h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sure it's worth more to pay for recycled products - I do it too - but I'm concious that it's not helping the global warming problem. In fact it's making it worse.

About the re-using glass bottles - as someone who brews my own beer, I always re-use my glass bottles. It kind of blows my mind, to see me re-using the same bottle 6 times, with no problem. Sure, out of a batch of 50 bottles, 1 or 2 have become damaged and un-usable. But it blows my mind to think of the waste (in materials in energy) involved when you have a glass bottle, use it once and then either throw it out or recycle it.

Lastly Zagreb, you have to get the ball rolling somehow, and personal conservation is one way to do that. Plus, in one of the most important areas (driving cars), personal choice does directly and immediately affect the amount of greenhouse gas emmissions

simulpost -

"but it's hardly an extinction event."

Sorry, that's something you don't know. It very well might be.

SWL, the whole point of the Stern report was actually to keep our society going, not to kill it off. It's just that, with the best information we have, we simply can't go on as we have. New Labour are not a socialist government, and Gordon Brown knows that once taxes get beyond a certain point, they will harm growth. As PM-in-waiting, he's probably not immune to the realities of political life (ie, if the economy goes tits up, he won't be elected). The real point of all this is to stop carbon emissions while maintaining as much of our current life as possible. I'm all for taxes, but I'd bet the % tax amount doesn't go up by more than 1 or 2 % at most.

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Does 200 million migrants not send a shiver up your spine?

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I'm with Arnie on this one. SWL, I would say that it very well could be an extinction event. I am not sanguine about our ability to change the places we produce our food quickly enough to adapt to a rapid change in temperature. Maybe not a complete extinction event, but certainly a lot of people could and would starve to death, and I hate to think of the rioting and looting that would go along with such an upheaval.

Morningh all,

The Doc is In,
An honest post which needs no reply.

Zagreb,
For a normally 'logical' poster, yours surprises me!

We generate more electricity than we need, and have Instant sources like Dinorwic, just to satisfy potential demand. Do you think that the genrating capacity could not be reduced , and with it carbon emission , if the usage of electricity could be reduced?

If you didn't take the plane it would fly anyway ! - what even if it was 10% full, because other passengers decided not to go?

You thinking is , with respect, upside down. If we could reduce electricity consumption, gas consumption, and the use of cars ( to nip to the Off Licence eg) then the result could be a dramatic reduction in CO2 emmission, and a reduction in the Carbon footprint.

The only way to achieve this, in all the above cases, is to tax the fuels to such an extent that we all use less. Walk or put woolies on , faced with The Doc's attitude, which I am sure is widespread, that is the only way to achieve it, and it will have to be globally applied.

The Summer Time post was a device to get more stimulating argument going. I shouldn't have done it, wasted time and fuel.....

Lastly however, NOT to do anything merely consigns our decendants to a potentially terrible future. SWL's point about adapting is a joke. My grandchildren might be abl to adapt here, but if significant areas of the world are either flooded or starved then a very large number might decide to come here - armed, for the purpose of securing their own future.

Novo

I'm totally ignorant about how electricity is produced and distributed, but I'm interested in Zagreb's point because it relates to a general concern of mine about how much we can do at a personal level rather than at a government / corporate level. I would have assumed that electricity capacity (i.e. the maximum amount of electricity that could be generated) wouldn't go down if people stop using less individually, but that the amount actually generated would go down pretty much directly proportional to how much is used. The point about brownouts relates to capacity rather than the amount that is actually generated. Is this an accurate picture of how it works?

Not intended to distract from the topic of what we can do about global warming, but I'm reminded by a recent news item how appallingly ignorant we are of how our climate really "works." Following is a brief excerpt from the 7 Oct '06 'Science News':

"Dinosaurs, too, endured climate change. Although scientists had speculated that the world some 120 million years ago was unvaryingly hot, climate fluctuated dramatically, a new report argues. Twice during a 250,000-year period in the reign of the dinosaurs, tropical sea-surface temperatures varied by 6¡C, the findings suggest. That's twice as much variability as is known to have occurred at any other time in history.

"Since animals evolved on Earth, this range of temperature shift is unprecedented," says Simon C. Brassell of Indiana University in Bloomington, an author of the report, which appears in the October Geology. To determine the ancient temperatures, Brassell and his colleagues used a new method that measures the composition of the cell membranes of a marine microbe that accumulated on the ocean floor.

[....]

Scientists suspect that a rise in atmospheric methane, an event analogous to the current rise in carbon dioxide, might have kicked off the warm Aptian period, says Paul Wilson of the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, England. "What we see here is that the Earth's system has a kind of innate capability to get itself out of jail," Wilson says. "You don't get into a runaway greenhouse scenario."

However, he cautions that the timescale for such adjustments is long from a human perspective. Furthermore, the atmospheric changes 120 million years ago were small relative to the current increase in carbon dioxide."

All of which seems to suggest that we'd be better off to err on the safe side, I'd say.

Let's assume climate change is coming.

What is being done about it? Lots of mealy mouthed pontificating about carbon footprints, 4 x 4 cars, plastic bags etc. It makes me puke

If it's coming, it's coming, deal with it.

Some here are typical of the blame culture that infests and paralyses our society. For every action, there must be somebody to blame. What are you going to do when the Northern Hemisphere is under a mile of ice? Sue the US Secretary of the Interior?

If there were a fleet of aliens attracted by our radio signals on their way to destroy the earth, some here would be advocating switching off tellys.

Let's see real work being done to deal with the real effects of climate change. Let's see nuclear power stations being built on high ground to deal with the surge of energy demand when it gets colder. Let's put an end to building houses on flood plains. Let's start developing genetically engineered wheat to cope with extremes of weather. Let's start sorting out our immigration policies and developing effective border controls.

"God helps those who help themselves", not those that go around crying "Woe is me".

If things really go 's up and we have 300 million trying to move south out of Europe, how welcoming do you think the Africans are going to be?

I've just got to love your direct approach to things, SWL.

SWL, as brilliant as your straw man argument is, it's not going to pass muster here. This thread has focused on what individuals can and are doing to make a change. So why do you then supply us with a rant saying that we are seeking to blame everyone else?

It just doesn't make sense...

What can individuals do to change a geological event?

The thread title is/was "Global warming - what will you do?".

The answer is: get warmer/wetter/colder.

Bickering about the efficacies of recycled bottles ain't gonna affect planetary climate changes.

If the sh!t hits the fan, the smart ones are going to be safely ensconced within societies that took action to protect themselves. That's the duty of Government. I don't vote so that a UK government can fanny around helping retarded cultures at my expense. I expect a UK government to look after the UK.

Arnie, I have been thinking most of the night (except while I was sleeping) about your repeated statements that recycling takes more energy than creating new items. At first blush, this seems illogical to me. But I have not seen any actual facts to back up your assertion, and I am willing to believe that you may possibly be right.

Of course, when doing an analysis of the energy used in both pursuits, it is important to look at all the costs associated with the activity. For example, if we want to recycle paper, the paper being recycled has to be transported to the recycling plant. So you have to include that energy cost. But if you are making paper from scratch, you have to get the log out of the woods and into the pulp mill. So, if you are going to look at the energy footprint of that activity, not only do you have to look at the pulp mill and the lumber mill, you also need to look at the lumberjack. How does he get to work? Where does he live? How much energy is being used by that logging camp, that skidder, that truck that takes them into the woods (I promise you they don't walk), etc etc etc.

I would be very interested in a link that actually proves your assertion.

On another subject. My husband and I were discussing personal lifestyle choices in terms of energy use. There is a thing that is going on in this country that no one is even talking about as a waste of resources. That is "After School Activities". Millions of children are engaged in playing football, or soccer, or band, or FFA (future farmers of America) and they can not ride the bus home because they are at school for these activities. How do they get home? Their parents pick them up. Usually in a big gas-guzzling SUV, or around here a Dodge 2500 crew cab dually pickup truck. He was "babysitting" our nieces and nephews while their parents went on a vacation. He came home with a renewed respect for the problems a single parent faces. But he also stated that in one week he used 40 gallons of gas, and all he did was drive the children back and forth to their after school activities and their religious training activities.

I was thinking about school buses actually - I have the impression that in the US every kid can get on a school bus, is that true or do they only start picking them up when they are a certain distance away? Do they pick up from stops or what? Am really quite curious as to how the system over there works.

Fanny, I'm sorry for not providing references! In hindsight, it looks very useless of me, and a lack of references is something I personally don't like. Thank you for your well thought out and measured response. My only reference is from my girlfriend who is a scientist working on energy research (solar energy). I'll try to find out where she got her info from.

On a related note, we were lucky enough that in our rural setting we had buses provided to take kids home from the after-school events. But still there was an incredible usage of individual cars...

School buses: the availability of them depends on the school district. When I was a youngling, (in the 60s) I spent 10 years in rural Colorado. This was an extremely small school, had 425 students. There were four buses that went four different directions and carted kids to school. If you lived within 1.5 miles of the school, you were expected to walk or ride your bike.

when I was a senior, we moved to San Diego. No school buses were provided by the districts. We could walk or ride bikes, or the city transit service served us. We could buy a monthly student pass for $5.00, or pay a dime each time we got on the bus. We were NOT allowed to drive to school unless we had a special parking pass that was issued for special events like rehearsals for the school play (South Pacific that year).

In the San Francisco Bay area right now, the same system is in effect. The monthly FastPass costs $30 (I think) and is good for unlimited travel. There are no parking lots for students, land is far too expensive to use it for that. There are very few parking places for teachers. Most of them use transit also.

Now, around here (Laclede County, Missouri) there are a lot of rural students. Some of them live over 30 miles away from their school. Bike and walk is not practical. In our school district, the buses travel 750,000 miles a year (aggregate distance). Our school system has devised a ridiculous wasteful thing called "dedicated satellite schools." If you are in 1st or 2nd grade,you go to Esther School. 3rd grade goes to Maplecrest. 4th and 5th go to Boswell. 6th go to Hillcrest. That means no one has a neighborhood school to which they can walk. Every child has the right to ride the bus at taxpayer's expense. Many of them cannot because of the "after school activities" thing, so their parents drive them there. And then pick them up afterwards. Plus there are the little darlings who "don't Like to ride the bus", and the parents who are shocked because their children are exposed to (gasp) bad language on the bus, so they get driven. Interesting side note: the junior high school here has the idiotic policy that you are NOT ALLOWED to ride a bike to school. Something to do with liability, playing hooky, whatever.

In Springfield, they were spending so much on busing they decided to change their eligibility requirements, if you lived within 1.5 miles of school you had to walk to school. This has led to the phenomenon of children walking along 4 lane highways with no sidewalks, trying to cross busy intersections that have no walk signs. So far, only 5 kids have been killed.

I hope this helps answer your question, Kelli

I read about a village somewhere in Northeastern France where they pick up schoolkids with a horsecart

When I was in San Diego, the buses only picked you up at dedicated stops. Here, the bus drives past your very door and picks up each and every child. If there are two houses right next to each other, the bus stops at each one. Apparently none of the little brats is capable of walking the 100 feet it would require to take them to a major artery of the town streets. Please don't get me started on this. The criminal waste this represents drives me RIGHT UP THE WALL! And the Powers That Be are deaf to any protests by the taxpayers. I am saddled with a substantial tax burden to support this system and I have no say and no kids in school.

Client here

Not far from home there's a school the entrance of which is in a rather small, one-way street. Which means that at certain times, there are huge bottlenecks due to parents having come to get their children and parking as close as possible to the entrance lest the little darling would have to walk too much to reach the car

I don't even think (well, I don't want to think) that the majority of parents do that, but a very small amount suffices to get a traffic jam

Hey Novo - Greetings to you

Re your comment "If you didn't take the plane it would fly anyway ! - what even if it was 10% full, because other passengers decided not to go?"

Unfortunately if it were a scheduled flight then, it is (by law) supposed to fly regardless. If an airline has (for example) two scheduled flight to Los Angeles a day, then they can cancel the early flight and re-book the passengers on the later flight. If they only have one flight a day, then only "Technical" reasons (i.e Mechanical issues) will allow the flight to not operate.

Maybe I should specify that the parents fetch their children with a car?

What doesn't help much traffic either is the bus stop just across the school entrance.