Mind Mash

The environmental movement of the 1980s (or earlier) had some success – at least in Britain: rivers were cleaned up, power station emissions reduced and motorway underpasses were constructed to allow frogs to access their breeding sites. These were good things: the Thames was not too long ago disgustingly poluted, but is now clean enough for fish, and I even read of a diver swimming up the Thames recently. The movement’s success was, however, limited by its marginalisation by the establishment, who managed to successfully portray environmental activists as unkempt tree huggers.

The stakes are even higher now, and climate change is a global problem which impacts everybody and will not be satisfactorally solved without action from more or less everybody. An important part of the solution is finding a way to tackle climate change within the framework of a capitalist world.

The British government recently commissioned a report on the economics of climate change, which will be published on 30th October 2006 (tomorrow). Judging from snippets reported by the BBC, it will make interesting reading.

I was trying recently to find out about the current extent of sea ice. Interestingly, Google Earth does not display sea ice at the north pole, so I had to resort to looking for images and maps in the wider web. A regularly updated report on the state of the cryosphere includes reports on sea ice at the poles and other areas.

Rapid melting of Greenland glaciers confirmed by NASA gravity studies – there was an idea recently that although Greenland is clearly losing ice at the edges, warmer air carrying more water vapor was leading to more snow falling inland and the two effects might balance. They do not. The gravity studies prove that Greenland is losing mass, with roughly 20% more water melting away from the glaciers than is being replaced by snowfall.