August 2007

Just heard some twerp from the people who are setting up the camp near Heathrow Airport on BBC News 24. She said that climate change was the be biggest issue around and that it was a survivability on the planet issue. What tosh. even in the worst case scenarios humanity will be able to adapt to the changes that occur. It will not wipe us out. Does this mean that we shouldn’t try to mitigate the effects? Of course not. We should use cleaner energy technologies to reduce our emissions etc. Should we limit the flights people can take? No. Should we use better engines and fuels? Yes.

The twerp on BBC News 24 (who probably wouldn’t understand climate science if you slapped her round the head with it) also called BAA climate criminals. Hmm. Apparently we also need to go back to a more sustainable level of living. Bollocks. What we need to do is make better use of the resources on the planet for the betterment of the whole population. Not retreat backwards. And we need to start planning to use the resources on the other bodies in the Solar System.

I was on a flight this week from East Midlands airport, near Nottingham in England, to Belfast. It was about 19:00 and it was sunny with broken cloud cover when the flight took off. Once we got above the clouds the view out the window was stunning. Really beautiful. The cloud cover was almost complete when looking down, but there were lots of gaps as well. The gaps in the clouds were filled with a sort of thin mist. The sun was low near the western horizon and the light shinning through the mist in the cloud gaps coloured them milky-blue. It made them look like lakes in ice covered land. The low sun was also casting long shadows so the relief and 3D appearance of the whole scene was quite striking. Also quite alien. Our brains didn’t evolve in an environment where we saw many scenes like that. I wish I had a camera with me. A quick Google turned up the picture below. This is similar to what could be seen from the plane, although there were more clouds in reality. Still it gives an impression of the scene.

Click picture for larger view