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.

In my Sunday newspaper was a big article about the oceans turning to acid  – right now, not some time in the future. If this goes on happening (and CO2 levels which cause it are increasing rapidly), then vast amounts of extra CO2 will be emitted by the oceans instead of absorbing it as carboniferous shells are dissolved. The other result will be that the marine foodchains will be completely disrupted.

This is just another huge impending disaster story to add to those we here on the news and read and those we don’t hear about.

My point is, that there is a huge disconnect between the environmental reality and humanity’s behaviour. Before the industrial revolution, and in more primitive cultures to this day, humans were forced to take account of the environment in order to survive. Many cultures placed the environment first in every decision that could affect it because that was how the society could assure it’s continuity. Where this didn’t happen, the result could be like Easter Island, where an advanced civilization simply died out.

It seems that we are unwilling to accept that we still are an integral part of our environment and that we cannot control it and we cannot over-burden it. Many people I speak to, including the young who are going to live through the coming decades, are fatalistic, taking the view that they will enjoy today and hope that tomorrow is OK. If it’s not going to be OK, then there will be a level of suffering that will make today’s troubles look like a holiday.

For people like me who are trying to do something about it, it is like pushing a large boulder up a slippery slope: challenging, if not discouraging and of questionnable value. It becomes increasingly evident that unless the mainstream does start to get involved, then leaving it to a rump of environmentalists is going to achieve little (see previous blog ‘Death To The Environmentalist’.)

One environment, one humanity, one survival.

We could do with that wisdom today: to know the limits our power and when to exercise our optimism.

We complain about immigration, and our legislators bulldoze half-empty refugee camps; but the tide of migration from south to north, from poor to rich grows rapidly. Now the systems in Greece, Italy and Spain are under strain, and a wall between the USA and Mexico won’t stop the tide.

Why? Do people who live in nice warm countries really want to live in cold damp, overcrowded, foreign lands such as England? Probably not: the reasons are conflict, bad governance and lack of work and food: circumstances that make it impossible for people to better themselves.

But at the root, what is driving people to go through horrendous, life-threatening hardship, deserting all that is familiar, is over-population: the more people there are, the more competition there is for resources. The general result is poverty, starvation, environmental destruction (eg chop trees down around Manilla and the city floods) and conflict at local, regional and national levels. And as each person on this Earth adds to the environmental burden, especially whilst our behaviour is so out of control and we pay so little heed to what is sustainable, the drives to migrate are only increasing.

The tide is coming in and, whilst there is the pressure of growing population behind it, we are as powerless to stop south-north migration and the conflict that will result as old King Canute was to stop the sea. But there are two differences: the first is that, unlike Canute, we are glad-eyed optimists who seem to believe that things will sort themselves out, or some technology will come along to do it for us; and second that Canute could do nothing about the sea and the moon, whereas humanity could tackle the problem of exploding population.

The Optimum Population Trust is a UK think tank that is trying to find some answers. www.optimumpopulation.org