Climate Change

Stephen has been getting annoyed and doing a lot of ranting recently. With the Copenhagen summit on climate change going on there has been an increased focus on climate change...a subject dear to his heart. There was major ranting going on when he found out that all the data comes from one source. The UK Met Office has by far the largest data set on climate change in the world. This is analysed by ONE group at the University of East Anglia, and there has been some controversy recently as they have been "sexing up" the language they have been using.... This is continued by the UK media who are using increasingly emotive terms - for example, the glaciers aren't melting - they are dying. Grrrrr....

There have also been many programmes on what we can do to prevent Global Warming...

We can switch all our light bulbs to the energy saving variety. And whilst energy saving bulbs are environmentally friendly (apart from the mercury they contain, but we won't go there) they take a long while to get up to brightness, not that bright is a word I'd use. Its maybe better to say they take a long while to get to a decent level of dimness... You soon won't even have the choice as to whether you go with the "mole burrow" lighting scheme - and its the lack of choice which annoys me! You can't buy 100w bulbs in the UK any longer and 60w bulbs are set to disappear too.

We can all drive Electric Cars. Erm....I don't want to be the one to point out the flaw in this logic....but where does electricity come from? Surely its generated by enormous power plants which pump out tonnes of nasty pollution (not to mention consume tonnes of fossil fuels) in order to generate the electricity to power these "clean cars"?? In the UK you are looked on as some evil planet murderer if you drive an SUV or a "luxury car" with a big engine. Before we moved to the US Stephen had a BMW with a 4.5l petrol engine and I had a Ford with a 1.6l petrol engine. You would imagine that the 4.5l engine would produce much more CO2 than my little dinky Ford engine right? Wrong! My Ford only produced around 20 CO2s less. So therefore its the millions of Fords which are the problem..! We are both now frowned upon planet murderers...the crops in the fields apparently wither and die as we drive past!

We can stop eating beef. Farting cows produce a lot of methane and we should therefore stop eating beef and switch to eating more environmentally friendly meat such as lamb, or even better, become vegetarian. You can imagine how much the steak-chowing, vegetable-hating one appreciated that suggestion!!

Following this through logically, there is one major item they didn't think to mention, and possibly a serious danger to the environment. They need to ban Indian restaurants. We all went for a curry last night (it was de-lic-ious!) but there are side-effects!!!! I'm pretty sure if scientists look, there will now be a hole in the ozone layer over Leigh Sinton, coz I'm pretty sure we punched a hole in it last night!!