The Climate Crisis film festival ran in November, and this week launched an online hub where you can watch 20 climate documentaries for £10. Some really good ones on there and I’ll be doing that myself. And as a reader of this blog, you can get yourself a 20% discount by clicking here and using the code GREENCHRISTMAS
Amazon is now the biggest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world. This does not make them good, it makes them fractionally less evil – but it’s a step in the right direction.
I hadn’t heard of ‘coral refuges’ before, but I was glad to hear that ocean currents can create pockets of cooler water that coral can flourish in, such as this one of the Kenyan coast.
David Powell is wise and funny and well worth reading on eco-anxiety in the latest issue of the New Economics Zine.
It’s always worth keeping an eye on what Drawdown are up to. Their latest report is called Farming our way out of the climate crisis and I’m going to try and make time for it this week.
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What we learned this week
Reuters’ investigation into global heatwaves has led them to conclude that we need a new term for them. They’re calling them heatstorms, and their report is an interesting crossover of journalism and science. On the subject of heatwaves, studies in Nature Health have calculated that there were 50,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer, the…
Let’s paint some roofs white
I’m doing a lot of work on overheating at the moment, and have been visiting schools to help them understand why their buildings get too hot in the summer and what they can do about it. One of the solutions that keeps coming up is painting roofs white. It’s well documented that white roofs reflect…
The science of hope
The Living Planet Report is produced every two years by WWF and the Zoological Society of London, serving as a regular health-check on wild nature. It’s not been positive news, and over the years its headline finding has become increasingly well known: that since 1970, average wildlife populations have declined by 73%. (This is frequently…
Should we put solar panels on railway lines?
A few years ago there was a flurry of internet hype about solar roadways – imagine a world where roads generated power for the streetlights! Or where solar-powered LEDs along the road replaced the white painted lines for no good reason! A lot of money was spent on this across various projects, the biggest being…
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Thanks for highlighting the Kenyan coral refuge. I know we need far deeper concern, alarm even, over our corals, but it’s encouraging to know of signs of hope too. I was reminded of the discoveries of resilience in the Red Sea and off Australia, and other measures to protect/restore them:
https://phys.org/news/2020-12-coral-recovery-prolonged-heatwave.html
https://theconversation.com/meet-the-super-corals-that-can-handle-acid-heat-and-suffocation-122637
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/17/why-there-is-hope-that-the-worlds-coral-reefs-can-be-saved
[hoping this comes across as ‘interested interaction/reaction’ stimulated by your post, which is the intention here, not as ‘competitive reportage’]
Interested interaction noted! These stories are important, as it’s felt like the loss of coral reefs is almost inevitable. If that’s the only narrative we have, it risks becomes self-fulfilling.
yes I have a feeling that’s how things should work on other issues too. I feel we need to be conversing on how things will turn out both worse and better than we anticipate, but there’s always a path to hope. I’m glad that sites like yours are bringing this out