Warming signs in our changing climate

Kiki Blitz: What are your views on carbon trading?

Sir John Houghton: Carbon trading is a good way of trying to reduce emissions, but these things sometimes aren't quite what they seem. For example, the European Trading System is not reducing carbon to the extent it needs to because the carbon allocations are far too great in the first place. People are also making a lot of money off the back of it and have got away with all sorts of things! The system has to improve and must become immune to exploitation. However, maybe that was the way it had to start.

Kiki Blitz: How do you view the green wave in consumerism as opposed to reducing consumption full stop?

Sir John Houghton: The hierarchy of waste reduction is

• (1) don't make it


• (2) recycle what you can


• (3) recycle as energy if you can and...


• (4) put it into landfill.

The first one, however, is don't make it. We all consume far more than we need to; we buy things we don't really need; we replace things we don't need to replace; we don't buy things that will last us a long time etc. The market tells us to 'buy, buy, buy'. This is a problem! It's not just about climate change, it's about having a sustainable future - to achieve this, our modern consumerist mentality will have to change.

Kiki Blitz: How will that change occur if there is no political and/or a populist will to do so?

Sir John Houghton: That's a good question. A change can only occur if both people in general and Governments in particular realise that the world can't carry on in this way. Green consumerism poses a big dilemma because by definition a lot of consumerism isn't green! The bottom line is that we are using resources and environmental capital at a rate which is unsustainable and we are all going to have to learn to find different ways of doing things.

Kiki Blitz: What do you think of the media and its attitude to climate change?

Sir John Houghton: The media are too fond of putting over confrontation rather than genuine information. They have an enormous responsibility to tell people the facts and explain to people what its all about so that people are truly informed. Instead the media creates confrontation between people who are for and against a topic, including scraping up people who are sceptical about man-made climate change. The media doesn't do this about flat earth theory!

Kiki Blitz: That brings us to Live Earth. The BBC wheeled out quite a few sceptics in order to present a 'balanced view' on the topic. Do you think the BBC will continue to present a 'for and against' view on climate change or will they start to readily accept it?

Sir John Houghton: I'm not close enough to the BBC to really know the answer to that.

Kiki Blitz: Are planting trees effective in combating climate change?

Sir John Houghton: De-forestation of the tropical regions is a major problem for the world - not only do tropical forests contain a huge range of bio-diversity and millions of species, but also the climate of the tropical regions will change if the forests disappear. Take the Amazon away, for example, and the rainfall will dramatically reduce and parts of Brazil would become semi-arid or even desert. This would have a large impact on the climate of South America.

Deforestation also causes the loss of a lot of topsoil making the re-forestation of tropical regions that much harder. The world is actually losing a lot of its soil and you must remember that soil is made over many thousands of years, not overnight. Forests also act as a sponge to soak up water, therefore if you have a region prone to floods, trees are very important. What I am saying is that, climate change apart, trees are good things to have, so long as they are the right trees in the right places.

From the climate change of view, if you grow trees (which obviously consist of carbon), what happens when the trees reach maturity in 40 years or so? Are you going to dispose of the wood somewhere? Or just let it decay and release CO2 into the atmosphere in the form of methane etc? Put simply, there is a question mark over just how much carbon you are going to offset by planting trees. You must pose these questions to people using trees to offset carbon in order to ensure they are putting forward a consistent and robust scientific argument.

Kiki Blitz: Thank you Sir John for letting me interview you today.

-Ends-
(P.S.= I snagged this interview because of my job at /www.gocarbonfree.com/global_warming/green_technology/Sir_John_Houghton.html"> GocarbonFree. Score!!^v^

China's Three Gorges Dam promises to be the largest hydroelectric river dam in the world and is already altering local weather patterns due to the drastic change it has made on the earths surface.

The environmental impact of the dam is two tiered. The dam's rising water has displaced a total of 1.13 million people as well as the loss of many valuable archaeological and cultural sites and effects on the environment. Erratic weather conditions are have also been detected. the dam also has a positive impact on the environment because it provides a carbon free energy source for the a nation that is one of the fastest growing polluters in the world.1

The Three Gorges Dam will save 31 million tons of carbon emissions per year, cutting the emission of 100 million tons of greenhouse gas, millions of tons of dust, 1 million tons of sulfur dioxide, 370 thousand tons of nitric oxide, 10 thousand tons of carbon monoxide and a significant amount of mercury into the atmosphere.

Dr Liguang Wu of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has used modelling and actual meteorological data to find that the reservoir is cooling its valley, which is causing changes in rainfall.

The Irish firm Steorn has invented an energy source that claims to produces clean and constant energy using only clear plastic and magnetic fields.

If the technology works, it will revolutionize energy use in the face of the global fuel crisis.

The new technology called Orbo demonstration is being held at Kinetica Museum, Spitalfields London, tonight and streamlined on the Internet.

Oceans are becoming more acidic due to the raising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere. Scientist used to think oceans were similar carbon sinks to trees, turning CO2 into oxygen, but new research suggests that carbon is actually making oceans more acidic.

Coral reefs are being affected by the rising acidity in the oceans, and are early indicators of the disruption of the ocean eco systems. Coral reefs are bleaching out and dying because their skeletal structure can't withstand the new PH balance. Other marine species that have evolved to depend upon coral are also in danger.

Dr. Richard Feely reported his concerns two decades ago about carbon dioxide disrupting the chemistry of the oceans, but his research was largely ignored until now.

Millions of square miles of wet peat moss releases severe levels of methane

Stordalen Mire in Northern Sweden, scientists have found that the amount of wetlands have increased more than 50% at the expense of higher dry land which had been underlain by permafrost. Methane emissions seem to increase with temperature and creating even more atmospheric warming.

Since global warming predictions have been based on present gas emission statistics, the acceleration of methane threw thawing might throw off the scale of those predictions. Sergei Kirpotin -a leading scientists who is studying the global warming effects of peat tundra described the thaw as an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming."