On your last visit to the shops, it is almost certain that you came home with some plastic that you hadn’t taken out with you: if you are really careless, then it would include the plastic carrier bags from the shops you visted, but it’s hard to avoid the odd polystyrene punnet in shrink wrap. Then there are the cardboard boxes with plastic wrappers on the food inside, and sometimes also on the outside!

Then there are those little bottles of water in shrink-wrapped multipacks, and packs of fruit drinks with tough wrappers that will be around long, long after the drink has been consumed and excreted into the sewage system.

Shrink-wrap can’t normally be recycled by local authorities, nor can polystyrene, nor many other packaging materials, so they end up in land fill or being burned in the incinerators that no-one likes in their back yard (so why do those same poeple continue to produce so much waste?), along with much of the recyclable plastic.

Some of it just gets chucked anywhere: just look at the verges of a major road that hasn’t been cleared by the local authority for a while. I have been picking up this sort of litter as I walk or run through parks and the countryside for decades, but what gets missed just blows somewhere. Today’s haul was a dirty nappy in Ashridge Forest, left just off the dirt footpath in a pretty piece of woodland. There was plastic in that too.

What has this to do with grey whales? Have a look at these web pages:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/11/plastiki-rothschild-plastic-bottle-catamaran (millions of tonnes of plastic swilling around in the Pacific Ocean while sea life disappears)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/20/beached-grey-whale-in-sea_n_544130.html (A beached grey whale contains large amounts of domestic plastic.)

None of these materials existed 50 years ago, when plastics were still relatively expensive and the technology was at an early stage, so the entire phenomenon has built up during one generation. Our society is more obsessed with cleanliness and smelling nice than it ever was, but we seem to pay less and less attention to the filth and pollution that we leave in our wakes as we drive on through our lives.

It cannot make sense that every time we buy a sandwich, a drink and a coffee, which are consumed in 10 minutes, we throw away:

Sandwich: shrink wrap or plastic sleeve, carboard pocket, the bits we didn’t want to eat.

Drink: A clear plastic bottle with label and coloured plastic cap.

Coffee: Polystyrene or carboard cup, plastic top, plastic or wooden stirer, paper sugar packet.

What can you do about it? Quite a lot actually, but only if you are willing to think a bit more about your actions, and to not just take the most convenient course every time, which usually means buying everything in one trip to the supermarket: local shops and outdoor markets usually put less packaging on food items. And you can always select items that have less packaging, or tell the butcher that you don’t really need two plastic bags and plastic film around those chops.

If you are feeling really bold, you could protest to the retailer.

If you disagree with all of this and are one of those people who think that their convenience is paramount, and that chops need 3 layers of plastic, then you won’t have read this far anyway. But if you did read this far, I’d be interested to hear how you can justify it.

Were these fields to be left alone, apart from mowing, for long enough, they could become meadows, rich in wildflowers, with nesting places for skylarks and other birds, and a refuge for hares. That is unlikely – it’s not the culture around here, but if we are so much in need of food that we want to plant GM crops, why are the in this state?

Much of the actively farmed land in this area has livestock on it – beef cattle mostly, some sheep and a little dairy. Cattle are notoriously inefficient in terms of food per acre, eating and drinking many times the weight of meat produced during their lives, let alone the methane they blow out of their rears.

Then there is all the land throughout the South East that is used for rearing horses, which are a hobby. There is an industry around them which provides work and pleasure for many of course, and they are lovely animals. But again, this is land that is supposedly so scarce that we need to plant GM crops.

Again the same question is begged – if we can afford to put so much land to livestock, can there really be a food crisis so severe that industrially produced GM crops are needed?

It may well be that the prices paid to farmers for crops make them less attractive, or even unaffordable to grow, but that raises questions about the ‘free and efficient market’ that is supposed to apply. The market for food is a bit of a free-for-all, certainly, meaning that it is the interests of the rich and powerful that are best served, rather than the good of the land. The fact that farmers are sometimes paid less than the food costs to grow creates great inefficiencies and waste, and also that the problem is not short supply.

It is a fact that the UK has a growing population. They need to be fed, and some very knowledgable people say that this will become a problem. But why are GM crops necessary? We seem to have plenty of land available for growing crops that could feed any number of people, but we just don’t use it. Of course, as long as supermarkets can import food cheaper than our farmers can produce it the problem is even less urgent. If we foresee a problem down the road, which is quite likely,we should plan for that both in terms of quantity of food grown and population size.

GM crops use lots of aggro-chemicals, including pesticides. Pesticides are intended to kill things – the bees, butterflies and other vital insects that unintentionally ingest them included. Even without GM crops this is a problem: One of our local villages had an open gardens day on Sunday and in 4 large gardens I didn’t see ONE honey bee (quite a few bumble bees) and few butterflies. The advent of GM crops in the UK is only likely to make this situation worse, owing to the quantities of chemicals needed for them.

Then there are the ‘unintended consequences’ of planting GM crops. By their nature, we don’t know what these will be, but these are alien plant types that require a lot of technology to make them successful, and their wide distribution could be catastrophic. You can forget about organic farms nearby as their crops are likely to become infected.

Then there is the fact that GM seed takes a lot of research and development – they cost millions and millions of pounds. So the companies that produce them own the genetic material, and will want to sell it as widely as possible once they are allowed to. They are very powerful and will offer big incentives to get farmers roped in. As the market grows, the company becomes more powerful, and eventually, the trap shuts, and the farmers and consumers are in it – you can’t re-use the seed, nor cross it with other varieties yourself. You have to buy the seed, AND the ghastly pesticides from The Company PLC (probably American or Chinese owned).

We have enough land to grow food for ourselves and more: it is a matter of how we choose to use it….  and whether we allow the global human population to continue to explode (http://www.optimumpopulation.org/).

Item 1: 33.8% of honey bees in the USA disappeared or died since last year. The picture is much the same in the UK, though figures aren’t all in yet and is a bad year in a continuing trend. The main, but not only cause, is  ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ where whole colonies just die or disappear: what triggers it isn’t known, but taking into account chemical residues in wax, hives and honey, pesticides are a likely contributor. And if you think that farmers all stick to the usage guidelines for these poisons, you are probably deluding yourself.

If flowers aren’t pollinated, then most fruit (which includes vegetables such as beans) can’t grow. The immediate effect on our food would be very sad, the long-term implications are frightening.

Millions of gallons of crude oil are being spewed out into the sea in the Gulf of Mexico from where they were stashed away by nature millions of years ago. There is no easy fix and vast areas of coast and sea bed in the Gulf and beyond are imminent danger of destruction. The cost in fish, birds and other sea creatures will be huge, even if they can stop the flow. If it goes on for weeks, as it may well, the size of the disaster will be enormous and terribly tragic.

This sort of news appears somewhere every day of course, and the scientists warn us that we are on a cliff edge. So what is actually important to each of us today?

Unless there is a World-wide revolution and What Is Important becomes OUR ENVIRONMENT, it is hard to be optimistic.

So there was huge disruption and worry at East Anglia University and damage done to the reputation of climate change science in general aided and abetted by the media, who claimed that climate science itself was a scandal.

The latest investigation results to be published last week exonerate the U.E.A. scientists and it turns out that one reason for the (admittedly inappropriate) emails was that the scientists were constantly asked for their data and it had become too onerous as they didn’t have the resources to deal with the queries.

Now scientists are a sceptical bunch who rarely, if ever, say that something has been ‘proved beyond doubt’, or is ‘fact’. Unlike the newspapers, they do not tend to shout rubbish and lies from the rooftops, then forget about it when it turns out to be wrong (unless sued of course). If a scientific theory is shown to be erroneous, they argue about and investigate more and update their findings, regarding being wrong as part of the process of investigation and learning rather than as a sin.

So where are these climate change deniers who were so noisy a few weeks ago now? Have they, or the newspapers who gave them voice, screamed at us that, in fact, climate science is NOT a scandal and that the scientists have been vindicated, whereas the deniers were wrong?

It has been very quiet. The damage has been done, but no-one involved seems to have to do anything to repair it.

It does nothing to improve my opinion of Lawson or his self-seeking cronies.

A group of Alabama climate scientists who are collecting data from a satellite and who are regarded as climate sceptics have announced that the Earth warmed more in January 2010 than any year since records began in 1979.

Headline 2 – People don’t believe it.

At the same time, opinion polls show that people in general have become much more skeptical about global warming since the well publicized errors in the climate report published by the IPCC, and the dodgy emails at East Anglia University.

So basically, we like business as usual, and if you have the money, it’s fun. If you want to put this into perspective, I recommend reading “The Rise And Fall Of Consumer Cultures” by Erik Assadourian which can be found, along with other stuff, through Transforming Cultures at blogs.worldwatch.org/. I’ve spouted stuff along similar lines in these blogs, but he does it much better.

Of course, weather and climate are different – we experience weather every day, and a year is a long time. Climate applies over tens, or hundreds of years and describes the general, overall situation. We find it difficult to see this perspective when battling through the snow of January 2010 or sweltering in the heat of June 1976. One degree centigrade is nothing within the variation of weather, whereas if a climate changes by a degree it is significant.

If the entire global average temperature goes up by one degree, it is a major change, and this is what is happening.

Climate scientists around the world have persuaded politicians that global warming is happenin. For some of those politicians, it is a disaster that is happening now as their countries are in danger of inundation from the sea already; most accept that global warming is caused by human activities but are having some difficulty in doing anything about it, but there are some who have not accepted it or who choose to ignore it as an issue. The overall status is that scientists think it is happening and have warned humanity that it needs to be dealt with.

A large minority of the UK and US populations do not accept that humans cause global warming, and recent revelations of wrong information in high level publications and nefarious emails among climate academics have given great impetus to the sceptics. There are few sceptics among the scientific community, but their voice tends to be magnified through the media by political and business interests, so these mistakes will have a resonance far beyond what is merited.

An interesting comparison the case of Dr Wakefield and his anti-MMR vaccine campaign. I heard yesterday that the General Medical Council roundly condemned him and his actions which caused thousands of mothers to withdraw their children from vaccination. The result has been increased levels of measles and mumps, which have killed and damaged children. I feel strongly about this as my sister’s immune system was permenantly damaged by measles in the 50s, before vaccines were available. Every study and enquiry into the matter has concluded the Wakefield was wrong, and it transpires that he had a conflict of interest anyway, but that hasn’t stopped the press and some people in vociforously promoting his cause. And this in spite of the damage the diseases are doing children today.

So my conclusion is that we believe what we choose to believe, and scientists can experiment till the sky falls in, but even if all of their conclusions point the same way, the public at large won’t necessarily accept them. We also tend to pick out the parts that suit our individual points of view, such snippets are often wielded like a large debating club, even if they are inaccurate, flawed or plain wrong.

BUT, we must accept that we have been warned that global warming is a threat that puts civilization and millions or billions of lives at risk within the coming century. If we just continue as normal and do nothing to alleviate the risk, how will future generations look upon us? If the outcome is disastrous, then our generation will be cursed and despised. If things don’t turn out so badly, then we will still have used up the great bulk of all of the oil and gas resources of the world in two generations, and be leaving a planet strewn with trash and pollution.

As a friend said to me the other day, ‘Perhaps I just don’t care that much.’

We focused on the modern and nineteenth century paintings on the 3rd floor on this occasion, which include a couple of rooms of Pre-Raphaelite works. One is a panoramic view from a hill over Jerusalem painted at the end of the 19th century, and it made me stop and think. The walled city of Jerusalem sits on it’s hill top surrounded only by countryside where sheep graze and olive groves quietly stand. Peace radiates from the painting and you want to join the painter and contemplate the history, significance and beauty of the scene laid out as it had been for thousands of years.

I pondered, with some horror, what it must look like now: the dreadful Isreali concrete wall, the settlements on stolen land, roads, fences, factories, cars, rubbish, building sites. An all the hidden tragedies of people being evicted from houses they have owned and occupied for generations because Israelis want to settle East Jerusalem and make it all their own, the poverty, the overcrowding and hatred, the guns and the politics.

It struck me strongly that all this ugliness results from the explosion in population and is as parable for the World. We have gained, many of us, prosperity, less manual labour, fast travel and better health but at a huge cost. As that cost begins to amount to destruction of the environment that we live in, humans must stop and work out what they actually want.

The global population has more than doubled in my lifetime (I’m 60) and we are trashing the planet – mass extinctions of whole species, vast destruction of forests, tons of trash floating in the oceans, coral reefs dying, and global warming.  In a couple of generations we are also using up all the earth’s resources, oil gas and coal in particular, and what right do we have to do this? Future generations are going to inherit our nuclear and other waste but little of use.

And do we like a World with too many people? Do we like being in crowded places, competing for food, water and space? Do we welcome people into our land from places where there are not sufficient of these resources? Aren’t we all constantly trying to create ‘our own space’ and ‘get away from it all’? Are we happier or less happy with a higher popuplation? For the great majority, the answers are No, No, No, Yes and less happy.

We can’t return to the 19th century painter’s idyll of Jerusalem, but unless we are prepared to accept that the sort of conflict and competition for space and destruction that is going on there will be repeated thousands of times in bigger and bigger theatres around the World; unless we want our children and their children to live in a nightmare World, we need to start working out how to bring the global human population down.

If we don’t start work on this now, then chaos will result, either caused by humans or by the environment, or both.

I heard a business man say the other day that he knew about risk management, and that the risks of global chaos were too high to ignore: we need to act.

The following item concerned the funeral of Stephen Gately of the band Boyzone which was attended by many stars and celebrities: it was a great deal longer, and did include background and interviews.

I did my grumpy-old-man bit and said that I’d write to the BBC to complain about the imbalance and their priorities.

This morning, I picked up my Observer newspaper (left-of-centre liberal broadsheet) to find the funeral in the centre of the front page and also taking up the entirey of page 3. Was this because the Observer is in financial trouble and needs circulation more than it needs to retain it’s reputation as a serious newspaper? I suggest that it was.

Stephen’s untimely death was a human tragedy (not a national tragedy as stated on the BBC I suggest) and touched many peoples’ hearts and in particular his family, friends, colleagues and fans. It also attracted A-list celebrities which would attract a crowd anywhere. The getting-together of folk in this way is heart-warming.

Climate change protests are NOT heart-warming, and the fact that a thousand nutters were willing to cause mayhem at some powerstation in Nottinghamshire was not going to have anything like the appeal of the funeral. But climate change is a turn-off anyway.

In attempting to get a campaign going locally I feel increasingly isolated and like the protesters: I may (or may not) be right, but I’m a bit of a pain in the arse and lack the pizzazz of a funeral.

Renewable energy is very much in the public eye these days and the UK has an enormous looming energy problem owing to years of vacillation on policy, and complacency because the UK had it’s own oil and gas (now largely depleted). All the money from these resources has been spent and virtually none was invested in energy for the future. Now our nuclear power stations are mostly going out of commission and we didn’t develop the nuclear technology that we invented to create an exportable UK-based nuclear industry. In the meantime, the take-up of renewable energy has been pathetic owing to lack of investment and direction at government level, and a very damaging application of the planning laws that has prevented many wind farm and solar developments from being started. The government is talking about turning this situation around in the Energy Transition white paper, but nothing in that is even close to implementation and there is no sense of urgency, although that situation might change after the Copenhagen summit.

In the news today we are told that the UK needs to invest billions of pounds in developing energy infrastructure or we will be almost entirely dependent upon imported gas, which puts us in a terribly weak position and vulnerable to the vagaries of other countries, such as Russia. We have seen this coming for many years but we now have a huge national debt and it is difficult enough to work out how to repay the debt we have, let alone investing further billions in new projects.

I have an investment interest in a UK company called PV Crystalox Solar. This is the largest UK business working in renewable energy producing photo-electric cells which are widely exported. The shares have suffered this year as the market for their product has greatly reduced at a time when the World drastically needs these technologies to be used. Interestingly, one problem for PVhas been that the Spanish government were providing grants for people to erect solar panels and sell electricity back to the national grid, but the take-up was so huge that they have put a cap on it, stopping further applications for the moment.

The UK government is still talking about doing the same thing but haven’t yet, probably because they are afraid that they’ll loose tax revenue (in VAT and company tax from energy companies) if they do. Some investment in the electricity market and grid is also required, but there are huge benefits for people in installing solar and other power generation in their homes and for the country in setting up wide-spread micro-generation, especially for energy security and cost in the coming years. There are also, obviously, substantial environmental benefits.

So we seem to have a situation where people are interested in taking up renewable energy technologies, the UK government desparately needs to solve the energy problem and The Earth systems that support us need us to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. However, nothing substantial is happening in the UK and renewable energy companies are having a tough time keeping their businesses going when they should be thriving.

It feels like being a passenger in a train in which the driver is having an argument with the guard and is not at the controls as the train progresses inexorably towards the buffers.