Reporting on Climate Change

Nicholas Stern wrote a report a few years ago. Everyone praised it, not because it contained any illuminating insights or great original thinking; environmentalists have been making the points that Mr Stern raised in his report years earlier when Mr Stern was in charge of dishing out money to environmentally damaging projects at the World [...]

GM crops break out in Dakota

Bio-engineering companies have been working to produce genetically modified crops for many years. The theory is that these newly engineered crops will be resistant to disease and pests, and will produce much larger yields than crops at present, so GM food is hailed by the companies that produce them as a way to feed the [...]

London Cycle Programme

I wrote last week about the London cycle programme under which you can hire a bike for an hour or for a day. A picture is worth a thousand words so I took some to show the visual impact of the programme;

Wind turbine at a solar cell plant

Life is rich with irony, that subtle wicked form of humour. In Cardiff a factory that builds dye sensitised solar photovoltaic cells for the PV industry at Wentloog Environmental Centre, is getting a large wind turbine to help power the plant, feeding any surplus into the grid. For some reason the photovoltaic cells have been [...]

Genersys the smallest carbon footprint in Chile

Many people talk about carbon footprint but very few go to the trouble of measuring the emissions of their activities. In Chile the Chilean-British Chamber of Commerce has awarded Genersys Sud America as having the smallest carbon footprint for small and medium sized enterprises. It is a high and significant award for corporate environmental responsibility. [...]

Non productive work

n the Spring of 1980 I visited Moscow. This was at a time when the Soviet state was authoritarian and provided a highly controlled environment. People were frightened to talk freely and to have any contact with people visiting them from the west. The group of which I was part were guided on all their [...]

Can you see the aurora?

For the past ten years the sun has been at its dimmest and least active for hundred years. If these condition prevail for some decades this will, some scientists think, create a new ice age of a short duration, which will overcome all our fears about climate change. The Maunder Minimum – a cold period [...]

The banks are returning to profit, but where did it all go wrong?

The news that the major United Kingdom Banks are returning to profit is welcome. In 2008 most of them were at risk, so it seemed and most of them needed taxpayers’ money directly as an injection or indirectly as a guarantee which gave people confidence to keep their money in the banks. After nearly two [...]

Floods in Pakistan and a heatwave in Russia…join the dots

When you look for evidence, hard evidence, that the climate is changing you should not bother with looking at places where there is large variability in weather, like the United Kingdom. Here we have had our cold winter for many years and the hottest summer for many years. Rainfall is down by 50% in the [...]

Genersys in the Saharan Desert – a panel designed to avoid over heating

Genersys has had its solar panels producing heat installed in many places. They can be found on the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, and on the further southerly inhabited place in South America, on a Chilean naval base. They can also be found on many homes throughout Europe, and on some homes in North America, in [...]