Category Archives: Climate Change
Forecast of 45mph headwinds – why am I doing this?
Best first on three wheels
With departure set for the day after tomorrow, just 36 hours away, I was amused trawling old photos to find this first recorded evidence of my passion for spoked wheels.
Early experiments with wheels - ca 1951
I guess I’m under a year on the left, and about three on the trike on right. The photos will have been taken in the summers of 1951 and 1953 respectively in the garden of the tiny farmhouse at Duckshole (wonderful name) just outside Holt in North Norfolk from which we moved in 1953.
Not sure why I look so glum, as little brother Hugh, 18 months younger, tests his own smaller-wheeled hobby horse in the background.
But nearly 60 years ago, neither of us will have been bothered (elegant segue coming here into the purpose of today’s post) by the winds the Met Office is predicting for the rest of this week down here in the other agricultural end of England in the Cotswolds.
Today, Monday, was gorgeous – ridiculously and global warmingly so like the past fortnight – but just in time for my planned departure 40 miles up the Fosse Way North-East to old friend Judy in Banbury, we’re warned to expect viciously cold headwinds on Wednesday from that precise direction, gusting to a truly horrible 45mph.
I’m not trying to break any records with this bike trip, and need to nurse sore necks and knees anyway, so perhaps I should delay departure until the winds abate? Read the rest of this entry
One week left, Raven packed – and ready to star in The Standard
MB and Raven loaded up a week before departure
So, Raven is readied, panniers, tent and bags test-mounted and photographs taken for an article on the pending adventure scheduled for next Thursday’s local Standard newspaper in the Cotswolds. Fame at last…
Below right is how my study looked with everything piled up in one great heap before being packed. (Note that Myshkin, aka Wussum the cat, is not coming with me – he’s trying here to find his way to his food bowl near the French windows, and miffed.)
Left, what it all looked like a few hours later. A lovely experience again to feel Raven loaded beneath me, with her low-low centre of gravity and so solid on the road.
Wussum seeking his bowl, buried behind the pile
Twenty-five kilos of bike, and the same again in luggage. That’s not light at all, so progress from next Wednesday will be slow and plodding.
If you’re curious about what I’ve packed into those bags, feel free to browse through my Take on Big Bike Trip list, compiled over the last decade of distance solo cycling (especially Budapest retour four years ago) and of tandeming with Sue. It’s posted here knowing how useful I have found similar lists compiled by other long-distancers in the past.
Climate Progress blog post on the Journalism of Climate Change
I thought I might post here a contribution I made this week to Climate Progress, a site I read daily and consider the best current blog on the science and politics of Climate Change.
The post was in response to some (partly but not entirely justified) sharp criticism of a BBC piece by my old World Service colleague Richard Black on Artic Sea Ice melt.
The discussion at the bottom of the Climate Progress post is well worth reading, and if you get far enough down, you’ll find some further thoughts and responses from me.
(Picture on the top right, to liven up the text, is of boats stranded by the retreating Miyun reservoir in catastrophically, soon, water-stressed Northern China just north of Beijing. And this, with my family atop, was already some 25 years ago.)
As a former BBC foreign correspondent (Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Beijing) during the Cold War, and former World Service editor now struggling with the monumental failure of contemporary journalism on climate change (Nicholas Stern’s 2007 comments about the market are just as relevant for the news media), I have to agree with recent commentators on Climate Progress who see the roots of this failure more in newsroom culture and subtle peer expectation than in a direct and explicit response to political or commercial demands (although those play their part, of course).
My former colleagues at the BBC, including Richard Black and others whom I know as good men and women all, remain trapped like most Western-style journalists in the old paradigm of news as event, not process, always needing to be shiny, new and different.
Talking at Deutsche Welle about Climate Change and Journalism
It’s not the most comprehensive of packages, but Deutsche Welle in Bonn have done an interesting job of summarising a panel on the journalism of climate change which I ran, together with Mary-Jayne Rust, in Bonn in June.
With some 1400 participants registered, many from developing countries helped financially to take part by the German Foreign Ministry, it was one of the world’s most substantial meetings so far on the reporting of climate change.
Massive new insights? Not all that many, but a worthwhile occasion – and not just for the fabulous food and Rhine cruise which were part of the social package.
For the record, here’s a report of our panel for DW, and below an article I’ve written on the conference for Transformations, the journal of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility PCSR.
If the dinosaurs had been reading Germany’s Bild Zeitung, implies the caption to this street advertisement, then they might have been prepared for what was coming and have adapted to a post-meteorite planet.
Will We Save the World?
The occasional visitor to these pages may recall that last year, we installed a solar hot water system in our house in Cirencester. It’s worked brilliantly, meaning we didn’t need to use any gas at all through the summer and well into the autumn – admittedly helped by switching the Aga off as well (a beast rightly condemned by George Monbiot in the Guardian last year.)
OK, keeping the Aga (aka Betty) installed at all undoes most of the good we’re trying to do in getting our energy usage down – though in a couple of weeks, we are having an (expensive) intelligent management system fitted – and I don’t just mean Sue – which will allow us to turn Betty down during the day and especially overnight.
Well, now we’ve gone almost the whole hog, short of having a heat pump put in under the garden, and have kitted the roof out with some £12,000 worth of photovoltaic solar panels – as in the picture above. (The link will take you to the folk who installed it for us.)
With the British government’s new so-called Feed-In tariff starting up in April, the panels should pay for themselves, we calculate, within about seven or eight years, and should considerably balance off the electricity we pull in from the grid.
What’s also rather good about the timing is that we’ve also qualified for a government installation grant of about £2000, under a scheme which stops at the end of next month with the introduction of the new payments system.
Best of both worlds, though do I think panels like this will save the planet? Or rather, save us human beings? No. But they do make us feel personally rather better about our carbon footprint, and at least we’re trying.
The Coming Climate Change Panic
For those readers of this modest blog interested in perhaps the best climate change discussion out there on the web, I’d like to recommend Climate Progress.org.
They have a fascinating and frighteningly relevant series of postings currently up there on the overlap between climate change and human population – including a link to the clearest exposition I’ve yet read on the psychological tipping point we are now approaching, where the bulk of humankind will shift – as I agree it will, and quite soon – from ignorance/denial to panic/blame.
Also, Canadian Broadcasting has put together an outstanding three-part radio documentary on what is brewing which will chill the soul. Riveting and disturbing listening, as experts discuss the implications of climate change for refugee flows, war, famine and much more, with news bulletins from the 2020s.
Back with Climate Progress, I’ve posted a comment on the population question which I will copy in here as well.
(This is) one of the best websites on global warming and the coming catastrophe, and I read you every day from the UK – with despair of course, but also with relief, as a former journalist and now psychotherapist, that at least someone is naming it as it is.
But on population, isn’t one huge elephant in the room largely being missed in almost every discussion of climate change and sustainability? That it’s not that too many people are being born, but that too few people are dying?
To focus on reducing births while at the same time deploying every way we know to keep everyone alive for longer and longer is understandable given human emotions, but completely illogical.
This is of course, politically, a spectacularly incorrect thing to say. And quite impossible for us as 21st century humans through our own agency to do anything about. It’s not controlling births that’s needed now, but reducing numbers. Been tried before…
For me, the more I read the debates on this site and out there among the climate denial folk, this circle tragically can’t and won’t be squared.
Theoretically, yes. And we know what we would need to do. But given human behaviour (and we do after all function as a species just as we function individually), we won’t stop consuming, or wanting to consume, until catastrophe strikes. And we won’t sacrifice either our own children or ourselves to bring numbers down until Gaia does it for us.
Time therefore seriously to prepare for the worst that is coming, and for that psychological tipping point brilliantly identified in one of your earlier posts last week.
One wishes it wasn’t thus, but can anyone provide any serious evidence that this analysis is going to be proved wrong?
Copenhagen – A Bucket of Cold Water
With Copenhagen now over, I’ve been wondering how, briefly, to capture here in words and an appropriate image my own increasingly clear understanding, which the climate summit has served only to reinforce, that the game is over.
The image I alighted on is perhaps a little subtle, rediscovered among thousands of old negatives I’m now scanning into digital format. It reminds me how my own awareness has changed since I took the photograph on a cross-country skiing trip outside Moscow when a student there 40 years ago.
Look carefully, and you’ll see a Russian Orthodox church cross cast into a snow-rimmed stream – reflecting youthful vandalism, perhaps, but more probably systemic communist-era contempt for a rich, complex spiritual past.
Whoever cast that cross into the stream just didn’t connect, didn’t take responsibility, didn’t want to know. It’s not about religion, but it is about care for our heritage and the world that has given us birth, warmth and sustenance. And of course it’s also a reminder of times when winters were magnificent and real, with temperatures in Moscow regularly falling to well below -20C, and of an era of naive blindness as to where the 20th century’s economic and political models were taking us.
That direction is now so much more urgently clear than it was, and reflecting on Copenhagen, I find myself agreeing with Open Democracy’s Simon Zadek, that it’s time to find alternative ways forward.
COP15’s greatest contribution to the public good, writes Zadek, may be to bury, once and for all, our outmoded ways of doing global governance. Such an achievement, whilst sad to contemplate today, may turn out in tomorrow’s history to be an extraodinarily important legacy that served us and our children well in decades to come.
As I watch, and join, Christmas shoppers here in the Cotswolds continuing to buy and to consume obscene quantities of food and of presents, encouraged by government and media to keep shopping and borrowing to rebuild the economy, I’m afraid that while I concur that Copenhagen will be seen by history as a turning point, I don’t share Zadek’s implied optimism for future generations.
Our friend and ocean-rower Roz Savage, still relatively fresh from her summer journey from Hawaii to Kiribati in the Pacific, is staying with us today on her own return from Copenhagen, and is almost as gloomy as we are. Perhaps it’s partly our own realism (I bridle when being dubbed a pessimist) rubbing off on her.
But her sense of profoundly being let down does seem echoed in much of the comment, public and personal, coming out of Copenhagen, where one senior diplomat I know emailed to say how he came away from the summit dazed and bedraggled – and particularly affected by a comment from an influential French thinker in the New York Times this week, recalling the Russian author Andrei Bely’s description of Russia’s early 20th century mood as revolution and war loomed.
Events here are coming to a boiling point, wrote Bely. All of Russia is on fire. The fire is spreading everywhere. The anguish of the soul and sadness of the individual have fused with national mourning to produce one massive scarlet horror.
The horror that is now coming on a global scale is, to me, beyond question. What’s less clear, visible or even comprehensible, is what shape it will take, how it will begin, how we – humanity collectively – will know that it has truly started, and when our collective alarms will seriously begin to sound.
We probably have a few years to go until people begin to panic. But when I think back to two years ago, when I wrote a cover article on the psychology of climate change for Therapy Today, a great deal has changed and continues to shift.
In terms of quantity, television, radio and the newspapers in Britain at least are now awash with reports and discussions of climate change, partly but not only because of Copenhagen. But I continue to be amazed how far the quality of alarm lags behind, with journalists and politicians remaining supremely reluctant – fearful, perhaps – to join up the dots and speak directly of what is happening.
Post-Copenhagen, 2010 will be a critical year.
Working with therapists on facing the worst
Bringing climate change into awareness: presenting the issues
Climate Change Attitudes Questionnaire
Tree Staunton, Stroud-based body psychotherapist, and I have been exploring ways of facilitating honest and uncomfortable discussion among fellow psychotherapists about the reality of climate change and what this will mean for us as a species.
As you may have read elsewhere on my site, I have personally reached the conclusion, on the basis of very clear science and very clear psychology, that this 21st century will very probably (as in, almost certainly) see the end of our present human civilisation, and the death of most of the planet’s human (and tragically also non-human) inhabitants.
So, how do we address this as therapists? The following article was written by Tree for publication in the autumn edition of Transformations, the quarterly journal of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility.
We would like to share our thoughts and learning about presenting the issue of climate change to groups of people. This is very much a work in progress. Mark presented a workshop at the Psychotherapy and Politics Conference in Glasgow in May; Mark and Tree offered an evening to a network of therapists and counsellors in Gloucestershire,in October, and Mark recently offered a workshop to the therapists at the Cotswold Counselling Service.
We would describe this as a global learning curve – Mark commented that a collective learning was taking place. Just as he and the most recent group were able to break new ground, so we can assume that other groups in other parts of the world, at the same moment in time, are also finding new ways to approach the task, to bring new ways of thinking and being with the issues that face us.
In each of the presentations, Mark’s Climate Change Attitudes Questionnaire was used to open up discussion of feelings and attitudes. With our joint presentation we wrote in the blurb ‘We promise an uncomfortable and thought-provoking evening with very few answers but a lot of extremely important questions.’ Numbers were not great in either of the last two and the general feedback from organizers seems to be that people do not want to come and to face such difficult truths.
We are discovering that things CAN be faced and progress can be made if we provide the proper containment and holding structures. The evening jointly run provided some issues to process between us, as Mark was distracted and left early, and I was left feeling that the ‘holding’ was not adequate.
Clive James and Global Warming…
It’s worth listening again to/reading Clive James from the weekend before last on climate change, and how in his view the uncertainty around the science (!) illustrates the value of scepticism. Important, I think, both to read his piece and the largely intelligent responses which the BBC has posted at the bottom. Read the rest of this entry
People Just Aren't Interested
Oh dear.
People Just Aren’t Interested
Oh dear.
Viola on how we manage the interim
I have a slightly different take on Lovelock’s view that it is hubris to think that humans know how to save the Earth. “The planet looks after itself. All we can do is try to save ourselves.”
Firstly, we are already powerfully changing the Earth. Secondly, we have known what to do to correct our actions for decades, and yet we have failed to do that.
In contrast to what Lovelock seems to be saying, I think it is negligent to think we
can’t know and therefore should not try. Yes it would be hubris to think we know everything, but there is much that we do know, or can at least make a wise guess, and that knowledge is power (and therefore responsibility) to act. So we should try, not just to save ourselves, but the life on earth that we are steadily destroying.As for just saving ourselves, to be honest, I don’t care as much about saving humanity, especially if it continues to come at a cost to the rest of life on earth – which as desperation increases, I guess it will. It won’t just be us/those humans who survive that will be grieving. Elephants and whales clearly and recognisably grieve and I imagine in some way trees do too and the whole, wider consciousness of life.
I’d say: our actions and inactions place us in a position of responsibility. While the planet looks after itself (and us), we can also look after the planet – not in a power-over sense, but a power-with.
Another thing that strikes me is that climate change isn’t a single event – that end point. It is a gradual (or sudden) set of changes. There are several tipping points. We might not be able to stop the first one, but can we prevent even worse? At what point do we throw in the towel and carry on flying and partying and burning coal while the climate and life on Earth continues to change? Do we transition to a low-carbon lifestyle simply because it’s better, whatever the outcome climatically? And do we need to commit to deep transformation – personally, socially, culturally, ecologically – as part of the inevitable process?
Reflections on Tree’s Reflections
The hoar frost in this picture isn’t in fact from this last bout of cold weather, but from last autumn – a layer of beauty on the top, would you believe it, of a car outside our house in Cirencester, caught in the morning light. What magnificence there is in nature in the smallest things…
Reflections on Tree's Reflections
The hoar frost in this picture isn’t in fact from this last bout of cold weather, but from last autumn – a layer of beauty on the top, would you believe it, of a car outside our house in Cirencester, caught in the morning light. What magnificence there is in nature in the smallest things…
