rachel.blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Crop yields expected to decline earlier than previously thought

    For me, the security of our food supply is one of the most significant of all the climate change impacts. Food shortages lead to famine which leads to mass migration and conflict. It is therefore important to predict how the warming planet will affect the yields of crops that we eat. A paper published this…

  • Is climate change responsible for recent flooding in the UK?

    I’m not going to answer this question because I can’t but you can help to answer another question which is has climate change made extremely wet winters like the last in the UK more likely? Oxford University early this month launched the weather@home project which seeks to answer this question. The winter of 2013/2014 was…

  • MikeM – part 2

    As a sort of follow-on to my last post about the death of my father-in-law, I want to post this obituary which was written by him for his own father in 1990. Apparently the newspaper was reluctant to print it at first, but eventually they did. It’s quite funny and says a bit about MikeM’s…

  • MikeM

    Ben’s father died last night. He was only 72. I was very fond of him. I don’t think many can say they are as fond of their father-in-law as I was of mine. He always treated me well and was very supportive of me, so I’d like to write a post about him. He and…

  • My Granny

    I am in Scotland and so I was going to write about some of the things I have seen but I have just learnt that my grandmother died in the early hours of this morning Australian time, and so this post is for her. She had a beautiful name, my Granny, so beautiful, that I…

  • Recipe for Lebkuchen

    This is a reblog of an old post of mine. It’s a recipe for lebkuchen which is a very delicious German treat eaten over the Christmas season. I usually make it every year but this year I’ve adopted the British tradition of baking mince pies instead. But this is recipe that must be shared. So…

  • Online shopping in the UK

    Yesterday I ordered some groceries online. I thought I had ordered 1kg of carrots and 1kg of bananas.  What I got instead was a single carrot in a bag and a single banana in another bag. This is one of the pitfalls of online grocery shopping. Don’t get me wrong here though, I absolutely adore…

  • The case for a Sovereign Wealth Fund

    I’ve been wanting to write about this for sometime and now seems like an appropriate one with Australians looking like they’re about to elect an anti-science government determined to dig up every last speck of coal they can find. George Monbiot, who has come up with the term “Abbottalypse“, describes this strategy as a “21st-Century…

  • Art and nature

    Does the natural world have value in addition to monetary value? The Great Barrier Reef generates more than $5 billion per year to the Australian economy and about 63,000 jobs. Surely that’s worth saving in its own right, but what if it did none of those things? Would it be less worthy of preservation? Earlier…

  • Bossy three-year-olds

    A three-year-old is an entertaining beast. Our three-year-old always seems to be ordering us about. Here are some of these orders. To Daniel: * Hurry up Daniel or you’ll be late for school! * Don’t run across the road!   To Daddy: * Don’t put the orange skins in the compost because the worms don’t…

  • Marvelous Freud, should he visit the Queen?

    We are going to spend the latter half of this year in York, England. It is a trip we’ve been planning for a couple of years but we’ve only just booked our flights. I am very excited about the prospect of living in York for 6 months but my excitement is marred because it meant…

  • Recycling, rubbish and corporate responsbility

    Last night, a Greenpeace-created TV advertisement was due to air on Channel 9 Australia but it was pulled at the 11th hour because TV bosses thought it was too offensive. Here’s the ad: I don’t find it offensive. Do you? Has Channel 9 bowed to pressure from Coca-Cola? We live in a disposable society. We…

  • How to use toilet paper

    My 3-year-old showed me a novel way of using toilet paper yesterday. After completing her business, she grabbed the entire roll of toilet paper from the holder, wiped her bum with the entire roll, then returned it to the holder.

  • Goodies vs baddies

    Our six-year-old son has been talking a lot about baddies recently, so Ben decided to probe him on it. Ben: What’s the difference between a baddy and a goody? Daniel: Baddies are always fighting goodies. Ben: But if you see two people fighting, how do you know who is the baddy and who is the…

  • Danielisms

    Once a week, I spend an hour and a bit helping out in Daniel’s class at school. Daniel likes it, I like it and it helps his teacher who works on a ratio of 1 to 25. It’s also nice for me to see what they’re doing at school so that I can provide the…

  • Are aliens manufacturing zombies?

    There’s so much crap on the web. If I believed all of it, I’d think that the MMR vaccine gave my son autism, that every moon landing has been a hoax staged by NASA, that the holocaust never happened and that aliens have landed on earth and are manufacturing an army of zombies  (those zombies…

  • Whose conspiracy is it?

    One argument I’ve heard in the climate change debate is that scientists around the globe are in on some kind of conspiracy, the purpose of which is to gather research funding for themselves. As the wife of a University academic, I find this argument quite amusing. Here’s why. My husband, Ben, has applied for and…

  • Could New Zealand get a Magnitude 9 earthquake?

    I recently listened to an interview on Radio NZ with Chris Goldfinger, professor from Oregon State University, on super-earthquakes. You can listen to it online, but here is the gist of the discussion. Historically, geologists have thought that mega-earthquakes (Mag. 9), like the ones that occurred in Japan in 2011 and Sumatra in 2004, were thought…

  • First days at kindergarten

    I am at home with no kids! Not one! Elizabeth is enjoying her second day at kindy and so far, so good. There were no tears at all when I left, no clinging, just a kiss goodbye followed by a return to play. I would like to say this is all my doing and that…

  • Top 5 things I hate about hot climates…

    I have to shave my legs – too hot for jeans. I can’t wear the same bra and shirt for days on end (I do change my undies everyday though). I have to share my pantry with insects. Just a couple of weeks ago I found maggots in there. Who wants to get all hot…