Snow or no snow, Scotland's ski resorts are still on the slide
Any environmentalist occasionally tempted (and I admit I've been one of them in the past) to use one off weather events to highlight the risks of climate change would be advised to pick up a copy of today's Times.
There, under the headline "Global warming? Scotland sees its best snow in a decade" (it's the question mark that I really love), is an article from Scotland Correspondent David Lister detailing how Scotland's five ski resorts are enjoying "once-in-a-generation" spring skiing conditions.
The implication in the headline is that the high levels of snow enjoyed this winter provide some sort of evidence that global warming is not happening.
Now, this is of course utterly nonsensical - although only in the same way as taking a single flood as evidence that climate change is happening is nonsensical.
The fact is that any commentator or business that tries to link individual floods or hurricanes to climate change invites both critics of climate change science and sensation seeking headline writers to do exactly the same thing with those one off weather events that appear to run contrary to global warming.
The only way to assess the risks and realities of climate change is with long term data sets that show a clear and present warming trend – anything else is junk science.
In fairness to The Times it hints at this reality itself in the story, albeit circuitously, noting that while the Cairngorm resort is now expecting 60,000 skier days for the season this is a massive fall on the 150,000 to 200,000 skier days it consistently enjoyed when it was in its prime 30 years ago. Moreover, the resort has only just managed to break even over the last six years and will still only expect to make a modest profit this year.
Scotland's skiing industry may well be enjoying a good year, but those are the long term data sets it should really be worried about.
Why it's time to stop talking to the climate sceptics
It is fair to say that talk radio is never going to be the forum for the most nuanced debate on green issues, but after appearing on London's LBC 97.3 last Sunday to discuss the business case for environmental action I was still taken aback at the refusal of many to even accept the possibility that climate change is real and that perhaps we should do something about it.
Every conspiracy theory going was voiced during an hour that saw me fielding questions from the host James Max and members of the public, all of which pretty much boiled down to "there's no such thing as global warming, is there?".
There was the suggestion that scientists have made it all up to protect their "lucrative" funding, that green taxes are just a ruse to make more money, that sunspots are responsible for global warming and that only a few decades ago we were worried about global cooling.
There was also my personal favourite from a woman called Joan who rung in to say there was nothing to worry about because as it gets warmer she'll be able to grow oranges and lemons in her garden.
The problem is how you even begin to engage with these views when the person you are talking to will countenance neither scientific evidence nor logical reasoning.
Consequently, my suggestion that the scientific funding available to research manmade climate change is dwarfed by the financial gains available to those who can prove the opposite were pretty much ignored.
As was the fact that the proportion of tax revenue coming from green taxes has fallen in the UK over the last decade and the fact that sunspots and the post war period of cooling have both been fully accounted by the vast majority of climate scientists who are certain we now face a global catastrophe of unprecedented scale.
As for Joan, the fact that a couple of degree increase in average temperatures would mean drought and catastrophe in other parts of the world was rejected on the grounds that "lots of part of the world are cold". While the argument that the flip side of orange groves in our gardens would be more frequent water shortages and fatal heat waves was dismissed with the rather glorious non sequitur "we had heat waves when I was girl".
So what do you do when the normal rules of debate are temporarily revoked by individuals who refuse to recognise concepts such as evidence and logic? How do you argue with an assertion that climate change is not happening based on nothing more than a belief that it is not happening? And what should businesses do with customers and employees who continue to cling to these views?
I'm increasingly coming round to the view that the answer is to just ignore them.
As I quickly realised last night you are never going to change their mind, on the simple basis that belief will trump evidence every single time. Attempting to engage in a debate is a pointless exercise that will only leave those armed with genuine peer-reviewed scientific evidence or basic principles of risk mitigation feeling extremely frustrated.
Instead the best option when faced with the belief that manmade climate change is not happening is to steal a move from the sceptics play book and reframe the debate.
The fact is that most of the changes required to deliver a low carbon economy make sense with or without climate change.
For example, Joan might not care about the environment, but she is likely to care about her energy bills and would welcome ways to cut them. For businesses this cost argument is even harder to dismiss given soaring energy prices and growing concerns over supply security.
Even GM's Bob Lutz has grown to accept the logic of this argument, dismissing climate change as a "crock of shit" but insisting GM's Volt electric vehicle is still needed to help wean the US off of increasingly expensive foreign oil.
Meanwhile, business leaders who are sceptical about climate change still have to accept and address the commercial, cost and legislative risks associated with being a carbon intensive business even if they think the customers and politicians imposing these new green demands and laws are just plain wrong.
Because more people understand good basic business sense than understand climate science, sceptics will find these arguments in favour of action far harder to dismiss than they do UN climate reports.
And if you can convince enough of them to start to reduce their energy use through these basic business arguments it may be possible to encourage even the most sceptical firms and customers to make progress towards cutting their carbon footprint even while we wait impatiently for the last of the climate change denying dinosaurs to finally die out.
Not the beer, anything but the beer
If concerns over deforestation, food riots and increased carbon emissions aren't enough to turn you off biofuels, perhap this will work: the price of a pint of beer is about to increase and once again that pesky ethanol is to blame.
The problem is particularly acute in Australia - where beer is a staple apparently - because the drought has combined with a global shift away from barley and towards fuel crops to drive up prices.
Expect prime minister John Howard's opposition to Kyoto to soften any day now. If there is one thing that Howard's core supporter can't stand (besides losing at rugby) it's expensive beer.
Why the subprime crisis is worse than climate change
Occasionally you hear someone frame the debate surrounding the transition to a low carbon economy in such a way that it makes you wonder why we are having a debate at all.
Yesterday, I attended a conference on green banking hosted by BT Global Services where the keynote was delivered by Jon Williams, head of group sustainable development at HSBC. Here he is on the cost of mitigating climate change if the world acts quickly and decisively:
"Most of the assessments I see put the cost at 0.3 to 0.6 or 1 per cent of GDP – that is a mild recession. It'll have a smaller impact than the subprime crisis in the US."
Makes you wonder what all the fuss is about.
Can bloggers ever be green?
Blogging has apparently just celebrated its tenth birthday. Were it a person you'd say it was fast approaching those teenage years when it starts to get confrontational, aggressive, surly, pedantic, volatile and anti-social, but then again it's always been like that.
Unsurprisingly this anniversary has prompted one of those now perennial debates about what exactly blogging is for, whether it is proving beneficial, whether it is really, as it's advocates claim, poised to destroy the mainstream media, and most amusingly whether it is even ten years old.
The white-suited, best-work-behind-him novelist and supposed modern-day sage Tom Wolfe took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend dead tree publishing and slam the blogosphere as "a universe of rumours" filled with "narcissistic shrieks and baseless 'information'," which would be fair enough if it wasn't also a recognisable description all forms of media besides blogs.
With an inevitability that convention dictates we describe as wearying the blogosphere leapt to defend itself.
The most interesting response came from Scott Rosenberg, the co-founder of Salon.com, who (somewhat ironically) took to the pages of The Guardian to argue that Wolfe was guilty of the exact same dismissive attitude that originally greeted his pioneering of the personal voice of New Journalism in the sixties. As with the New Journalism movement, asserts Rosenberg, blogging does little or no harm and in providing a more democratic platform for people to voice their opinions and emotions it can do much good.
He cites as an example the penmachine.com blog of 38-year-old Canadian blogger Derek Miller who earlier this year began posting about his experience with colon cancer:
"On one level, this was the sort of thing so many of blogging's critics detest - of what The Wall Street Journal described as "thoughts that, ideally, should have remained locked inside fevered heads".
Of course Miller's posts are not traditional journalism, or blows against the "MSM" [mainstream media], or anything like that. They're just one human being injecting a direct vision of his experience into the global information stream... His work simply matters - to him, and his friends and family, and to anyone else who drops in a gets caught up in the drama of his story."
As Rosenberg adds, if anyone objects to such blogs no one is forcing them to read. "What price is the world paying for the existence of blogging's universal soapbox?" he asks. "Unless someone has figured out how to make you read a blog when you don't want to, I don't see one."
Now it will surprise no one to learn that I broadly agree with Rosenberg's analysis - you after all reading this on a blog.
There are appallingly bad and even harmful blogs out there, just as there are apallingly bad and even harmful newspapers, TV programmes and people. The immediate mass publication that blogging enables may well increase the risk that ill thought out and occassionally libelous opinions are voiced, but weighed against that risk is the ability to provide a hugely open and egalitarian form of publication and communication. Some politicians and old school journlists may disagree, but blogging's accessibility and it's ability to stimulate debate and communities has to be good for democracy.
That said, Rosenberg makes one throw away comment that is almost undoubtedly supported by millions of bloggers and serves to highlight the most intransigent problem the IT industry faces as it attempts to tackle its burgeoning environmental footprint.
"So what, exactly, are Wolfe and other blogging detesters worried about?" he asks. "We're not going to run out of web space."
Well we might not run out of web space, but our real world space is taking quite a kicking as a result of our exponentially increasing need for web space and the computing power that provides it.
As has been noted here several times, IT is responsible for over two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions - the same as the airline industry.
A huge number of innovations in IT hardware, software and datacentre design promise to slash the IT sector's energy use in the short to medium term. But it is highly unlikely that any of the technological developments delivered over the next five years will deliver energy savings big enough to keep pace with the increased demand for computing power from corporations under pressure to keep and analyse more and more data, from consumers who want a server in the corner of the living room, from burgeoning developing economies wanting to come online, and yes, from the ever-expanding blogosphere.
The problem, as Rosenberg's comment encapsulates, is that no one sees IT and, more specifically, the internet as a finite resource that might have to be managed. It is ephemeral, it is free, or virtually free, it is ubiquitous - it really is like air. And as it becomes more and more central to democratic, social and economic life, as embodied by the benefits of the blogosphere that Rosenberg rightly espouses, access to the web becomes increasingly regarded as a right.
And yet the web space Rosenberg is so confident will not run out is entirely dependent on real world resources that can and do run out - the PC on your desk, the millions of miles of cabling that literally tie the web together, and most concerningly the football pitch-sized energy-guzzling datacentres that IT experts agree are increasingly constrained by a shortage of space and power.
The IT industry can do a huge amount to tackle these problems through better, more energy-efficient technologies, but perhaps it also has to begin to ask itself some unthinkable questions about how best to manage the "web space" we already have instead of trying to keep pace with exponential demand for more.
We're not going to run out of web space? Sadly I'm not so sure.
