in China is in the poor air quality in its major cities.  In Beijing, smog is so bad that people routinely …

Seventy-one percent of the surface of the Earth is water… ninety-seven percent of which is saline.  Of the remaining three percent, two are locked up in ice caps and glaciers.  So, 7.5 billion humans depend upon just one percent of the water.  This is not just the water we drink.  …