Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Though a critic of the concept of an elected mayor for West Yorkshire, describing it as ‘an elected dictatorship, and not a proper democratic body’, Andrew Cooper, from Huddersfield, is representing the Green Party in next month’s election.
My friend John Gardner, celebrating his birthday today, has built up an impressive list by running an ultra-violet light moth trap in his garden. Hopefully these reprobates haven’t turned up.
Moths have a bad name in my brother Bill’s childhood writing. He wrote this damming indictment aged six and it’s survived in a school exercise book from his infant school days.
It is scarcely necessary to remind people of what a few feet rise in sea level (let alone the ultimate 200 feet which would follow the complete liquidation of the land-held icecaps) would do to to our geography. Suffice to say that it would be unwise to take a ninety-nine year lease on coastal flats!
Peter Ritchie Calder, Man and the Cosmos, 1968
That urgent advice was given over half a century ago by award-winning science journalist Peter Ritchie Calder in a succinct account of ‘The greenhouse effect’ in his 1968 book Man and the Cosmos, The Nature of Science Today.
As a student, publications like this convinced me that, if I was going to try to make a career as a natural history illustrator, I should also do all I could to campaign on environmental issues. I didn’t do very well on that one, so it’s good to see Greta Thunberg’s generation treating global warming (along with the alarming rate of extinctions) as an overridingly urgent global issue.
One of the functions of weather satellites is to make measurements of the energy which reaches the Earth and to note the circumstances in which it is lost. If records show over the years that this debit or credit is being affected, then counter measures will have to be taken. The energy budget is more important than the ledger-balancing operations of ministers of finance. The lives of people and the fates of nations will depend on patterns of rainfall.
Peter Ritchie Calder, Man and the Cosmos, 1968