Posted on March 7, 2008 by robertkyriakides
Some of the smallest living organisms feed the largest animals. Plankton are the food supply of many marine creatures including the largest fish, the whale shark and the largest mammal, the blue whale.
Plankton are organisms that float drift around oceans, seas and other bodies of water; plankton derive their name from the Greek “planktos” which [...]
Filed under: biodiversity, carbon emissions, climate change | Tagged: acidic oceans, algae bloom, Angel Lopez Urrutia, box jellyfish, carbon sink, dimethyl suphide, Great Skua, Guillemot, IMF-GEOMAR, Oahu, ocean carbon sink, plankton, sandeels, Spanish Oceanography, sting | 2 Comments »
Posted on February 15, 2008 by robertkyriakides
Would the Severn Barrage end up as an environmental blessing or a curse? There is, of course, no free lunch in the world of environmental energy – there is no possibility of something for nothing so we have to approach decisions about things like building huge tidal barrages from the viewpoint of what will cause [...]
Filed under: Flooding, biodiversity, carbon emissions, climate change, electricity, energy, microgeneration, solar, solar energy, solar panels | Tagged: coastal erosion, concrete and carbon emissions, eco systems, electricity generation, environmental changes, intermittancy, Severn barrage, tidal energy, wild wading birds | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 11, 2008 by robertkyriakides
The law of unintended consequences provides that if you fix one thing you sometimes in fixing it break something else that wasn’t broken. Sometimes it works the other way around – you do something wrong – like Alexander Fleming keeping a dirty laboratory and you end up with penicillin. Nowhere is this law more inevitably [...]
Filed under: Coal, biodiversity, biomass, carbon emissions, climate change, electricity, energy, gas, global warming, heat, oil, pollution | Tagged: bio fuels, biomass, clean air legislation, destruction of habitat of tigers, flying, food production, global dimming, orang-utans, organic food, palm oil, port talbot power station, unintended consequences | 1 Comment »
Posted on January 30, 2008 by robertkyriakides
I must admit that I don’t know a lot about birds but I do know that they can be harbingers of change. I have been looking at the Royal Society Protection of Bird’s website and at the Chaffinch in particular, because it is a pretty yellow gold bird, and when I played the chaffinch song [...]
Filed under: biodiversity, climate change | Tagged: birds, Chaucer, climate change, migration of birds due to climate change, Parliament of Fowls, RSPB | 3 Comments »
Posted on January 28, 2008 by robertkyriakides
If you have been lucky enough to snorkel around a coral reef you will know what marvellous places they are. They are homes to about a quarter of all marine life and are an invaluable source of shelter for breeding and spawning fish and crustaceans. Reefs also serve a valuable carbon dioxide absorbing function both [...]
Filed under: biodiversity, carbon emissions, climate change, weather | Tagged: climate change, coral reefs, Katrina, warmer seas, Wilma, world conservation union | 8 Comments »
Posted on January 16, 2008 by robertkyriakides
Right now somewhere in the ocean there are Japanese “scientific” vessels that aim to catch around a thousand whales for “scientific research” and there are some environmentalist vessels aiming to stop them, some by fair means or foul.
Of course the capture and killing of whales for scientific research is simply a pretext. The International Whaling [...]
Filed under: biodiversity | Tagged: breaching, hump backe whales, internation whaling commision, Japanese whaling fleet, whaling | 4 Comments »