"Greenwashing" concern re Solahart promotion

I just sent the following email to Solahart's Australian headquarters:

Hello,

Let me preface this by saying that I'm a very satisfied Solahart customer, having replaced my electric system just over six months ago and not wasted a single watt-hour of electricity on water heating ever since. However I was not so impressed with your company's recent marketing initiative involving a bumper sticker which reads, "My Solahart helps offset my car's CO2 emissions."

It surprised and disappointed me to have such a misleading environmental line come from a company which does an enormous amount of good through the promotion of renewable energy technology. Quite simply, that bumper sticker statement is false and potentially harmful.

The statement is false because solar water heaters do not remove CO2 from the atmosphere, directly or indirectly, and therefore cannot be counted as an "offset" against the burning of fossil fuels in a car engine. Instead, solar water heaters simply avoid the need to burn fossil fuels in power stations or in gas heaters. There is absolutely no relationship between solar hot water and vehicle emissions.

If the community truly believed the bumper sticker then they would feel less compelled to reduce their transport-related emissions in the false belief that they were somehow "offset" to some degree by their solar water heater.

Though it may have been an honest mistake or oversight, this promotion has the appearance of "greenwashing". At the very least, please cease the distribution of this bumper sticker immediately. I would also ask that you either send a follow-up retraction letter to all those who have already been sent a sticker (such as myself), or that you post such a retraction in a prominent place on your website or in another suitable public forum.

I would be more than happy to discuss these matters with you further - please feel free to reply via email or contact me on [phone number removed].

Sincerely,
Terry Brady

Bald Hills, Qld, Australia
http://2050vision.blogspot.com

Top Aussie: "Carbon-free economy" by 2050

From the ABC:

The Australian of the Year [Professor Tim Flannery] has told an energy conference in Sydney that climate change is occurring more quickly than at first thought and time is running out to make substantial emission reductions... "what that really means is that four decades from now we have to be living in a carbon-free economy."

Wake up, Australia, before the Great Barrier Reef and Bondi Beach become nothing more than stories we tell our grandkids. That is if society survives long enough for us to have grandkids.

Whatever you think about the economy or health or education, the most important issues this election are climate change and sustainability. Please vote for the long term, not just the next term.

Reflections on the Climate Change Forum

Many thanks to all who attended last night's forum at the Chermside library, hosted by BNCWAG. There were around seventy people including the group members and the politicians which means fifty or more responded to our invitation.

We had five politicians participating:
- Wayne Swan, ALP (current member for Lilley)
- Simon Kean-Hammerson, Greens (candidate for Lilley)
- Andrew Bartlett, Democrats (senate representative for Qld)
- Larissa Waters, Greens (senate candidate for Qld)
- Phil Johnson, Climate Change Coalition (senate candidate for Qld)

In some ways I felt it was a little unbalanced to have two Greens candidates on the panel, but I guess it's representative of their concern for the issue of climate change that they would consider it worthwhile to spend their time with us.

We opened with Dr Trevor Berrill's presentation which appeared to be well accepted by everyone present, including the politicians. Trevor did a brilliant job of setting the context for the night, with an emphasis on climate change as part of a broader concern for sustainability. He brought the issue home with a look at the local impacts and a call for local responses.

Mr Swan's political experience and professionalism is immediately obvious and he has an engaging speaking style - a combination which gives him an edge in keeping people's attention while he talks. I interpreted his position (and by extension the position of the ALP) to be that although climate change is the single most urgent issue facing humanity, it's not important enough to take any action which might harm the Australian economy. Unlike the Liberal party they've announced a target for GHG reductions by 2050 - I think it's 60% below year 2000 levels, based on the recommendations of the Stern report from the UK. But they are refusing to say anything about shorter-term targets until their own economic advice comes through from an analysis which is currently underway.

Mr Bartlett is somewhat more softly-spoken, with the air of somebody who weighs his words carefully before he permits them to become speech. A serious but not sombre man who earned a warm reaction from the audience for his assessment of "clean coal" as a marketing term chosen more for its emotive effect than its accuracy. As he pointed out, "less-dirty coal" is more truthful but doesn't have the same ring to it. And although I can't recall many specific policy details I gained the firm impression that this thoughtful bloke represents a party that's genuinely interested in the advancement of humanity in an ethical, prosperous and sustainable fashion.

Mr Kean-Hammerson was the third speaker, and I mean no disrespect when I say that he did not appear to be very practised in the art of public presentation. The Greens policies have been online since March so there's not much to say in that regard other than to suggest you go and look them up if you aren't familiar with them. With regard to climate change specifically and sustainability in general, I suspect that my own vision and values are more closely aligned with the Greens than with the other "major" parties. I'm not entirely sure I'd be comfortable with a Green majority in parliament but their influence, especially in the Senate, is welcome. To get back to Mr Kean-Hammerson individually, I was fascinated by the insight gained through his childhood in Kenya (I think it was Kenya, please correct me if needed) with regards to social and industrial development. If you're a voter in the Lilley electorate, try and find an opportunity to speak with this man and get to know him a little better.

The introduction of our fourth speaker marked a small milestone in history. The Climate Change Coalition was only registered as a political party three weeks ago and last night was the first public address by Mr Johnson, who is standing for election to the Senate. As you can infer from their name they have a fairly focused agenda. Mr Johnson has a background as a professional in the health sciences and acquits himself well in front of an audience. The sceptic in me rates the party's election prospects as poor, but I'm a bit inclined to give Mr Johnson my primary vote as a statement of support for his policy objectives.

Ms Waters had the closing statement and an opportunity to repeat the Greens key messages. A 30-year-old environmental lawyer with a somewhat vivacious style, she pressed the case for Greens seats in the Senate as the only way to break the Liberal/National coalition's influence in government even if Kevin Rudd is successful in his bid for the Prime Minister's office. It's an argument that bears some serious consideration.

Now to try and summarise some of the audience's questions and the responses as best my recollection allows.

A challenge was made regarding the accuracy of the term "clean coal". Unsurprisingly four out of five candidates agreed that it was an oxymoron while Mr Swan stuck to the party line in stressing the belief that coal-sourced power is essential for Australia's economy in the foreseeable future.

The candidates were asked whether any of them were brave enough to face the public and urge us to change our consumptive behaviour in the interests of efficiency and sustainability. The most memorable response came from Ms Waters who declared that she tells people not to buy things they don't need because it won't make them happy and it harms the environment.

Mr Swan was challenged regarding the relative importance of climate change versus the economy. His response was the standard ALP cake-and-eat-it line with reference to the Stern report and the need to wait for the results of their own analysis before committing to any "rash" actions. I understand the need for a large party like the ALP to be cautious with their policy development and disclosure but I can't avoid the impression that they consider the possibility of recession to be worse than the predicted effects of climate change. If that's not true, the ALP needs to do a better job of communicating it.

An insightful question came from none other than Doone Wyborne of Geodynamics fame - the company which is attempting to develop the hot rock geothermal resource in South Australia. He asked about the parties' stance on population management. Unfortunately I wasn't able to listen to all of the responses but I did catch Mr Bartlett's comment that he wasn't a fan of "steady-state economics" but saw economic growth within a stable population as being necessary to alleviate poverty. Mr Swan expressed concern about the social consequences of a reducing population, advocating instead a long-term policy of "replacement", ie zero population growth. Mr Kean-Hammerson described a conversation with an African villager in which numerous children were seen as a necessary component of family life at least partly for their capacity to do work such as water carrying: the provision of electricity to perform such practical tasks would, it was claimed, reduce the incentive to bear more children.

I also took the opportunity to ask a question myself. It was prompted by Malcolm Turnbull's comment about the prospect of achieving a global zero-emissions electricity sector sometime this century and based on my belief that values drive behaviour. The first part of the question was directed towards Dr Berrill: is it feasible? His answer, essentially, was yes - provided we're all bloody serious about achieving it. The second part was for the politicians and all I needed was a yes/no answer. "Do you dare to envision a society like that?"

I was pretty sure that the Greens and the Climate Change Coalition would answer in the affirmative. The Democrats I had hope in. But I was concerned that the ALP - in reality the only party with a chance of wresting control from the nuclear-bent Liberals - would prevaricate or maybe even deny the possibility that an advanced technical society could achieve balance with nature. If the ALP wasn't even considering a zero-emissions future then the fight for climate action in the next few years would be a difficult one indeed.

To my delight, every one of the candidates including Mr Swan delivered an unqualified "yes" in response. I am yet hopeful for the future of human civilisation.

Target, my arse!

I hope that subject line got your attention. Because that's exactly the strategy employed by our Prime Minister with his weekend announcement of a "National Clean Energy Target". Hopefully I've got something more useful to say than he does.

The more astute reader may have already picked up on my subtle hints and started to suspect that I'm not particularly impressed with Mr Howard's efforts in the area of clean energy. But for the sake of not being an arse myself I'll make the majority of this post as objective and even-handed as I can, starting... now.

There are three major aspects to the announcement: the what, the how and the when.

What: 30,000 gigawatt hours of energy per year. It sure sounds like a lot (it's meant to) but it's a funny way of putting things. Since one year has around 8,760 hours in it we can convert it to a measure representing the average instantaneous rate of power generation. Dividing 30,000 by 8,760 gives a smidge over 3.4. That's 3.4 gigawatts. To put that into perspective, Tarong power station in South-East Queensland has a generating capacity of 1.4 gigawatts, so we're talking about just under two and a half Tarongs worth of energy. I've loaned my copy of Mark Diesendorf's book to a friend so I can't look up what fraction of Australia's total present energy generation that is but my initial estimate would be "not much". To be fair, increasing our total renewable energy capacity to this level would be a significant step forward, but see the next paragraph.

How: This is not a "renewable" energy target or even a "sustainable" energy target. This is an allegedly "clean" energy target which refers to "technologies that emit less than 200 kilograms of greenhouse gases per megawatt of electricity generated", explicitly including coal-fired systems with carbon capture and presumably including uranium-based nuclear plants. There's a serious omission in that definition, which is the amount of time over which those emissions will be measured. Multiplying 200kg/MW by 3.4GW gives 680 tonnes. But is that 680 tonnes per year? That would be quite impressive actually, but it could well mean 680 tonnes per HOUR. Regardless, it appears to be a business-as-usual approach from a government which has pledged its support for the coal and nuclear industries, declared its faith in the gospel of carbon capture and storage and demonstrated its disinterest truly clean, renewable, sustainable energy sources.

It must also be pointed out that this scheme is intended to replace all the existing state-based schemes and coalesce them into a national one. There could be some real advantages from an administrative and economic perspective in doing this. But whereas the existing schemes are largely being implemented using true renewables this new arrangement seeks to bring coal and possibly uranium-based nuclear energy under the same umbrella.

When: Mr Howard's announcement sets the year 2020 as the goal for implementing this scheme. That much at least is clear and unambiguous. But if 3.4GW is only a small fraction of today's consumption, it'll likely be a much smaller fraction in twelve years time unless dramatic action on energy-efficiency is taken between now and then.

In the end this policy has the appearance of a misleading pre-election publicity grab designed to give the marginally-concerned majority the impression that the Liberals are being proactive about addressing climate change and sustainability, when all they actually intend to do is sweep the carbon under the rug and rush to build uranium-based nuclear plants as soon as they possibly can.

Event: An Inconvenient Truth presentation

Brought to you by the BNCWAG...

We are delighted to have Chris McGrath from Environmental Law Publishing coming to present Al Gore's famous slideshow. Chris was one of the 85 Aussies trained by Mr Gore last year to help spread the message about humanity's impact on the climate. As well as the presentation itself there's plenty of opportunity to ask questions - both of Chris and our group members.

Wednesday 10th October, 6:30pm for a 7pm start.
Chermside Library meeting room.
375 Hamilton Road, Chermside.

Mr S and I are hoping to have a display set up to show people how we're reducing our greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency measures and the use of renewable energy. If you have any suggestions or questions please let me know in the comments.

Action stations!

Mr S sent me a link to the Big Switch campaign website the other day. It's an initiative of Greenpeace with support from quite a number of conservation groups and a couple of business organisations. It aims to promote grass-roots community action on climate change and use that as leverage to pressure individual federal politicians into ratifying Kyoto, committing to significant emissions reductions by 2020, committing to significant renewable energy production by 2020 and establishing a national emissions trading scheme.

I gave it some thought and decided to participate. My details are registered and I've sent an email to my local member of parliament. But I was most interested in the community group aspect of the campaign.

My electorate (called "Petrie" even though it does not include the actual suburb of the same name) is bizarrely-shaped with the northern and southern halves having almost nothing to do with each other. Through the Big Switch site I discovered that there's a Redcliffe Climate Action Group but I have no intention of driving all the way up there to be part of it.

Thankfully there's another group based in the adjacent electorate of Lilley, going by the (possibly temporary) name of the Brisbane North Climate Action Group. This looked like a much better fit.

So Mr S and I went along - car pooling - to a meeting of the BNCAG this evening. What a fascinating bunch of people they (we) are. A dozen in total, a handful of whom started getting together about two months ago. Highly informal, friendly, and motivated to actually do something about reducing our community's impact on the Earth, and in particular on the climate.

It's very early days. Almost embryonic, you might say. But I'm hoping that this might be the opportunity I've been looking for to get involved and make a meaningful contribution to the future of civilisation.

Next meeting in a fortnight. I'll keep you posted.

Save the world by burning trees

With everybody going nuts about greenhouse gas "offsets" through the planting of trees which will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, this might sound a little weird. There's a growing interest in how much good we might be able to do by setting trees (and other plant material) on fire.

In the Global Warming context, the problem with using trees to soak up CO2 is that when the trees die they decompose and most of their captured carbon goes back into the atmosphere again, sometimes as methane (CH4) which is a far worse greenhouse gas than is CO2.

Researchers in South America studying the composition of some unnaturally fertile soils have discovered what appears to be large amounts of charcoal deliberately added by indigenous farmers over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. While initially most excited by the prospect of being able to improve soil productivity by adopting similar approaches elsewhere, people began to realise that this was also a surprisingly simple and effective form of carbon sequestration.

Instead of burning trees and other vegetation in big bonfires which leave just ash, if you reduce the amount of oxygen available to the fire you will convert much of the carbon into solid charcoal - as much as 50% of it. Then you can bury this charcoal in the soil where it appears to remain quite happily for many hundreds of years. Do that in the right kind of soil conditions and you can improve crop yields by up to 800%, or so it's said.

As an added bonus, burning things gives of energy which can be harnessed for other purposes, and even the gases from the fire contain useful compounds which can be captured and processed.

That's about as much detail as I want to go into here but I'll post some links from time to time with new info. If you want to Google, the South American soils are known as "Terra Preta" and the modern process of producing charcoal, energy and chemical compounds all in one hit is being called "BioChar". A local bloke I met on the weekend is doing research on that front and is setting up a website at www.biochar.net. (At the time of writing, that page only displays correctly in Internet Explorer - Safari and FireFox users will need to try again later.)

Global warming myth busting

Wanted to point out a great article at the New Scientist website which addresses 26 of the most popular myths and misconceptions about global warming.

Bottom line: climate behaviour is bewilderingly complex and it's great that global warming research is being subjected to intense scrutiny, but it really does seem likely that humans are having a major influence on the climate and this could have disastrous consequences unless we sort it out in a big hurry.

You can read the article here.

When I was a kid, we had something called a "car"

For the average Aussie nothing on this blog so far would have been too surprising. I've talked about global warming due to CO2 emissions, the terrible drought we're suffering and some fairly obvious approaches to reducing electricity and water consumption. So far I'm pretty much in the mainstream.

But to live up to the title of this blog we're going to have to go quite a bit further. Time to get back onto the topic of oil, I think, and how utterly dependent we are on the energy it provides us for transportation.

To recap, there are two essential problems with our oil supply: our burning of it is a major contibuting factor to global warming, and we're burning it so fast it's probably not going to last more than another couple of decades anyway. What's more, there aren't yet any technologies which we can confidently say will be ready to step in to keep our vast fleet of vehicles moving as the oil wells dry up and/or global warming gets so serious we don't dare drive any more.

Stop for a moment, and try to imagine a world with only half as much fuel available for transport as we have today, and at twice the price. Imagine that every second airline flight was cancelled. Imagine that you could only drive your car to work every second day (or for two car families that one car had to be taken off the road). Imagine half of all road-based goods delivery being cut. Half of the bulk cargo ships permanently anchored.

It should be immediately obvious to you that any significant decrease in oil supply is going to have a huge impact on the civilisation we call "the developed world". And in stark contrast to the basic assumptions of economic growth, the availability of oil would continue to decrease quite rapidly.

Civilisation in 2050 will either be based on some revolutionary transportation technology... or it will have dramatically restructured in a kind of reverse-globalisation. Actually there's already an accepted term for this: "localisation".

This idea is going to feature pretty prominently on this blog in the future. I know there's already plenty to worry about with the warming and the drought, but I think this one's probably just as important and equally urgent.

Tonight I'm going to add permanent links over on the side to two other blogs. The first is Chris Rhodes' Energy Balance and it's become essential reading for me. It can be a bit technical/analytical at times but frankly that's the value of it: Chris manages to put actual numbers against things like the comparison of present oil consumption vs the amount of land required to grow the equivalent amount of corn etc for producing ethanol. He helps separate fantasy from reality. And he has a great grasp on the implications.

Please take a moment to at least skim some of Chris's posts - this link gives you about half a dozen of them which include reference to localisation.

The other blog I would like you to check out is also from the UK. There's a fascinating movement springing up over there in which small communities (mostly rural but there's also some city action) are quite deliberately adapting their local economies and infrastructure to become vastly less reliant on oil. They're operating under the moniker of "Transition Towns" and there's a blog called Transition Culture dedicated to documenting their experience and promoting the broader adoption of the idea.

Now none of us can say for sure what will happen in the next forty years. Maybe we'll develop the technology to permit us to continue something like our current society in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. But that's a bloody short period of time. It seems smarter to me that we should look for wisdom in the culture of our pre-oil ancestors rather than gamble the future of everything on us actually pulling off a technological miracle.

For the time being, my vision of 2050 involves a lot less moving about of people and products. We'll still have the ability to travel... but as with so many other things we'll have learned to appreciate it more and will use it much more wisely.

Water

Australia is suffering a devastating drought. We have no idea whether it's a temporary abnormality or a new weather pattern caused by global warming which is going to stick with us for the long term.

Brisbane's water storages have dropped to under 20% capacity. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on water infrastructure in this region alone, including new dams, pipelines, desalination and reclamation (recycling). It's appalling that our response to a drought which may be caused by global warming is a massive project which first burns oil to power the construction machinery and then coal to power the desal plant and all the pumps. It may in fact be our only option to survive the present conditions but still...

The nation's major food producing region (the Murray-Darling basin) has just been informed that in the absence of significant rain in the next couple of months there will be no water available for irrigation later in the year. If this eventuates, future recovery would take years as long-established trees and vines are likely to die.

All these water woes aren't restricted to humans though. Environmentalists have been telling us for years that our abuse of water destroys ecosystems upon which we all depend. Now the pressure on the environment is coming from both sides: what little rain there is is being consumed by us, with basically nothing left.

No Silver Bullets (re Peak Oil)

My previous post was about the tension between the growing demand for oil and predictions of declining availability, and the relationship of oil consumption to global warming.

I expect that many people reading that post would quickly reassure themselves by thinking about one or more of the following:
- biofuels (especially ethanol for use in existing cars)
- electric, hybrid or hydrogen-powered vehicles
- coal liquefaction (literally converting coal into a fluid form similar to oil)

Here's why none of those make me worry much less, if at all.

1. Biofuels

The basic idea is neat: instead of giving carbon a one-way trip from oil to the atmosphere, lets grow plants to take CO2 out of the air then convert it to fuel which when burned puts the carbon back where it came from. The overall amount of CO2 in the air stays constant and we don't need oil.

But already we've hit a fatal flaw with biofuels: in fact the production of ethanol from, say, corn requires massive inputs of oil in the form of fertilisers, pesticides and fuel for agricultural machinery and transport. It also requires significant electrical input which - especially in Australia - basically means burning coal. So we're still consuming oil and adding CO2 to the atmosphere even before the ethanol gets into our petrol tanks.

Fatal flaw #2 is so obvious I'm stunned we are even bothering to attempt growing fuel. Our cars and trucks and planes and ships consume enormous amounts of fuel. Even if we dedicated all the productive land on the planet to growing fuel crops we would only manage to produce a fraction of the fuel we need to keep everything running at the current pace - let alone meet the exponential demand predicted for the future.

There is some research being done into growing algae in tanks or ponds as an alternative to land-based fuel crops. This may lead to a significant, sustainable biofuel industry and I'd be encouraged by that. But from what I've read it's still not likely to ever be enough to match our current appetite for oil.

2. High tech cars

It's true. We can make cars which don't need to burn oil.

Some people are keen on cars similar to the ones we have today but which burn hydrogen gas (H2) instead. There's no "C" in hydrogen, so when you burn it you just get H2O. Water vapour. But hydrogen gas is highly explosive (can you say "Hindenburg"?) and it's very difficult to handle. Oh yeah, and water vapour is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.

So there's a lot of attention on using hydrogen in fuel cells - basically little modules of hardware that generate electricity through chemical reactions and which you'd either swap in and out of your car like rechargable batteries in a camcorder, or top up with additional hydrogen. Fuel cells are real enough (they're used in the Space Shuttle, for example) but the technology needs a fair bit of development before it's suitable for use in everyday transportation.

Sounds good, huh? Uh-oh, here it comes.

Hydrogen's fatal flaw when it comes to the global warming / peak oil dilemma is that it generally isn't a source of energy but a carrier of energy. Hydrogen can't be mined*, it has to be produced. The simplest way to produce it is to push an electric current into water so that you give the hydrogen atoms the energy they need to escape their bonds to the oxygen atoms. That's how it acquires the energy which we want to use later on when we burn it in an engine.

Fuel cells and electric vehicles get lassoed with the same rope now. All these vehicles depend on large inputs of electrical energy. Hopefully you recall that our electrical consumption is already a major concern because of the CO2 we emit when we generate it. Unless we come up with a revolutionary large-scale way to produce electricity, these cars would simply drive us from the peak oil frying pan into the global warming fire.

3. Coal liquefaction

I only learned about this one recently, but it's old technology. During one of the Great Wars the British were astonished that their attacks on the German sources of oil didn't bring the Nazi machine to a halt. The Germans had prepared by switching to production of liquid hydrocarbons from coal.

The world does have heaps of coal (though calculations for "Peak Coal" are already being debated) and I get the impression that it's relatively simple and efficient to convert it to a liquid. On the positive side, this may help alleviate the shortage of raw material for plastics and fertilizers etc. But of course burning the stuff in cars is just as bad as burning it in power stations. As a greenhouse-friendly replacement for oil, coal is also fatally flawed.

Three bullets: shiny-looking, but definitely not silver.



* I am simplying things a fair bit with regards to hydrogen as an energy carrier but it's generally true that getting usable H2 on a very large scale would require massive energy input and that would predominantly come from coal at this point in time.

Peak Oil

The global warming prophets like to make graphs showing the world's predicted consumption of oil growing at an exponential rate through 2050. Their point is that we shouldn't be doing that because it will add so much more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and accelerate the warming.

However...

Another group of scientists and researchers reckon those graphs are plain silly because according to them there isn't enough oil left in the ground for us to consume at anywhere near that rate. Instead they predict that within a decade or two we're going to reach a point where oil extraction starts to steadily decrease as the wells dry up. They call that point "Peak Oil".

Some think we've already reached it.

So on the one hand there are predictions of skyrocketing demand and on the other they're talking about falling production. Those of you who owned a car in the 1970's might feel a sense of deja vu reading this. As I understand it at that time the constraint on supply was more political than practical but the effect is predictable: fuel prices went through the roof.

But the potential problem is much worse than high prices. Having a gap between demand and supply literally means there isn't enough oil to go around.

Transport would be the first thing to be affected. I was struck some years ago by a very simple phrase stuck to the back of a semi-trailer: "Without trucks, Australia stops." Think about it for a second or two. Then consider which is more important to you: the tractors and trucks which grow food and transport it to the shops, or the car which you drive to work to earn the money so you can drive to the shops and buy the food. In a world of diminishing oil, which one could you give up first? And what happens when the other one runs out of fuel too?

Oil is also a critical feedstock for industry. According to Wikipedia, it is "the raw material for many chemical products, including solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics; the 16% not used for energy production is converted into these other materials." The cost and availability of all these things and anything which depends on them would also be badly impacted.

It's kind of ironic that the worst predictions of CO2 emissions growth might never come to pass, due to us simply running out of hydrocarbons to burn. Lucky us.

Global yawning

OK, let's get this one out of the way.

I'm mentioning global warming as the first of my Big Worries because it's so obvious. You're probably well and truly sick of hearing about it. Just so there's no uncertainty I need to let you know I'm currently in the "this could be really really bad and it looks like it's our own fault" camp.

There are plenty of other places where the causes and impacts of the ever-rising thermometer are being debated and I'm not intending to enter into that here. But I will keep an open mind about it all and let you know if my position changes in any signficant way.

Now there are plenty of unpleasant predictions but for me the scariest thing about the world getting hotter is the thought of what would happen if the unbelievably large masses of ice currently sitting above sea level on solid ground in Antarctica and Greenland were to melt or slide off into the ocean. I've heard estimates of global sea level rises of as much as 60 metres as a consequence of that happening. No idea how reliable those estimates are, but even as I type this my stomach is clenching just a bit at the thought.

According to Google Earth my home is about 8m above sea level. Frankly I don't think I could possibly survive this if it did happen, even if I sold up today and moved to higher ground and joined a commune. For starters, both Michelle and I are pretty much dependent on modern medicines to keep us alive and functional (my heart and her thyroid gland) and I reckon things like drugs would be pretty hard to come by with most of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne etc permanently under the waves.

Of course I have no real idea how likely that is. The vast majority of us can only see a tiny glimpse of the overall picture through our personal experience - like I can tell you that winters just don't feel as cold as they did when I was a kid. But when the people with full-time jobs analysing this stuff tell me there's a chance it'll happen, who am I to tell them they can't possibly be right?

It'd take a lot more than six billion people crossing their fingers to hold back the tide. For the sake of my kids, as well as my own chances of seeing 2050, "a lot more" is what I'm willing to give to try and prevent the ice from melting.