If we’re f**ked on the climate, what can we do?

Blasted Peruvian uplands, ploughed up and burned for superfood maca. Those who visit this blog know how concerned I am about climate change, and the psychology of human denial of the urgency of approaching catastrophe. Our 32-year-old son Alastair is now on a kind of retreat in Peru, where we as parents were ourselves recently […]

Right, NZ ahoy. This bike trip’s for real…

So, after the disappointment and nerve dramas of the RTW bike ride that wasn’t last Easter, Raven and I (doesn’t it irritate when cyclists anthropomorphise their bikes!) are on our way to cycle the South Island in New Zealand. And this is also my first attempt at blogging with WordPress direct from my mobile. Hope […]

Climate Change and the Failure of Today’s Journalism

(Cross-posted with kind permission of Greenpeace Energy Desk) What was the most important angle in the news coverage of Superstorm Sandy? Was it – should it have been – the storm’s impact on the US presidential elections a week later? Was it the number of human deaths – the usual measure of newsworthiness – or […]

Forecast of 45mph headwinds – why am I doing this?

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. 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 […]

One week left, Raven packed – and ready to star in The Standard

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]