Conversations with people who don’t fully understand things

I had the most perplexing conversation with a friend today.

We were discussing what would happen to society when oil and gas run out. I suggested the following scenario as a possibility:

Firstly, improvements in GIS etc mean we may find that the world has a lot more reserves than is now thought.

Secondly, when even these run out, we can go back to finishing off all the plentiful coal reserves which were considered economically unviable when huge oil fields were discovered.

Thirdly, this will not happen for some time, so by then the relatively new field of marketable renewable energy should have developed significantly, with dramatic improvements in technology.

Fourthly, we could all become France and go nuclear. To summarise, there are ways in which the world will not end when the oil runs out.

My friend (who i know is not joking about this) asked me if it was true that there are huge oil and gas reserves beneath Antarctica. Begrudgingly (because i knew where this was going) i confirmed it to be true. My friend then said “well if we aren’t gonna run out of oil for a while, we could just wait for global warming to completely melt Antarctica and then get the oil and gas from there, and also go snowboarding, because it would be really cool.”

At this point i tried to explain that Antarctica is so massive that it would take longer to melt than the time it would take for oil reserves to run out, but my friend had made his point and was running with it, and accused me of lying! “Why would i lie about how long it will take Antarctica to melt?” I asked him. His reply? “Because you are an environmentalist, and environmentalists lie.”

So in conclusion, thankyou very much to Al Gore for completely ruining my credibility.

The end really is nigh

I had a really interesting lecture today on the instrumental records of climate change. There was no comment made as to the possible causes of global warming, but one definite conclusion was made: we are totally buggered.

Happy International Polar Year!

This week saw the the launch of a year dedicated to polar study, to the tune of $1.5bn.

Unsuprisingly, climate change studies are at the top of the agenda. It’s about time we got our hands on huge quantities of raw data, so the ‘oh my god, we are all going to die’ (Copyright, The Independent) headlines will finally be justified. However i don’t think that bringing back this data is enough. Lots of amazing pictures should be taken of the large-scale melting, and there should be many images showing polar bears stranded on icebergs. This is the best way of translating the data into something meaningful. Remember the golden rule: give it a human interest angle! The Sun will lap it up. 

In other news, a member of an environmentally-orientated society at the university accused me of not caring about the planet today. This is because i rarely put articles from this person on my page. It’s not that i don’t care about the planet, because i really do, it was because the articles are really REALLY crap, and show that evidently the writer does not possess English as a first, second, third or even fourth language. This is despite the fact they are from Southampton.

Also, i looked through all the pages i’ve done this year, and over 70% of them are environmentally themed. If this person actually wants to make a difference, they should get a haircut and an English qualification and join the lobbyists in Westminster campaigning for the Climate Change Bill.