Scientific Alliance Newsletter
Is there a crisis in farming? |
14.06.2013 |
According to a BBC report, things do not look too good this year for harvests in the UK: the headline reads Britain’s wheat crop ‘down by a third after extreme weather. The essential problem goes back to the exceptionally wet summer in 2012, which prevented farmers from sowing winter wheat between September and the end of the year (as well as spoiling a much of last year’s crop and making a significant proportion of the potato crop impossible to harvest). Over-wintered cereals and oilseed rape play a major part in temperate northern Europe agriculture and give consistently...
A common understanding of climate change? |
07.06.2013 |
A few years ago, there seemed to be a clear line of battle drawn between those who accepted the IPCC received wisdom on climate change – that disruptive and damaging global warming of several degrees was almost certain this century unless stringent cuts in carbon dioxide emissions were made as soon as possible – and those who believed the case was at best overstated and at worst completely false. With the debate being so polarised, insults flew in both directions and a dialogue of the deaf ensued.
Official scientific advice and the messages reaching the public were...
The unravelling of EU energy policy |
31.05.2013 |
As Burns said, ‘The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley’. This universal truth should be translated into all official languages and displayed prominently in the corridors of power in Brussels and all EU Member State national capitals. Nowhere does it apply more than to current energy and climate change policy.
Ever since distributed electricity and gas supplies have been available, governments have generally tried to make them accessible to all citizens and assure security of supply to both domestic and industrial users. An affordable, secure energy supply...
The consequences of misunderstanding risk |
24.05.2013 |
It is natural to try to avoid risk. All animal species try to protect themselves, and we are no exceptions. However, just as our bodies are still essentially adapted to a semi-nomadic, hunter/gatherer way of life but now have to cope with a largely settled and secure existence in a manmade environment, so our instincts are still essentially for a flight or fight response to perceived immediate danger.
Over the roughly ten millennia following the development of farming and the formation of settled communities, risks have changed. Like pretty much everything else, the rate of...
How best to spend £30 billion |
17.05.2013 |
The UK government announced some time ago its intention to build a second high-speed railway line – somewhat prosaically called HS2 – linking London initially with Birmingham and later with Leeds, Manchester and other northern cities. This major infrastructure project has been highly controversial from day one, but the necessary legislation has been outlined in this year’s Queen’s speech and the government is very bullish on the project (despite considerable opposition from rural Tory heartlands which lie on the route).
Opposition varies from the local (...
Biomass used to be good |
09.05.2013 |
Large-scale initiatives – and they don’t come any larger that trying to ‘decarbonise’ the global economy – often make sense on a broad scale, but the policymaking process tends to give some patently absurd outcomes. Consider just three examples: the EU Emissions Trading System, the prescription of renewables as the way to reduce emissions and the love affair with biomass.
First, the ETS. The objective of this is to reduce emissions of CO2 across the EU by assigning the right for a certain level of emissions to large energy users. In theory, by...
Banning neonicotinoids: a cautionary tale |
03.05.2013 |
After an extended and hard-fought battle, the European Commission this week agreed to put in place a temporary ban on a widely-used class of insecticides – the neonicotinoids – because of their link to declining bee populations. This is a clear victory for supporters of the precautionary principle. In the eyes of many people, the fact that lab experiments had shown that exposure to certain levels of this class of compound could harm bees was enough to justify the ban. But the way in which it came about shows that this is not at all a clear-cut issue.
For a start, only...
In 2008, the UK Parliament passed the world’s first Climate Change Act. At the time, this appeared to be almost universally approved of by the political class, with only three MPs voting against. Not only that, but the Bill was only passed after the government revised it to make it more stringent. The final Act enshrined into law a target of 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (up from the original proposal of 60%) and included aviation and shipping along with land-based activities.
The Act also set up the Climate Change Committee, an independent body with a...
At the turn of the century, climate change was arguably the single biggest issue around the world, or so it seemed in Europe. There had been a rising trend of global average surface temperature from the mid-1970s. The Kyoto protocol had been adopted by the signatories to the UN Climate Change Convention (although difficulties with ratification meant that it was 2005 before it finally came into force). The IPCC had already published two mammoth assessment reports and the third came out in 2001. This featured the striking ‘hockey stick’ graph produced by Professor Michael...
Government policy needs public acceptance |
11.04.2013 |
Governments in a democracy are elected to represent the voting public, but also to take the lead on necessary but sometimes controversial issues. Sometimes, legislators respond to lobbying from interest groups with an agenda for change, and are ahead of public opinion. In the rich world, this is very obvious in the education sector for example, where a strong clique of academics and professionals have moved teaching away from disciplined learning of facts to a more creative, child-centred approach. Most parents did not ask for this, and many right-of-centre politicians might be...
