I hope you find this Blog a resource for moral & environmental thoughts from a Christian viewpoint. "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in".
So, just how far away is 'space'? The Federation Aeronautique Internationale has established this to be an altitude of 100 km or 62 miles, NASA considers people to be astronauts once they've travelled higher than 80 km (50 miles).
Oxygen in the atmosphere runs starts to run low at 12,000 feet, about 2 ¼ miles and Mount Everest, you have to be very fit to climb her, is ‘only’ 5.497 miles high and many have died there without oxygen.
The NASA image seen on the left shows just how thin the earth's atmosphere is relative to the earths's size, evident in its radius. This scene captures the silhouette of several thunderstorms with their cirrus anvil tops spreading out against the tropopause, the first dark blue line over the earth. The height of this varies according to where it in Lattitude, it can be between 6 and 8 miles high and temperatures can be as low as - 80c.
It is the thin area below this that needs our protection and the reason why pollution control is so important in maintaining God's creation for future generations.
There are times when I wonder if the environmental movement in general looks at the environmental problems and forgets about the environmental successes. These are usually seen at a local or small level and yet often have a huge impact for the environmental cause. The following is one such local level initiative.
Our village had an allotment field (community garden) which is owned by the parish council. This had fallen into disuse over the years and had not been used for at least 20 years except to graze horses. With the increased awareness of environmental concerns generally and local food production in particular, one of the parish councillors thought it would be a good idea to get the field back into use again as individual allotment gardens.
After managing to get a grant and getting the work organised to reinstate the field in order to provide new fencing, gates, a water supply, marking out and initial allotment rotivating, the individual in question then held their breath, concerned as to whether or not the 12 allotment gardens would be taken up.
Within two weeks they all were and now the area is a hive of activity with some chickens as well as vegetables on the allotments. Last week I passed one of the allotment holders walking back from the allotment with the vegetables he was about to cook for dinner, food miles had been reduced to food yards.
Some are sharing their allotments; a group of three have got together and have formed a hen and egg syndicate on one allotment, and a local community has sprung into life. One of the allotment holders said to me recently that she had spoken to more local people in the last 2 weeks that she had over the last 20 years.
There is so much that is going on in the environmental field by such as you and I and from Transition Towns to planting a single seed each and every initiative is a success and I sometimes think that we do, at times, overlook them.
I must admit to being amazed by the response to this UK TV advert, especially from our U.S. cousins. The comments being made are that those that agree with the adverts sentiments are Nazis, Communists and Marxists, one individual suggested that we in the UK move to 'the land of the free.'
I am not a fan of the present UK government but when they get things right, and they do get things rights, just as Her Majesty’s opposition gets things wrong, then I am in support of their actions.
I have been involved in environmental concerns over the last 25 years and one of the causes for this is my concern about what kind of environmental legacy we are going to leave our children and grandchildren. This advert then gives a voice to all of my concerns and I was more than pleased that our government had the courage to have it made.
There are, of course, some scientists and experts who do disagree with those that consider the advert's science to be correct, just as there were indeed eminent scientists, doctors and experts that said that there was no danger of lung cancer from smoking... they were wrong as well.
Here in the UK we are surrounded by the sea, and yet the non-stop tides that are an unending part are seemingly ignored as a source of never ending carbon free cheap energy.
A way of harnessing this resource is an ‘energy island’. This is basically an outer ring, rather like an atoll, but with the inner area sealed off from the surrounding water. The island would use wind power to pump out the water from the inner area and then generate electricity by allowing water from the outer to again enter the inner via electricity generating turbines.
There are already wind turbines in the some offshore UK locations, as indeed there are all around the world, and the spare capacity they generate could, if this type of ‘island’ was constructed around them, mean that the potential energy in the trapped water would be the same as the trapped energy in a battery. Often the criticism levelled against renewable energy, especially wind energy, is that it may not be available at times of need, but with this Dutch system, that perceived problem could be overcome.
An attraction of this concept is that it potentially allows a large amount of new energy storage to be brought online quickly and, compared to nuclear or ‘clean’ coal, cheaply, and most importantly this storage would be along the world's coastlines, where most of the world’s population lives.
The power of the seas and the oceans are the most overlooked of the big renewable energy resources and yet they are there 24hrs a day 365 days a year.
As a part of Global Warming the world is experiencing many '100 year only events. many of these are extremes in weather, extreme storms are but one, and you can find more details of these HERE.
Rising sea levels threaten many low lying areas and countries are facing disaster, the Maldives is one. For more details see HERE.
The above is the breaking up of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, for more details, see HERE.
In Bolivia, the glacier melt water that many rely on for life has all but gone. For more detail see HERE.
The picture above is of Terry Cochrane in the U.S., and the dock that he is standing on should be on water 30 to 40 feet deep where he is. For more details see HERE and HERE.
The above is Scotland in early September this year,for more details see HERE.
In Kenya, the drought will effect millions and bring starvation to many, for more details see HERE.
Australia has been gripped in many areas by drought conditions, as a result recent high winds have caused Dust Bowl conditions in Sydney, for more details see HERE.
For more details of the demise of Lake Chad, one of the worlds biggest inland seas, click HERE.
Due to destructive logging activity and the clearing of land for large-scale farming, both offer high financial returns, the world's rainforests are being destroyed at an alarming rate, and the deforestation threatens the many vital ecosystem benefits that these forests provide.
Cutting down and burning tropical forests to clear the land in this way enables rainforest nations to provide globally traded commodities, such as timber, palm oil, beef, cocoa, coffee, rubber, bio fuels and soy as well as mining and cattle ranching.
The world’s population is likely to increase from 6 billion to 9 billion over the next 40 years. This population growth, combined with rising incomes, will lead to a continual increasing demand for food, animal feed and fuel. And this, in turn, will lead to more destruction of rainforests – with devastating effects for everyone.
Rainforests benefit us all, not just those who live in the nations in which they are found. They store water, regulate rainfall and are home to over half of the planet's biodiversity, but most importantly, they absorb and store carbon dioxide (CO2). So they play a critical role in helping to limit the amount of fossil fuel emissions (greenhouse gases) that build up in our atmosphere every year. To make matters worse, when they are cut down and burned as they are at the present rate, they are releasing more emissions than the entire global transport sector!
Rainforests absorb almost a fifth of the world’s man-made CO2 emissions every year. But tropical deforestation releases an extra 17% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. It is these emissions that are causing global warming. In simple terms, if we didn't have any rainforests to absorb CO2, the temperature of the earth would rise, as would sea levels.
Climate change is already happening. We can all see it all around us in the unexpected weather patterns, the flooding, even plants flowering earlier than usual. We are no longer in a position where we can reverse this process, but we might be able to slow the process down to manageable proportions, even if we cannot stop it completely.
In the past 50 years, a third of the world's rainforests have been felled and burned, and deforestation continues, now at the rate of 15 million hectares per year, the equivalent of approximately 8.5 million soccer pitches a year, or 23,483 a day. Although this deforestation averages a loss of less than 1% of the forests per year, it is believed that after the loss of 30-40% of a rainforest that the remaining forest ecosystem may become so destabilised that it will collapse.
In 2007 The Prince of Wales, following reports from the top climate change experts and scientists including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Inaugurated The Prince's Rainforests Project (PRP,)in order to promote the urgent need to take action against tropical deforestation. The Prince of Wales has long been concerned about climate change and about how destruction of the world's rainforests contributes to rising temperatures and sea levels and as a prominent public figure has often faced appalling sarcasm and criticism for his views.
I am a huge fan of the prince's environmental aims and opinions, as he has the courage to stand up and be counted for what he knows is right. For many of us his views may not have been new, but we are the very, very small minority and Prince Charles certainly reaches the parts of society that so many of us will never even have a chance get near.
In The Prince’s own words: "If deforestation can be stopped in its tracks, then we will be able to buy ourselves some much-needed time to build the low carbon economies on which our futures depend. I have endeavoured to create a global public, private and NGO partnership to discover an innovative means of halting tropical deforestation. Success would literally transform the situation for our children and grandchildren and for every species on the planet."
Please visit the site via this link and, if your are able, sign via the below.
During the week of September 20th, 2009, hundreds of government and business leaders from around the world will converge upon New York City for a series of high-level meetings and events focused on the most urgent issue of our time: climate change. This takes place just seventy days before the UN Climate Change Conference.
This "Climate Week" starts off 7 days of events in New York. The summit's purpose is to get world leaders together in advance of the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
Climate Week will be a high-power event because UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for this emergency meeting, and both Barack Obama and Hu Jintao will be giving landmark speeches.
The film trailer above (it may take a few moments to load... please be patient) is for an unprecedented global film event, the eco-premiere of the critically hailed documentary THE AGE OF STUPID. This will be broadcast live from New York City's World Financial Center on Monday September 21 to more than 700 locations in over 50 countries simultaneously, uniting nearly one million people for climate change reform during Climate Week NYC, setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest single screen shared audience experience ever.
This film has already had vocal condemnation from some quarters, much as Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' did. I am always heartened when certain parts of the media attack something like this as I am then certain that my thoughts, opinions and ideas are correct.
The truth is just as inconvenient now as it was 2000 years ago, but it cannot be silenced.
When plants grow they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Under the normal carbon cycle when plants die they either rot or are burnt and the carbon they absorbed is returned to the atmosphere but although this is better than using fossil fuels for compost or heating/light, the process does not remove carbon from the atmosphere. The same applies to Bio fuel. The crops from which bio fuels are made take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while they are growing, but as soon as that bio fuel is used, the carbon is returned to the atmosphere through emissions. If, instead, waste biomass is turned into Biochar, it can be buried in the ground, locking in the carbon for hundreds or even thousands of years and have a positive impact on crop outputs.
I recently went to see a pilot system of making Biochar. The Biochar in this case was small branches that would normally be burnt or used for wood chippings. The project I looked at uses a sealed system so the gasses from the wood actually burn the wood, and 90% of the carbon is still locked in the Biochar.
But what then do we do with this material?
Scientists have known for years that adding Biochar could improve soil fertility. The early Amazonian Indians introduced Biochar to their soil over 3,000 years ago, forming the Terra Preta, black soil which remains fertile to this day. It is only recently that the reasons why this happened have been understood. Biochar is extremely porous; the surface is like a sponge. This encourages the growth of micro-organisms which produce enzymes that release the mineral ions trapped by the heat stabilized plant resins in the charcoal and make it available to the root hairs of the plant as nutrients. Furthermore, the resins within the charcoal act like an ion exchange resin, absorbing traces of mineral ions onto the charcoal particle surfaces from the rain water, and trapping it within the charcoal’s molecular structure. The trace minerals always present in rainwater actually act as a fertilizer - providing the nutrients needed by the crops, year after year.
Or as Johannes Lehmann - Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, U.S.A said, “Important lessons can be learned from Terra Preta about development of civilization in the Amazon, basic functioning of soils, carbon sequestration, and sustainable land use”. I especially liked that last point, ‘sustainable land use’.
So we have a win-win situation, we create Biochar, locking the C02 away, and also create a proven fertiliser.
The systems to enable this are totally unsophisticated, as you can see. The materials are cheap and easy to obtain, a few building blocks, a sheet of metal and some oil drums. In the retort you can see in my photo’s the gas tight seal was obtained by a liberal application of Sussex clay, obtained from underfoot, while the trees that provided the wood grew around us. If you would like to know more about the Carbon-Gold project, please see HERE.
Genesis 1:12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
And not just good for beauty and food either it seems.
Plastic bags used this year:
(Plastic bag counter from reusablebags.com)
Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used and disposed of worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute. Billions end up as litter each year, in the sea, on the earth and in streams.
My Awards
With many thanks to the amazing Mrs.A for her award above. the very generous judges of The UK Christian Web Awards, for the award below and Margaret for hers.
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