View from Trefonen

 I read last week that the main reason why London has experienced 40+ degree temperatures recently, as opposed to the 30 or so of the past, is that big cities create large amounts of energy in the form of personal usage, for transport, electrical appliances etc, and this energy use is increasing. And it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps what we should be worrying about with regard to climate change is actually increased production of energy, something which shows no signs of abating, in spite of much noise made about carbon. The timescale is also suggestive: the current warming has coincided with the much greater use of energy of every kind (beginning with steam) associated with the Industrial Revolution. Nothing like it has ever occurred before – though high concentrations of greenhouse gases certainly have in Earth’s distant past. Whatever the truth about the greenhouse effect causing climate change – a theory which has never really convinced me, I have to say, as readers of m...

In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States, the debate on abortion and its legal status has been reactivated everywhere, including in the UK. Our Abortion Act of 1967, whilst it is on the statue books, making it a degree more secure than the case law that underpinned abortion rights in the US, yet has similarly fragile foundations. It is framed as an exception to the act of 1861 that banned abortions and treated their perpetrators as murderers. Thus abortion is allowed under the 1967 act in exceptional circumstances, for a limited time (currently set at 24 weeks in spite of several attempts to reduce it to 22 or even 18 weeks) and only with the permission of two doctors. Outside this permissive position, it is still illegal. This is not understood by many who see abortion rights in the UK as unassailable, and there have already been comments made in Parliament that indicate some would like to turn the clock back on this under the influence of the Roe v Wade overt...

 I saluted the French people in rejecting Le Pen last week. While, as a woman, I would like to see more women in genuine positions of leadership, and they often do the job of leader extremely well (New Zealand’s experience comes to mind), Le Pen represents, in my view, the worst of populism; and populism, and the nationalism that often goes with it, are among our main dangers in modern politics. Consider the damage done by Trump, by Bolsonaro, and now by Putin, not to mention our own Boris Johnson and company - lesser members of the breed perhaps, but nonetheless shameless in their wooing of the popular vote with false promises and misinformation. And that is the rub. Populism is often the enemy of truth - and truth matters. In St John's Gospel, Jesus has more than one sharp encounter with a group of religious influencers in the Judaism of his time, known as Pharisees. They claim, as good Jews with a strong sense of heritage, to be ‘children of Abraham’. But in one of these enc...

  The whole subject of climate change is not only topical and emotive, but also contested, as anyone who has read anything about it over the last ten years or so will know. Over the last 30 years scientists taking the Global Warming view have gradually won the argument in the scientific community, and therefore in the public domain too. The IPCC has become very powerful, intellectually, and the near-hysteria over the COP26 recently confirmed that the whole topic is now at the forefront of public consciousness. I have, as readers of this blog will know, been very impressed with Prince William's Earthshot prize, and with his and David Attenborough’s excellent series of TV documentaries on the five areas we need to address in order to save the planet from environmental destruction. Only one of these five areas concerned climate change, the others ranging from re-wilding and dealing with waste to cleaning up the oceans. All are connected, and all need to be addressed. I do not have a...

 I’m writing this third post partly because I am concerned at the level of what is called ‘climate anxiety’ in the general population, and particularly among young people. This has clearly been caused by the media heavily emphasizing every possible negative climate story, as well as talking up the disaster theories, not least because these headlines ‘sell newspapers’, as we used to say (!). Our current climate mania seems still to be stuck in the ‘hockey stick’ era, with every new piece of research seized upon by the media and stacked up with all the rest to create terror; and the scientists have - understandably but I think without fully considering the effects of all the media hype - allowed this to happen because it captures public attention and increases the likelihood that policy makers will actually address the issues. However, this global anxiety is, in my view, largely misplaced and may actually be dangerous, not only to individuals who are being made anxious, but also beca...

In my first blog in this series I mentioned the Gulf Stream and its relationship with the warming and cooling of the North European climate. It is thought by many climate historians that the cooling effect of the Gulf Stream weakening has happened before, in fairly recent times, during the early part of the Holocene. After the last ice age ended, around 15,000 years ago, there was a period of rapid warming. Ice sheets retreated, sea levels rose – and the Gulf Stream currents, overwhelmed by the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet over Canada, switched off. Almost immediately, in climate terms, global temperatures fell sharply, leading to what is known as the Younger Dryas event, about 12,800 years ago. Ice sheets that had been in retreat across northern Europe re-formed, and global warming went into reverse – for a while. Then the warming trend reanimated and the period we call the Holocene began, usually dated from about 10,000 years ago. Climate change is so unpredictable, by its v...

 In the last few days I have seen various mentions in the news of a report on the state of the system of currents that form the Gulf Stream, which keeps northern Europe warmer than its latitude would normally allow. As I understand it, when a lot of fresh water pours into the North Atlantic, usually as a result of the melting of ice sheets in North America, the salinity of the ocean is reduced and the currents drop lower, rather than staying near the surface. As a result of global warming, there has been a lot of quite rapid melting of glaciers in Canada, and the current system is becoming unstable. If it collapses completely the warming effect of the Gulf Stream would stop, bringing about (fairly swiftly, probably over a couple of decades) abrupt cooling of north-western Europe. A New York Times news item this morning explains: ‘… a crucial ocean circulation system in the Atlantic Ocean, which helps stabilize the climate in Europe, is now starting to slow down. While the [IPCC...