Climate change needs a name change

I believe in climate change. I do so because the evidence for it has been made accessible to me by people who seem to be independent of anything except a rigorous pursuit of the truth. Twenty years ago, worries about climate were raised by a few lone voices, characterised mostly as wacko environmentalists. Today, those voices include a vast body of scientists, be they climate specialists or otherwise. We might blame them for being slow to galvanise public opinion, to articulate the story, but let’s face it, even Leonardo di Caprio has found it hard to grab eco headlines. But that’s all in the past. Nobody can now doubt that science seems to have got the hang of ringing alarm bells. Even when a few email exchanges between climate scientists turn up which seem to feed the conspiracy charges of climate change sceptics, I am still a believer. And I suspect that so are most other reasonable people who have absorbed and sifted the same evidence for climate change as I have over at least the past 20 years. But even as I feel my views here accord with a sane and rational majority in the UK, I still have a big problem with climate change and worryingly, I’m not alone. So do half the population of the US. My problem is largely semantic but for many Americans it’s much more fundamental – they simply don’t believe that climate change on the scale we see today can be put down to man’s activities. Now, even though many Americans regularly touch us with the naivety of their convictions, I’m willing to forgive them their inability to believe that the current rate of climate change is down to us. I’m ready to do this because I’m prepared to bet that if we asked those same doubters if they believed their environment and the environment of others around the world was changing, they’d probably say, hell yeah. In other words, like a lot of us, they are lost in the science of the debate about climate and CO2 emissions – but they know a burst levee when they see one; they know a drought when they see it; they recognise a dustbowl and they know pollution in their local river when they see it. It’s often how you ask people the question and what I’m saying is, we no longer need to get involved in a tug of war about whether climate change is or isn’t our fault when we can almost all of us agree that our environment is changing very quickly and not for the better. I frankly don’t know how many parts per million of CO2 are best for the planet but I do know that the world I live in is beautiful and wondrous and it’s being trashed. And when the forests are cut down, when land becomes dust, when water becomes sewage, when fabulous creatures and peoples disappear, I understand it affects the climate but it affects my soul and my joy at being alive much more directly. The heating of our planet is the consequence of the way we are desecrating the earth and I don’t need science to prove this is right or wrong for me. Like everyone else, I have the evidence of my own eyes. So the arguments of climate sceptics are irrelevant to people like me. Even if they were right (which I don’t subscribe to for a second) and humanity was having little or no effect on the earth’s climate, it wouldn’t divert me - and millions of others I suspect - from pursuing actions to preserve our environment. After all, what sane person would want to live in a world where everything of beauty had been made ugly? That the planet is heating up is so blindingly obvious to me, as are its causes, that I simply don’t want to be part of that debate any longer. The carbon age has to be superseded for utterly unscientific and completely sentimental reasons: the needs of carbon reliant societies are unsustainable and force us to destroy and make ugly the only place we have to live. For that reason, forgive the semantics, but let’s start talking and worrying about something we can all agree on: Environment Change. This is observable, we can all experience it and we don’t need a degree in physics to see that a mangrove swamp replaced by a concrete shrimp farm is pollution or that a forest chainsawed to produce sawdust for fibre boards leaves behind a desert. Or that what happened to the River Cocker in Cumbria the other day was just one of those things...

Paint Free Coke?

OK, so the cynical may say Coke's new unpainted can is a) a publicity stunt and b) unlikely to ever happen. That kinda makes the cynical among us a) defeatists but b) realists.

But it doesn't half look good.

If these things are thought of, they may inspire good things to happen.

Be great to see this actually just be thrown into the market place, as opposed to bandied about and talked about. Such a radical step, as long as the eco credentials actually weighed up, might just force a lot of other manufacturers to work a little harder to bring their products up to scratch rather than taking little, safe steps towards a greener brand.

Green Graffiti

Seen this around a fair bit recently, but we do kind of quite like the idea of graffiti that technically cleans the streets, forcing the councils to keep up...

My Mate Climate

Well, here it is. The Standard Tuna tee to raise awareness and money for the good of our climate. They're ethically sound tees and printed with totally harmless water based inks by the good people at I Dress Myself, the ethical screen printers.

We're just kicking things off so are still setting up a lot of stuff, please be patient, but this is a very integral stage where we need as much support as possible.

We basically wanted to get them done them in time for The Wave on 5th December, but we'll still be selling them after that as the issue isn't about to go away and all profits from this project will be going to Rainforest Alliance.

So if you want a tee, they're £12 each + P&P . Drop Kenny a line on kenny [AT] standardtuna.co.uk and he'll sort you out from there.