Eco Blog - St. George's Berlin

Greenpeace UK warns: “  Shell wants to blast extremely loud shockwaves into the Wild Coast of South Africa, a fragile and beautiful ecosystem that is a vital whale breeding ground.  Each shockwave is louder than a space shuttle launch, and local whales, dolphins, sharks and turtles will be subjected to them every 10 seconds, for five months, in whale mating season.“  Here is a link to the Greenpeace UK petition: LINK Please help to preserve God’s creation.

  The EU commission want to define natural gas and nuclear power as sustainable, which would allow EU governments to keep on using them.  The WWF is planning to present a petition to the German government to prevent this, and need need 25 000 signatures by the end of today. ( LINK ).  Please sign if you can.

 Damian Carrington wrote an article in the Guardian on 3 June 2022 entitled "Car tyres produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts, tests show;  Toxic particles from tyre wear almost 2,000 times worse than from exhausts as weight of cars increases." ( LINK ) The importance of this article is not merely that cars produce even more pollution, but that electric autos are also not pollution-free. He goes on to write: " The tests also revealed that tyres produce more than 1tn ultrafine particles for each kilometre driven, meaning particles smaller than 23 nanometres. These are also emitted from exhausts and are of special concern to health, as their size means they can enter organs via the bloodstream. Particles below 23nm are hard to measure and are not currently regulated in either the EU or US."  Eliminating the most toxic tires is one possibility, but the overall data is striking: "Used tyres produced 36 milligrams of particles each kilometre, 1,850 tim...

  An article in the Reuters newsfeed by Leah Douglas on" Food, farming and forestry must be transformed to curb global warming, U.N." says: " Protecting forests, changing diets, and altering farming methods could contribute around a quarter of the greenhouse gas cuts needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change, according to the United Nations' climate panel." ( LINK )  Protecting forests is a long term issue in Germany as well as in the UK. Of course it is not just European forests that need protection, but also those in Brazil and the Congo and elsewhere. It seems easy to persuade governments to sanction countries for invasions, but even restricting entrepreneurs within our countries from funding the destruction of forests seems to be challenging. Banks and pension companies will listen if enough people put pressure on them to fund environmentally  responsible projects. The personal decision to change diets should be easier, even though changing habits ...

There is more than enough bad news in the world to create lethargy towards the climate crisis, when in fact there is more reason than ever to take active steps to protect the planet. Guardian columnist Kalyeena Makortoff wrote in an article on 11 May ( LINK ): " The UN climate envoy  Mark Carney  has warned against deferring emissions reduction targets in reaction to the energy crisis linked to the war in Ukraine, saying it will only require more 'radical' action in the future.“  Another guardian writer,  Damian Carrington, wrote on 13th May ( LINK ) : " The massive and deadly floods that struck   South Africa   in April were made twice as likely and more intense by global heating, scientists have calculated. The research demonstrates that the climate emergency is resulting in devastation.“ Warnings about prospective "carbon bombs" ought to get people's attention. The Guardian editorial of 12 May states ( LINK ): "  A Guardian investigation has reve...

Fiona Harvey (Guardian, 3 April 2022) ( LINK )  writes: "Scientists fear that their last-ditch climate warnings are going unheeded amid international turmoil caused by the war in Ukraine, and soaring energy prices." The report makes it clear that time is running out. Urgent action is needed in order to prevent further climate deterioration. The previous report garnered little attention, perhaps because it came out just as the invasion of Ukraine began, and there is little hope that this report will get greater attention. The substance of this report grows out of "thousands of scientific papers from the last seven years" and is yet one more indication that the scientific community sees a very serious crisis for the planet. Nonetheless it appears that neither policymakers nor the general public find scientific data sufficiently persuasive to take steps that would make the rich a little less comfortable, even if famine, flood, and death from hea...

The crisis in Ukraine is serious, but the climate crisis is at least as serious for the long-term survival of life on this planet. The news on the climate front is not good. Right now the earth is warming at both ends. "Startling heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles are causing alarm among climate scientists, who have warned the “unprecedented” events could signal faster and abrupt climate breakdown." (Harvey, Guardian, 20 March 2022)  ( LINK ) The concern is that this "unprecedented" double warming could lead to even more dramatic changes that are virtually irreversible in our lifetimes. The risk of an attack by a foreign tank army is easy to understand because it is physical, and has historical precedent, and can be seen in movies or in photographs in leading newspapers. The risks of climate change are virtually invisible,  except in the form of its consequences: flash floods or violent storms. Climate change kills by causing intolerable temperature rises that direc...