rachel.blog

Tag: global warming

  • I’d rather die in a freezer than an oven

    The hottest temperatures today will be the coldest temperatures in the not-too-distant future. The only way to stop the warming is to make our emissions zero. It’s not enough to reduce them. They have to be zero or the warming will continue. Even if we were to reach zero emissions tomorrow, the earth will continue…

  • Another report and the message on climate change is still the same – our emissions must be zero

    Another report and the message on climate change is still the same – our emissions must be zero

    I used to write about climate change quite a bit on my blog. The first posts date from 2013. I was usually prompted to write after having an emotional reaction to something I had read or heard – usually someone denying it was happening. One of my earliest posts was prompted by claims that climate…

  • Aberdeen climate strike

    Aberdeen climate strike

    We did our bit and attended the Aberdeen climate strike today. There were about a thousand people there which is pretty good for an oil city. It’s definitely the biggest protest I’ve ever seen in Aberdeen. It was a hot and sunny day. Unusually warm for September but I suppose that’s apt given we were…

  • Global climate strikes

    Global climate strikes

    The global climate strikes begin tomorrow. The Aberdeen event is at Marischal College tomorrow at 11am. I will be there along with Ben and the kids. You can use the map at https://globalclimatestrike.net to find your local event. I am lucky that my employer is supporting me in attending this event otherwise I’d need to…

  • Chernobyl

    Chernobyl

    Ben and I watched the first episode of the TV series Chernobyl last night and it was brilliant! I’m looking forward to watching the rest. One of the protagonists is the same actor who plays the dad in Friday Night Dinner. It’s a very different role for him in this series and because of this,…

  • Global Climate Strike

    Global Climate Strike

    Global climate strikes are planned for September 20 – 27th and I’ll be attending the Aberdeen strike on September 20th from 11am – 2pm. There’s a map at https://globalclimatestrike.net where you can find your local event. I urge everyone to attend for the sake of your children and grandchildren or, if you’re young, then for…

  • Living a low carbon life

    Living a low carbon life

    Last week the BBC came to our house and filmed us for a story on a low carbon family that aired on the news last night. It also went on the web at The Aberdeen family embracing a low-carbon lifestyle. In some ways I feel like a bit of a fraud because I feel there’s…

  • It was summer here in February

    It was summer here in February

    It has felt like summer here for the past week or so and lots of temperature records have broken. A 120-year winter temperature record for Scotland was broken on February 21 when Aboyne reached 18.3C. This is unprecedented for this region in winter. 18.3C is a summer temperature for us. On the 25th February the…

  • Growing your own food

    Growing your own food

    Climate Café no.5 was on in Aberdeen last night. If you live in Aberdeen I highly recommend this series. It’s an initiative of Aberdeen Climate Action, a community organisation for which I’m a volunteer, and we are spreading inspirational messages to encourage our communities to tackle the problem of climate change. Inspirational is absolutely the…

  • Climate change and the elephant in the room

    Livestock farming produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transport sector. That’s all the planes, trains, trucks, buses, cars, and boats on the planet. Exactly how much the livestock farming sector produces varies depending on which study you look at. The most conservative estimate is from the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United…

  • Pumpkin and the Dog’s Bollocks

    Suppose there’s a planet called Dog’s Bollocks and the aliens on Dog’s Bollocks have been using something called pumpkin for all their energy needs. But pumpkin has several problems. One: it’s running out. There’s a limited supply of it and eventually there’ll be none left. Two: it produces pollution which when inhaled can cause asthma in young aliens and reduces…

  • $5 million up for grabs!

    I thought I’d share this. It appeared in my Twitter feed yesterday and even if you have no intention of participating there are some interesting questions there. How are we to solve the problems of today? Humans are good at solving problems but so far we’ve failed to address the problem of climate change despite…

  • Greenhouse gases: not just a bunch of hot air

    I saw this last week on the Australian Sydney Morning Herald site and it’s good and needs to be shared. It explains the greenhouse effect and how we can tell it’s us making the planet warmer in less than 4 minutes.  

  • Frozen

    Frozen

    We had our first frost last week and there’s another heavy frost this morning. I went outside to take some photographs. It’s very pretty. I used to miss frosty mornings like this when we lived in Auckland. Here are my cyclamen surrounded by frozen leaves. Can you see the pink flowers? Despite the frost in…

  • Old people don’t care about climate change

    I saw this video last night on Grist – Old people don’t care about climate change – and it was funny yet there’s some truth to it. Unfortunately I can’t post it to my blog so you’ll have to click through to Grist and watch it there instead. I really like Grist.org. They have an interesting assortment…

  • Scientists paying for advertisements to get message across

    Australian scientists have paid for a full page advertisement in a Queensland newspaper – The Courier Mail – because they felt the newspaper was not covering the coral bleaching of The Great Barrier Reef adequately. Coral biologist, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, is quoted in the Guardian today saying, One of the reasons we placed the ad in the Courier…

  • Roadrunner, sea level rise, and the Bloggers Bash

    Roadrunner has gone viral so I thought I’d share it as well. What’s so fascinating about this clip that it gets over 3 million views in less that a week? The bird is really fast and I was reminded of Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner but I’ve seen better things on YouTube that get…

  • Interview with Professor Kevin Anderson – part 1

    I enjoyed watching this video interview with Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research in Manchester (Thanks to Manchester Climate Monthly). It’s about the recent Paris climate talks. From what I understand, although the Paris talks resulted in a very ambitious target – 1.5°C – there’s no plan to actually reduce our…

  • The Paris agreement

    I haven’t written anything about the Paris climate change agreement yet but have been wanting to put my thoughts down on my blog so here goes. On the one hand it’s quite ambitious. They agreed a 1.5°C target which is very ambitious and an improvement on the 2°C which is what is usually bandied about. But on…

  • How much do cows fart?

    I found this two-minute clip on Grist which shows how much cows fart in 2 hours. Spoiler: A lot!   A paper was published in Nature Climate Change in October 2015 which finds the temperature increase for parts of the Middle East is projected to exceed the level which humans can tolerate by the end of…