So do we care about climate change?

Well we have had a lovely term of sustainability and at the end of it all we have to pose the question that how many of us in the big wide world care about climate change? Well the answer would seem to be that we simply don’t care about the situation as the link that I have provided shows that many of the British public don’t care about climate change and this seems to be a growing trend which is very unfortunate. This is very troublesome as the issues of climate change will not go away on their own so they public needs to be confronted on these issues but it will most likely be just ignored again and again. I personally think that climate change is the most important issue in our lives and it ranks above war, famine and hate as it is a force that could destroy our way of live while people who dismiss it only make it worse. We are blighted by governments in the world who simply don’t care about climate change. These countries that include America and the rapidly developing nations of India and China (will populations of 300 million 1.1 and 1.3 billion respectively) and they are the worlds three biggest countries and they decision will have massive ramifications on the world over the next decade. In my lifetime we may be faced with a world in turmoil with countries and cities sinking beneath the now much larger ocean and the world will be plunging into a new ice age as the amount of fresh water from the melting ice caps will shut of the world’s gulf streams. These actions will most certainly be the result of the actions of these great countries in my early lifespan but in the future we will never blame them and will try to find scapegoats. The only way we will avoid this man-made Armageddon would be the recognition of climate change as an omnipresent and ultimately malicious force that must be combated and not ignored. The major problem is that people often are very bureaucratic when it comes to these issues and often try to hide away from their own mistakes and try to ignore the issue that is staring them in the face. There is a growing appreciation of this in the United Kingdom but we are only a small country in terms of world politics and in terms of population and our actions will only be a drop in the ocean and more needs to be done to recognise the threat. There are also a lot of problems from developing nations in Asia and South America that need to cause damage to their environment to develop and are unwilling to stop and they cite the destruction of woodlands in Europe over the past two millennia as reason to continue. These problems will be the major issues in the future as we have to become more and more aware of the possible outcomes of a global shift of climate and the major countries of the world (both political and in terms of population) need to be made aware or else all our actions in the United Kingdom will be fruitless.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1028425/Scientists-exaggerate-climate-change-fears-majority-Britons-believe.html
read the article not laugh at the photo!

Notes on our (totally uncorrupt) mini UN debate

So the time has come to discuss our geography debate which we held last week and I think in overall fairness we did very well even though some of the funding was clearly bias! I had to discuss the sustainability of South Korea and I found out that country to my own beliefs they are a very sustainable nation even though they are a rapidly developing nation. They have many policies in place which mean that they are becoming very sustainable will the country undergoes massive changes to their structure and the form of their economy. There a shining beacon to the world and many countries should make not of their example as they are doing very for themselves. They are set to become one of the world’s leading designers and producers of hydrogen fuel cells which will have to become the fuel in the future no matter what America has to say. They are designing many ways in which to make the world greener but they desperately need capital as many of the so called ‘developed nations’ are ignoring them as they don’t want to admit to their own mistakes which they have may and own up to the fact that this small countries ideas are the way forward. The debate itself was very well structured but I wish there were more structured comments like the ones a certain Andrew White made but nobody understood! The countries involved where from a vast plethora of places and I think some where poorly chosen as there was little information on what their policies on sustainable development was if they even had any. This made it difficult to create decent arguments as many people had little to compose their arguments with and was hampered by some people’s difficulty to talk in front of a large amount of people which held a lot of the debating back which was very annoying. The ideas presented were of very good standard however and the creative use of facts to expand some of the more unfortunately thin ideas by some groups was a very good decision. I do however totally disagree with the distribution of the funding to the countries as some of them were totally undeserving of the money. The main culprit of this was the United States of America which received 4 billion dollars of funding and even though they could only get it if they raised and equivalent amount I believe 4 million would have been too much. This is country dead set against sustainable development and many of their leading figures proudly display this fact when they talk to the globe. They have never wanted to try and help the world and would rather see it tipped into oblivion than raise themselves to do anything about their situation. This is my conclusion to this debate I am sorry for the rant but in blog you have to speak your feelings and this is my feelings.

Lets recycle!

So third blog and it just keeps getting easier and easier (no not really!) this blog will be on waste recycling in Northamptonshire and will focus the seven districts that make up Northamptonshire. These are South Northamptonshire council, Northampton itself, Daventry district council in the West, Kettering Borough council (also in the west), Corby borough council (in the North), East Northamptonshire council and the Borough council of Wellingborough (in the South-East). These Seven make up the political makeup of Northamptonshire but each one is very different in its characteristics as there are some that are rural and there are some that are very urban. These differences will make a difference in the manner that they collect and recycle their waste as different areas will have different ways of carrying out their waste recycling policies. The East Northamptonshire council has the lowest waste collection of the lot of them (26.8% compared to 39.2 average over the whole area of Northamptonshire). This could be due to the very rural nature of the area which borders East Cambridgeshire which is a very rural and agricultural area which may explain why there is not as much recycling. Many of these areas like the little villages are very hard to accesses from the major population centres and this means that there is little waste collection and so their percentages are lower. There is also the issue of the council actually wanting to recycle the waste as there is a charge for picking up recyclables which is in place nowhere else in the country and is a very rare thing to do in the whole of the country and is detrimental to the whole system of recycling. There are could also be other things such as people just couldn’t be bothered to recycle but we can’t tell that from the charts given and people would be unlikely to admit to it anyway so it is nearly an impossible thing to try and survey. So it seems after all this then that this business of recycling is a case of it takes two to tango as it is one thing to have a lot of people wanting to recycle but you need a reciprocal council to take up the scheme and actually want to do help the people in their district to recycle. This works in opposite as well because if you have a council that actively wants to recycle but doesn’t have the popular support they have to do a lot to make people want to recycle and this is the crux of the matter. This is an issue that will always be as difficult one as there will be many problems to overcome. There will always be people who don’t want to recycle and there will always be people over do a lot of recycling and believe that their respective council are not doing enough to help them ‘save the planet’. Trying to find a balance will always been a very difficult and thorny issue and it one that all councils will face but the outcome will be the decision of a lot of different people.

Don't panic!!!

Well here we go my second blog sorry for the delay but I don't come up with ideas on tap! This blog will follow the prompts this time and I will be talking about the image of global climate change and issues of the environment through different medias as I find the different slants on stories very interesting. There are many different newspapers in circulation in Britain today and they all have different slants on what is going on in the world and they often disagree on issues that are nearly exactly the same. This is due to the political ideas or parties that they follow and this is called media discourse (thanks Faith) which means that they may report the same article but in very different ways from each other. These traits can be seen across all papers in the United Kingdom and they each attract different groups of people who these papers are designed to approach and appeal to. This however is a major problem because they often different wildly on issues such as climate change where some there needs to be some co-operation as these issues could be sorted out a lot quicker if there was some sort of co-operation on the issues of climate change. This is a major issue and could be dealt with more effectively if there was some sense of co-operation between the different newspapers. In the UK there are many different papers but the leading one is the Sun (one of the most widely read papers in the English language) and no matter what people say about it this is an important paper as it shows the right-wing working class and as this is a very large and vocal group the Sun is an interesting paper to read if you what to get under the skin of a lot of people in this country. The Suns articles are often scare-mongering to appeal to a larger audience and this ok if you want to speak to the general public but if we are to analyse it there is greater difficulties as you have to look very deep down to find any grains or nuggets of hard fact but this can be a very fun process! There others major right wing paper is the Daily Mail but they are much more subdued and there articles are much more straight forward and there articles are often much less scare mongering. To swing in the totally opposite direction there are papers such as the Guardian which is a very left-wing paper and it is nearly as scaremongering as the Sun and in some aspects is even more so as they are more technically in their language due to who their readers are. There is also the Independent which is left leaning but is more gossipy than the Guardian and its appeal is to a slightly different audience. The last major British paper is the Times which is a very old and established paper which is supposed to be right-wing but has become much more central lover the last decade but it uses very complex language as it readers are the very affluent and they are the type that want straight forward news.
Here are a few examples of climate change from different newspapers
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/special_events/green_week/article1547947.ece
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1080945/Climate-change-causes-rare-swans-stay-warm-Siberia-instead-returning-UK.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/05/climatechange-carboncapturestorage
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-change-at-the-poles-is-manmade-980256.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4957408.ece

The rainforests

So this is my first blog of many on the topic of sustainable development and I hope that you find this as interesting as I hope I will find it. The ideas of sustainable development have been around for a while now but there are many conflicting ideas about what we must do to save the planet as it stands today but there are many who don’t see the current situation in the world as one of danger while there are others who believe that we have gone too far and there is no way that we can save the planet as us humans have already done too much damage over the last 200 and last couple of thousand years. I have read an article today (link below) which was published by the BBC that says that there are now countries in the world such as Indonesia that are trying to save parts of their rainforest from further destruction but there are problems as these countries as they are developing countries and they need these resources that are found in these rainforests such as wood and it will be unlikely that there will be much change as they simply will not be able to stop all people trying to drain these resources from these areas. In the past centuries all the so called ‘developed’ worlds such as America and Europe have destroyed vast acres of land for development and resources and it still goes on in places like Brazil where they are losing a rainforest the size of Wales on a regular basis. The idea of saving species is a very different concept but there is still issues as we have lost loads of species over the past century like the Dodo the Auk and the Tasmanian Wolf and it seems that now people believe that what species we have left can be saved but I am a pessimistic person and I believe that there will be little change to the situation and I believe that the situation will have little effect.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7662186.stm