“Nuclear power? To most people, it’s witchcraft” (Chris Patten)
To describe nuclear power as clean might seem perverse, given that some of the waste produced is so dangerous that there is no containment material that won’t be destroyed by it, and that it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
But last week the government finally [...]
On January 7th the 200-metre-long tunnel boring machine called Eliza Jane broke through the side of a mountain in Scotland after sixteen months of grinding. The resulting five mile tunnel will take water from a reservoir up on the Monadhliath plateau down to Loch Ness, via an underground cavern housing a hydro-electric power station. It’s [...]
Newly published in Nature is a study by researchers about adapting to climate change. The gist, according to EurekAlert, is that we’re making a mistake in concentrating on the mitigation of global warming, and that this has been at the expense of adaptation. (Now, I may have dramatized it somewhat with those words – such [...]
There’s an interesting report on Reuters:
UK scientists downplay GMO threat to biodiversity.
Before reading this it had never really occurred to me before that one of the main reasons people object to GM crops is because they are too efficient. Herbicide-tolerant crops mean that most weeds can be killed, and this is seen as bad because [...]
Polar bears have been in the news quite a lot over the past few years. Just yesterday I saw a feature on a Canadian Polar Bear centre, in the Metro. There is much concern over their future. According to Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity, polar bears could be extinct in less than [...]
Read an article in the Times today by the conservative intellectual Roger Scruton which asserts that environmentalism is truly a conservative, rather than a radical, cause, and that it would be more successful if it were proselytized from this standpoint. In my post from March 3rd I write about Scruton and conservatism, and about this [...]
My work mates, and various TV people, have been worrying about the freak weather. Snow in March! The world’s heading for catastrophe! Here’s an example from the blogosphere, and here’s a Times article that quotes the MD of the Lecht Ski Centre in the Cairngorms as saying “…we have had more snow in March than [...]
