Small is beautiful

Stole half-an-hour break before evening surgery to hot-foot-it to some waste ground which is becoming densely overgrown with a riot of brambles, nettles and other "WEEDS." Absence of gardening / cultivation has led to the burgeoning of a flora and fauna well suited to MACRO - blippage. I saw lots of bees, wasps, beetles, hover-flies, flies, butterflies, shield-bugs (some in carnal embrace) and other insects, most of which are unknown to me. I liked this tiny elegant flower - which might be a white campion.

When the last ice-age ended the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere measured around 180 parts per million (ppm). This concentration rose to around 240 ppm by the beginning of the industrial revolution 250 years ago. By the time I was born, in 1958 the concentration had increased to around 350ppm. This year, for the first time in at least 5 million years, the concentration has reached 400 ppm. It's an exponential curve - rising more and more steeply as the world population of people has risen.

It was proven two centuries ago that CO2 is a green-house gas which insulates the earth and gradually increases environmental temperatures. The effect of increases in atmospheric CO2 is to disrupt the climate and ecology of the earth - effects begin by being almost infinitesimal but these effects grow and reverberate. There are many uncertainties about climate change but these things are certain. No serious scientist of the climate believes that the atmospheric CO2 concentration is irrelevant.

If we don't curb our CO2 emissions our children, grand-chidren and great-grand-children may never see what I have seen today. What's more the ecologic disruption which they do see may be a disaster more complete and more catastrophic than Hiroshima or Auschwitz or the Great Fire of London, the Black Death, the carnage of the Somme.... and all because we like to drive big cars, throw away anything we've had for more than a couple of years, and think that its better to run air-conditioning or radiators rather than change our clothes to suit the weather.

Here endeth the sermon