C02 emissions since 1850 (red); exponential growth (blue); cuts to hit climate target (dashed). Source: The Guardian

The author points out that in spite of everything we’re doing (renewable energy, emissions trading, etc.), CO₂ emissions are still rising at the same rate as before — have a look at the graph on the right. As it says in the article: “For whatever reason, cutting carbon has so far been like squeezing a balloon: gains made in one place have been cancelled out by increases elsewhere.” The dotted line shows what the world needs to be doing to limit temperature rises to 2°C — there’s just no way the red line (the actual emissions) are going to fall like this over the next couple of decades.

The article doesn’t offer many concrete solutions, but I think it’s very important to realise that we aren’t currently actually doing anything to limit the rise in CO₂ emissions.

Stumbling upon a python, a photo by viralbus on Flickr.

As always, it was a great experience, so much better than Eden.

If you don’t know the place, the idea is to take a zoo and a greenhouse, and then take the animals out of the zoo and put them and the visitors into the greenhouse together. This means that monkeys, parrots, leaf-cutter ants, pythons and bats might suddenly be sitting on your shoulder (the really dangerous animals, such as rattle snakes and Komodo dragons, are still locked up).

Furthermore, you can help feed the animals at specific times, and Léon loved feeding the bats just as much as Anna enjoyed feeding the manatees.

Apart from the winter months, you can fly directly from Edinburgh to Billund (home to Legoland and the Lion Park), which is about 80 miles south-west of Randers, so it’s really quite easy to get to.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the photo — it really is a live python next to Léon!

EUobserver has published an essential article today about the necessity of eating insects to save the planet.

It quotes a Dutch academic who believes that ‘insects are the sustainable, healthy and environment friendly foods of the future. “There are so many benefits to the eating of insects compared to conventional livestock, and, nutritionally, insects are exactly the same as conventional meat.”’

It appears that there are now several insect farmers in the Netherlands, concentrating on three species: ‘There are about 1,800 edible insects in the world. But for “scaling up” it has to be possible to raise the insects easily, which leaves mealworms – the larvae of darkling beetles – crickets and locusts.’

Insect products might soon be coming to a supermarket near you, given that there is a ‘team of four PhD students with €1 million for research focussed on extracting protein from insects. This is something of a holy grail […] as it would give all of the goodness of insect protein without the off-putting exoskeleton visuals.’

In case you’re getting hungry from reading this, the article even provides a recipe: ‘the novice insect-eater should start off with insects in a wok with rice and soya sauce, with garlic, pepper and salt: “This is really good.”’

Bon appétit!

Danish media are reporting that stocks of road salt are running low:

“Britain is the big culprit. They use too much [salt]“, says Per Nygaard.

He justifies this with the country’s road network, where A roads are narrow and bad. This means that in his view, all it takes is just a little bit of snow on the roadside before they begin to use road salt.

“They pour salt on by the bucketload. Their demand is enormously high,” explains the manager of Brøste [a salt distributor].

East Renfrewshire have now decided that we need to put food waste into a separate bin.

This means that we need to fit six bins into our kitchen:

1. Compostable waste (fruit, veg and egg shells)
2. Other food waste
3. Metal and glass
4. Paper and cardboard
5. Hard plastic
6. Everything else

(I’m excluding from this list batteries, medicines, electrical equipment and other items that shouldn’t be thrown into the normal bins at all, but which still need to be collected somewhere in the house until we find the time to go to Ikea or the recycling centre.)

However, it’s starting to be a problem to find enough space for all the bins, even though we have a relatively big kitchen.

Of course we could pop outside whenever we’ve eaten an orange or finished a pint of milk, but that’s not very practical in the long run.

How do other people fit in their bins?

During our stay in Devon, we went on a daytrip to the Eden Project near St. Austell in Cornwall.

It’s supposed to be one of the UK’s main tourist attractions, and most visitors did look very happy.

I thought it was an eery place, however.

Basically, it’s supposed to be “a living theatre of plants”, and its “mission is to tell the world the story of plants that changed history”.

I guess it does that very well (although there seems to be an emphasis on plants used in herbal medicine), but it also achieves it literally: There are no animals!

Compare it to the delightful Randers Regnskov in Denmark, and the difference couldn’t be greater.

Randers Regnskov is teeming with life, but Eden’s huge greenhouses are strangely quiet – no insects, no birds, nothing.

To me, it breaks the illusion completely: No matter how well they reconstruct a Mediterranean landscape, an indivisible part of that consists of the background noices made by the animals. How can you believe even for a second that you’re in a rainforest if nothing’s moving and the fruit is rotting away uneaten on the branches of the trees?

To be fair, the place is not completely dead. There are plenty of Cornish ants, and I also spotted a robin next to their banana plantation, but that just made the absence of tropical fauna even more painful.

I wonder how they keep the place so barren. Not only are there no animals, but I didn’t see many weeds, either, and in a tropical climate you’d expect every square millimetre to be overgrown within a fortnight.

I think I hated the place so much because it was so stunning. The greenhouses (or biomes, as they call them) are enormous and full of the most amazing plants.

If they handed over the site to the people behind Randers Regnskov, it could become a true Eden.

Am I the only one who loves the taste of pineapples and mangos but finds them a pain?

Pineapples are far too complicated to get into, and mangos have this horrible big stone in the middle.

All fruit should either be very easy to peel, like bananas, or have edible skin, like apples, and they shouldn’t contain any stones or seeds.

Why are the genetic engineers wasting their time on making wheat resistant to herbicides and other boring projects, when they should be developing pinanas (pineapples with banana skin) and pangos (mangos built like a pear, without a stone and with edible skin)?

The technology surely is there, so bring it on!

A scientist called Ning Zeng is proposing to bury trees (in Danish, scientific article in English here) to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

In many ways it’s a fairly obvious idea, given that coal and oil are the result on plants having been buried millions of years ago, so basically burying plant material now is just creating fossil fuel for the far future.

There’s something slightly weird about digging up ancient plants in the form of oil, gas and coal and burning them while burying modern plants to compensate, though.

Why not just stop using fossil fuels instead? Just because it’s more convenient to burn oil than a fir tree?

There is an alarmist article by Gaia Vince in the latest issue of New Scientist, called “Surviving in a warmer world”.

Its basic message is that a global rise in temperatures of just 4 degrees would lead to most current subtropical and tropical areas becoming vast deserts, leading to most people being moved to claustrophobic cities in the far north:

If we allow 20 square metres of space per person — more than double the minimum habitable space allowed per person under English planning regulation — 9 million people would need 18,000 square kilometres of land to live on. The area of Canada alone is 9.1 million square kilometres and, combined with all the other high-latitude areas, such as Alaska, Britain, Russian and Scandinavia, there should be plenty of room for everyone, even with the effects of sea-level rise.

These precious lands with access to water would be valuable food-growing areas, as well as the last oases for many species, so people would need to be housed in compact, high-rise cities. Living this closely together will bring problems of its own. Disease could easily spread through the crowded population so early warning systems will be needed to monitor any outbreaks.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Anyway, given that I’m not a climate scientist, I can’t really tell how likely this scenario is.

But one thing I must comment on:

In order to survive, humans may need to do something radical: rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution. [...] “We need to look at the world afresh and see it in terms of where the resources are, and then plan the population, food and energy production around that.”

I think they basically have some kind of planned redivision in mind, with the UN tearing down countries and creating new ones.

That is never going to happen.

If some smallish countries were lost to the sea, I guess the UN would be able to convince most countries to take their share of refugees, although most of them would be bound to end up in camps in neighbouring countries.

Alternatively, I guess some countries could try to buy new land. E.g., if Bangladesh were about to be submerged, I guess Russia might sell it a small chunk of Siberia.

I’m not convinced, though. 150 million Bangladeshis within Russia would lead to huge geopolitical change, and I’m doubtful Russia would agree to that willingly.

So I think reality would be a mixture: Some rich groups of people, or even countries, might buy new homelands in Canada or Siberia. Some peoples would be scattered across the world. And millions upon millions of people would lead hopeless lives in refugee camps.

Not neat, but much more realistic than the ultra-rational dystopia imagined by New Scientist.

I was thoroughly annoyed a couple of years ago when the Labour government in Scotland rejected a proposal to set beavers free in Scotland, just because some landowners thought they would be a hassle.

So I was very pleased when I learned that the proposal has now been given the green light by the SNP government.

Beavers were released in the wild in Denmark a few years ago, and it’s been a big success. Sure, they build damns and flood fields, but that’s the whole point – the resulting wetlands are great for lots of animals, not just the beavers.