Friday October 1st 2010
Up earlyish as usual. I
like listening to the Today Programme whilst
coming to my senses via two large mugs of black coffee. Go through my
emails - there's one from Dave from the Welsh Mines Society regarding
the Red Dragon mine at Dinas Mawddwy and another from Kevin Trenberth
of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in response to a query
I had sent him. I respond to both and then I check a third - from the
10:10 campaign. I pop over to the Guardian website and watch the "No
Pressure" movie....
It's
a
bit like one of the gorier Monty Python sketches, the first scene of
which involves blowing up two kids in a classroom because they were not
going to try to reduce their carbon emissions. There is ketchup
everywhere. My heart sinks. As a PR move, this has DISASTER written all
over it - there would have been many complaints even if it was a Python
skit.
I
look
around the net. For Anthony Watts and friends, Christmas has come
three months early:
Comments have been flooding in overnight at the Guardian as the
relevant links get circulated virally around the net. Here's one
example - it got a lot of recommendations. It's not just "Guardian
Readers" that follow the "comment is free" threads over there. Far from
it - it is a hallowed battleground for veteran campaigners on all
sides.....
The Guardian do moderate their comments pages. But on Facebook a stream
of expletives is piling up on 10:10's own page - I've painted the worst
out:
A
day
is a long time in politics. By Friday evening, 10:10 have withdrawn
the film, but already multiple copies of it are circulating on Youtube
and elsewhere and again the links go flying around the ether. On
Climate Progress, 350.org's Bill McKibben is clearly very hacked off.
On the 350 website, it is announced that links with 10:10 have been
severed. Via email, I circulate my thoughts around friends in our local
Transition
Group and, depressed, head off to the pub to talk about other stuff.
Saturday
October
2nd 2010
Get
up,
boot up computer and see who's been saying what. In my inbox, there
is one from George Monbiot, forwarding me comments by George Marshall,
with which I fully agree. Over at Climate Progress, I post my thoughts,
for what
it's worth:
As a PR exercise, this was an epic fail
IMO. But the responses to it are equally interesting. Godwin’s Law has
been involved widely. A lot of the criticism bangs on about the
“incitement to violence”. Where were the same critics when Rush
Limbaugh was calling out for certain climate scientists to be
publically flogged?
The need to move to
cleaner, less polluting ways has not gone away. An ill-conceived film
does not suddenly make all the fossil fuels infinite in their
abundance. Neither does it mean the Pakistan floods never happened. It
does not mean that Deepwater Horizon did not blow, ruining livelihoods
along the Gulf Coast. It does not mean that the worst heatwave in
Russia’s history was a figment of the imagination. It does not
invalidate two centuries of scientific research. The laws of
thermodynamics, the Clausius Clapeyron equation – these remain
unchanged.
If the makers of this
film had bothered to read Climate Cover-up (especially page 32) they
would have realised that there is a lot that the think-tanks that stand
behind the organised opposition to climate science can teach us.
Specifically, with respect to that reference, the importance of careful
message-testing in advance of public release. I think if they had
bothered to test this particular message then they would not have used
it!
At
the
Guardian, comments are building to over 500. My system and/or
browser does not get on with long Guardian comment threads and after a
dozen or more "unresponsive script" prompts I give up on the job. The
thread is full of commentators who seem to think the film has also
managed to change the laws of physics....
I
check
the Met Office Mesoscale Forecasting model output twice and it
looks odds-on that the massive blob of heavy rain moving up into the SW
will miss western Wales. Sod it - I'll have a very early night and head
off fishing in the early hours. All this staring into my monitor isn't
helping!
Sunday October 3rd 2010
The alarm rouses me from a deep sleep to the sound of rain hammering
against the roof and water sluicing down the road. Check the Met Office
Radar which confirms the rain - lots of it - is much further west than
the models had indicated and what was expected to remain an open wave
on the cold front has instead developed into a discreet Low.
Back to sleep awhile, then off just after 9 o'clock to see
my friend Mandy for a
cuppa and a chat about recent events, before going just a couple more
miles down to the beach to collect seaweed for the garden. Unusually,
for this year, there is only old weed washed up on the strandline and
crawling with sandhoppers. I'm not removing them from what they call
home. But the trip is not wasted. Some nearby grassland has a good
number of field mushrooms on show - a bit wet but they'll be OK. With a
couple of pounds in the bag I head the 10 miles home, roast a chicken
and add some of the mushrooms to the shallots, runner beans and
potatoes, all from the veg-garden. A fine feast ensues.
The rain has now cleared away and a drier afternoon beckons.
I nip over to the veg-garden and take down the two rows of
runner-beans. They are
finished for the year - they've been brilliant - with just a few
old tough ones left here and
there. Once that's done I tackle the hedge behind, which has exploded
outwards as it does every year. A bit of effort and it's looking a bit
more sensible.....
I need to have a good bonfire with the
hedge-cuttings but heavy showers arrive by late afternoon, ushering me
to the pub where my friends Tim and Ann are expected. Over three pints
of Old Peculier, the world is once again put to rights, and we do not
mention the 10:10 film - mostly because they have not heard of it and
it's nice to discuss something else for a change!
Monday
October
4th 2010
I
awake
to a fine morning with just broken cloud and the wind has dropped
right away. Check the Inshore forecast - variable becoming southerly 4
or 5, increasing 5 or 6, perhaps gale 8 later. Looking over the
synoptic charts, I reckon I've got until late afternoon before the wind
really gets up. There's nothing in the diary so I head down to Borth
and spend the day fishing over low tide and up the flood. All that I
catch is a small-eyed ray, which would have been too small to eat if I
did eat them. I don't as rays are a slow-growing, relatively endangered
fish. The bait is meant instead for bass or turbot, both
faster-growing and tasty. Wading out into the surf, I slip the ray
back. It swims off strongly. Phew.
A
little
later there is a distinct thudding
of a Chinook helicopter somewhere. By the time I realise it is flying
extremely low straight along the beach it's too late to grab the
fishing camera -
a trusty old Pentax compact - so all I get is a shot of it going away...
As
the
tide floods, the weed
appears. Floating weed is the bane of shore-anglers hereabouts, and on
a flood tide - flowing northwards along the beach - and an
increasing
southerly wind, all the lines start to be pulled northwards too.
Reeling in is like pumping iron - gradually raise the rod-tip, then
lower and reel - then raise again. It's like dragging a wet sack in
every cast. There are piles of weed all around
my rod-rest where I have stripped bunches of it from my lines. I still
have the containers inside the jeep from Sunday - so I fill one of them
to the brim with the stuff. At least I have something to bring home!
I call at the pub on
my way home. There is a parcel waiting for me. It's from the JNCC - the
book that I co-wrote nearly a decade ago has finally been printed. It's
great to see this out at last.
The
book
describes the most important mineralogical sites in England and
Wales. Richard Bevins and I wrote the section on Wales when I worked
for the National Museum.
Mineralogical
sites
are important for research for a number of reasons. They yield
important information about ore deposit formation. They are vital
teaching sites for students who may later become exploration
geologists. They yield important information about the chemical
behaviour of metals and their compounds in the environment. In turn,
this can help us to develop technologies that tackle pollution.
But
in
many cases, and particularly with respect to old mines, such sites
have suffered badly. Tips full of interesting minerals have been taken
for hard-core. Fly-tipping is another major issue. Preserving the best
sites as SSSIs will help to protect what we have left, for generations
of students and researchers to come. That's what the Geological
Conservation Review seeks to do with these and other important
geological sites.
Tuesday
October
5th 2010
Over
my
morning kick-start of black coffee I read my email. Good news in
that two work opportunities are firming up nicely and a third is up for
discussion. Elsewhere, I see there are more developments
with the 10:10 affair. Rob Hopkins of the Transition Movement has a
piece about it posted the night before:
Meanwhile, one of 10:10's sponsors - Sony - have
issued a press-release on their website:
This frankly comes as
no surprise to me. The moment I saw the film I realised that this was
going to cause problems - a classic "Gerald Ratner" moment if ever
there was one. Why, I again ask myself, were no others consulted on
this? Message-testing is such an important stage of any campaign - the
organisations opposed to climate change mitigation policy are very
effective at
the practice.
The
-
our - message should be that the transition to a
lower-carbon economy, which is inevitable in any case at some point
because of the finite nature of the fossil fuels, does not have to be
that painful if started in time. If we wait until oil supplies are in
decline, then it will be very tough indeed. Oil depletion and climate
destabilisation are twin symptoms of our addiction to fossil fuels, and
whatever the uncertainties regarding climate change, the finite nature
of oil, obtainable with the same extraction-rate and energy balance
(and therefore cost to the buyer) as the regular crude we mostly use
today is one thing that is quite certain.
Pondering
on
this, I click over to Climate Progress to find the laws of physics
are certainly still in a Business-as-Usual mode:
Coffee
drained, I head over to the garden, lugging the seaweed with me and
tipping it on top of the bean foliage cut down on Sunday afternoon. It
will rot quickly and it seems to accelerate the rate of composting of
other stuff, besides being full of minerals - it's a key ingredient of
the compost-heap, along with periodically-harvested "weeds" and the
grass-cuttings from the beer garden at my local. All good stuff!
A movement catches my eye and then another. The
Commas have started hatching out. A male and female are flying around
together - they breed in the garden, which is why any clumps of nettles
that come up in Summer go unmolested, even those that are in the way. I
follow the butterflies with my camera, finally catching
both in the one frame:
Biodiversity's something I work hard to encourage in
the garden and it's amazing what lives there - from all manner of bugs
and beetles to the slow-worms that hang around the compost-heap to
these. I cannot believe anyone could look at the photo below and not
think it worthy of having alongside us in the centuries to come.
Leaving the
garden and its denizens in peace again, I head home, sit down with a
brew and write this piece. Why?
Many
of
the most hostile
commentators to the 10:10 film were calling all environmentalists
"eco-nazis". Hence the title of this piece. I thought people might be
interested
to find out what a fairly ordinary one gets up to!
The
events
described in this piece involved 40 miles of driving at a little
under a gallon of diesel, two frozen mackerel for bait, a chicken, lots
of homegrown veg and wild mushrooms, about 7 pints of beer and several
bouts of physical effort. Eyestrain was provided courtesy of the
Internet and thoughts were inspired with the view out over the waves to
the distant horizon of the ever-restless ocean. Cameras by Pentax and
Nikon, screengrabs processed with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 and the
butterflies were played by themselves. Nothing was blown up during the
making of this piece, something that all environmental campaigners
should take on board for the sake of the future.
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