I watched this video by Just Have a Think’s, Dave Borlace.
Just Have a Think Independent Youtube Channel dedicated to Climate Change issues and mitigation technologies.
I watch most of his presentations. They are easy to digest, and if you skip past
the Climate Emergency narrative then there is always something to take away
either in terms of awareness of what you do and how it may be affecting the
environment or just some whizzy new tech that at some point may start to make
it past the vested interests of the fossil fuel industries into the mainstream.
There are some mixed messages in the paragraph above. I
caveat that as long as you can skip past the Climate Emergency narrative, there
is always something to learn but it is indicative of scepticism. But then go on
to say something that looks like I’m not into fossil fuels for the long-term
future … what’s going on?
Linked below is a paper from Bjorn Lomborg, wikipedia.org Bjorn Lomborg
Sciencedirect.com Bjorn Lomborg Paper
Well, the thing is, I think both polarised sides of the climate
argument have now become industries upon which livelihoods depend, and
therefore a certain amount of objectivity has been made absent by default. I’m
not going to reiterate either side’s arguments here. There are so many papers,
presentations, and arguments, and most of us know them all, as they are on
perpetual repeat in all forms of media. What this overload does do is make
making informed choices difficult. The advice in the Just Have a Think
presentation is sound, however, only in so far as it is affordable. Getting all
hair shirt and flagellating yourself is bad for you, bad for your mental
health, and probably pretty bad for people around you. You will become an
idolater, within an ideology, under the auspices of ideologues.
When I was younger, and before the internet became a thing,
I’d been pretty much indoctrinated into the Global Warming cult and the fear of
the `End of Days’. However, over time apocalyptic warnings came and went and
things stayed `sort of the same', with a few aberrations here and there. Climate
Alarmists (just using this for ID purposes) would cite the aberrations as
examples of extreme weather events and a symptom of climate change. Climate
Change sceptics or deniers (just using this for ID purposes), would suggest
that records don’t go back far enough and there are no guarantees that extreme
but unrecorded events haven’t always taken place throughout history, sunspots,
interglacial periods etc.
So where does that leave me personally? It’s interesting,
and the reason I posted the link to the Just
Have A Think Video, is because having sat through it, I find that
likely as not the indoctrination into the Climate Alarmist branch in practical
terms has been stronger than the scepticism but at a subliminal level. Put another way, I've responded to fear of the future at my/our own cost.
What does that mean? In simple terms, almost all the carbon footprint
mitigation measures you can take on a day-to-day basis … I/we do.
For instance, nothing sits on standby, we have solar panels
and battery (we feed the grid, and the grid dumps excess energy into our smart
battery), we don’t waste food, we upcycle, we compost, we volunteer (though
that’s more to do with litter picking than climate per se, though nowadays
oddly the two seem to have been conflated). We do have four vehicles, the
camper still lives, we have the big gas guzzler because it’s still very useful
in this part of the world to have four-wheel drive and a shed load of torque
and room for guests from far away (seven seat XC90), The Alfa (which is
hopefully going soon), and Amanda’s latest addition a little Mazda 2 that sips
fuel. We both use it for the nipping about locally. All our lights except in
the bathroom are LED -The bathroom light fittings and lamps need to be replaced
to move to LED. We have clay cored radiators, and a Defra approved wood-burner,
and only burn arboricultural waste (that’s all the grotty offcuts from forestry
operations, kiln-dried, and we use it sparingly). We don’t burn coal. We have
also replaced all our external double-glazing for a Low-Iron glass, warm seal type.
We have also messed about with our loft insulation and plan to do more up the
loft and have even thought about losing 50mm off the inside of the outer facing
walls to add more insulation.
So, all this said, clearly, I’m a Greeny through and
through.
Well, no, not really. I do practical things to save money,
to reduce our bills and keep our home environment stable, as much for my
abundant house plants as for economics or the external environment. That isn’t
to say I don’t care about the environment, clearly, I do ... I go and pick up other
peoples discarded litter from beaches, Rhyne’s, Lanes and paths. We garden for
insects as much as for ourselves (apparently the entire insect apocalypse
thing has been equally overblown in the media over the last decade, more about
that another time).
In the paper linked above `Welfare in the 21st century:
Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and
the cost of climate policies.’ There is
a counter-narrative to the climate emergency narrative and somewhere between
these poles is sanity. Somewhere between these positions is common sense. In
essence, people care less about the environment than they do about education and
health. If you were to believe the mainstream media the environment is the
greatest cause for concern.
I am not a Greeny by ideology, but I get that
in previous centuries we extracted 220million years’ worth of fallen and
compacted trees and burnt them in furnaces to create the modern world and that
in many places that burning of coal still goes on. I get that Carbon Dioxide
hangs around in the atmosphere for a long time. I also get from an
arboricultural perspective that trees are carbon sinks, and of all the plant
forms on land they are the largest and support the largest eco-systems
individually and as a copse or wood (of any size). Caveat this may not be the
case in a plantation … in fact the exact opposite in terms of monoculture.
If you take those two bits of knowledge (atmospheric
carbon, plants as sequestration devices) and add in the compound word
bio-diversity you move in the direction of understanding carbon offsetting.
But, not really, and the reason for not really, is because trees are only a tiny
part of the bio-diversity part of the equation. And Biodiversity is a stupid
term because it tells you nothing. It’s a trendy word, another catch-all that manages
to miss the point.
Biodiversity; It implies that if you are
bio-diverse you have a great many species. Frankly so what. What you are
actually interested in is Bio-Mass. Never have two terms gotten in such a mess.
Bio-Mass if you ask people about it, would
relate to boilers and energy crops (of the seven times it's mentioned in the linked paper, it is in regards to fuel).
Bio-diversity. A cynic would suggest that the
word diversity has been pushed front and centre just because it allows the word
diversity to be used more often. And is a useful way of leveraging opinion
about `human diversity' as a parallel to natures raw diversity, by indicating
that natural diversity and human diversity are the same things. There are parallels,
they aren’t the same thing. But from an identity politics, perspective binding climate
to social justice using a common framework of words is a useful strategy (I may
have over-thought this).
Bio-mass, on the other hand, is the sum of
living and dead organic matter, all that matter is sequestered carbon. A tree
has roots, those roots are exponentially extended by mycelial structures (Mycorrhiza).
In the soil, about and around a root system there is a plethora of sub-soil
species from bacteria up the chain to invertebrates and beyond … it’s quite
diverse, but for our purposes it also contains mass. The mass is sequestered from
the exchange of gases, water and minerals in the soil and above the soil by
living organisms and natural processes such as rainfall, weathering, birth and
death. These natural cycles sequester and diffuse CO2 from the soil and the
atmosphere, it’s called the Carbon Cycle.
What happens if you create vast mono-culture
crops? You lose biodiversity in an area. But in relative terms you still have biodiversity
generally, after all, all the insects that have come to our gardens (front and
back) over the seven years we have been here, had to come from somewhere else.
They didn’t spontaneously generate by an act of god in the presence of Daffodils
or Dahlias.
So, what’s really happened in our imaginary
monoculture? It’s lost bio-mass in relative terms.
While we have been burning coal, we have also
been changing soil use, creating more monocultures, losing biomass and losing
the ability to store CO2, in all areas from plants in all locations on land and to some extent in the seas, but also from the Chitin in exoskeletons of insects and arthropods to
bones and flesh of all living creatures in a given area. When you cut down a
tree, you lose a lot more than a tree above ground. Beneath the ground, the
change would be slower, but you are still likely to suffer a net loss in time.
If you say what I have said above, you will, I
will be pilloried because it suggests climate change denialism/scepticism.
However, I do believe we have and can change the climate and that global
climate changes can influence weather locally, non-specifically, and randomly,
be that storms or drought and every permutation in between. What irks me is
this fixation on emissions, when from what I can see and find there is very
little on biomass in terms of all up annual and decadal net sequestration (in our context, I’m only talking about terrestrial biomass, I have no clue as to
the real state of our seas and oceans). All living things are made of carbon in
our context. And the worlds great natural carbon sinks are being eaten away
(habitat loss), biomass loss. So, while you can do things at home to offset
your `Carbon Footprint’, in relative terms, until you are given explicit
instruction about natural carbon sinks, you are barely doing half the job
required.
I look around our town at the vast areas of
garden land concreted, paved or gravelled over and think about all those people
who haven’t in any way shape or form been persuaded by the green argument to
assist the atmosphere by growing stuff, or they have been confused by the
messaging solely orientated to reducing emissions, and how putting up a bug
hotel is going to save the planet (without supporting infrastructure -plants- a bug hotel is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard).
I have no scientific background and I could be
so far off the mark here as to be laughable, but having read, having watched, having
listened and thought I can’t help but think that climate alarmism isn’t working,
and that (excuse the conflation) the same tactic of ramped up fear around Covid,
demonstrates that people who are put in fear do less positive things not more,
and in some cases actually, push back because they have lost hope. This all said the lifestyle changes in the Just Have a Think video presentation, will save you money in the longer term, and perhaps if it makes you feel a bit warm and fuzzy, you will do more. Positive reinforcement as opposed to the negativity of lost hope.
