Slick

More photo-chop. As the black stuff engulfs the gulf coast, BPs greenwash is exposed.

Smells like teen spirit

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Something of a stink in Beijijng

ut you really should be looking at this HERE

Salt and Vinegar

The seas continue to acidify apace.

Biofuel takes to the air
...and crashes to the ground
...without significant benefits along the way

Art's lost subject, anyone?

Bad Dream Time

Global warming is bad for your health - particularly if you're an aboriginal Australian, a Pacific Islander or a polar bear

The British police drum up a bit more business for themselves

Excellent climate commons piece from Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate

More Noblesse Oblige

Prince Charles continues to use his position a lot more wisely than the rest of the anachronistic rabble from which he hails. Frank may have been manning the anarchist barricades for 40 years but he now, somehow, finds himself in bed with Chuckles. Life, eh?
This cartoon is a modestly amended regurgitation of a very early Frank strip, which is as much as I can manage today.

In the wind....designs improve and the promise of increase abounds (outside of the lamentably poorly served UK) and even the mafia are keen to get involved!
Hell - even the French!

In the water...anacondas

McFly 23 is out and about in Manchester, teaching elephants to tapdance

Fuel Dump

It might need a revolution in the water-heavy way we process our own waste, but there's a lot of potential here, isn't there? If we need a massive infrastructural rearrangement, why not make it inherently sustainable.
If I'm talking shite, please tell me. (Please see very informative comment by Anonymous (Dr. J. Singmaster), below)

Elsewhere - despite continuing improvements in the technology, the "demand" ( now there's a can of semantic worms) for wind turbines declines .

An early-doors pointer to the potential problems we might face, should a nuclear future coincide with further economic collapse; Will capital run for the hills when the bills outweigh the profits and the dangers are on someone else's doorstep?

Once more unto the beach, dear friends.

As a recent poll shows that even those who profess concern about climate change have no intention of cutting down on the jet-fuelled beanos, and as Portugese Men-o-war swarm into the Med' in the latest incursion by the jellied masses, I am tempted to yet again repost this (slightly amended) old chestnut.

Meanwhile - US consumers seem a little more ready than we in the UK to foot the bill. Something to do with leadership, perhaps?

Efforts are made to streamline and revolutionise energy

When Fixes Need Fixing?

Grist provides these two links to reports of pending agricultural collapse in the Punjab due to (profit driven?) over-exploitation of resources.

The Huffington Post posts this , by Lise van Susteran, on Moral Obligation

Fred Pearce on consuming vs population. Did I post this already?)

I just saw this - Ian Tomlinson's death at the G20 demonstrations now being treated as possible manslaughter

The most terrifying video you will ever see?

Pooling Resources

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.



Frank can't help it. He's old.

Australia wrinkles up and begins to fall apart, giving the world a taste of things to come.

It may look like we'll wipe everything out and poisonously ship it home for our supper, but while there is gobsmacking genius like the cardboard solar oven, there is still most definitely hope.

Bear essentials

While humans concentrate on launching an "affordable" car for billions of bicyclers, and prepare to meltdown the amazon for palm-oil, the incredible shrinking polar bear seeks protection where it may

More on the Polar bear here.

Water and space are at a premium

Manchester Climate Fortnightly (McFly) Number 20 is now available, and , if you live in Greater Manchester, you are cordially invited to the launch of the "Call to real action" to make real progress in decarbonising the city.

Birds of Prey

Birds - forever the canaries in our coalmine -are first off the blocks in the race over the edge. Our own migratory upheavals will not be far behind.

Meanwhile - The EU bottles out of Climate Funding for poor nations whilst the media call for it all to be left to the philanthropic urges of uber-capitalists (who have been doing such a bang-up job lately)

Wipe-Out

Toilet humour. I know. It's not big. It's not clever. Some sophisticated souls pull their faces over material like this and end up looking like a bulldog licking piss off a thistle. They think it devalues the currency. I pooh pooh such notions.
Anyway...American's dedication to a luxury defecatory experience leaves virgin forests depleted, with a nagging feeling that they could have done so much more with their lives. Maybe they could have been the mainstay of continental water equilibrium. Rather water than water closets. Maybe in another life.

Char wallahs

BioChar seems set to be a nice little earner for those unable to fill their boots with biodiesel. But before everybody runs away with the idea that this is some sort of tried and tested technology, lets have a little look at the downside, shall we. (with thanks to Almuth Ernsting and Rachel Smolker)
Especially in light of the unsettling ups and downs of the palnet's forests, the state of the larder and the urgency of the task

This is something of first for Throbgoblins International:
Of all the links we have included over the past year we have never had occasion to link to that great British arse wiper, the Sun. But there's always a first time, and their splash coverage of "The Age of Stupid" can be seen here.

Beast Market

Seeing as the markets have done such a wonderful job of securing a safe and happy future for everyone, the British Conservative party suggest leaving the safeguarding of bio-diversity in their caring and capable hands

It'll drive us all mad in the end, but some folk have got off to a head start, (short sighted dinosaur politics in the North of Ireland? - who'd've thunk it?)

We begin to say goodbye to Asian water supplies, Indian rains and the salamander

End Daze

As Australia burns in a record breaking drought -(as does China and, soon, California) - James Lovelock advocates a Churchillian battening of national hatches, whilst others man the barricades.

On an entirely irrelevant note...
1) Pop has not only eaten itself, it has been violently sick down its shirt, and

2) The missing Dark matter sought by physics can be easily accounted for by adding up all the invisible elephants in all the rooms in all the houses of our glorious civilization

Fox Trot (?)

And lo - Darkness is upon the face of the waters pretty much everywhere you look, whilst Australia maintains its historically low tolerance of humans. Is it any surprise that Uncle David Attenborough should feel moved to take a small swipe at biblical half-wittery in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

Jonathan Porrit also speaks out about the elephant in the room.

A price is put on life.

Elsewhere, disappointingly, - Jim Hansen declines to support those struggling against airport expansion - declaring it an irrelevance in the face of the real problems - which centre around coal. Of course Jim Hansen is not a man whose opinions one dismisses lightly - and he no doubt has well considered reasons - but we at Throbgoblins International consider that the cultural significance of the conspicuous carbon consumption of habitual frivolous air travel makes it a crucial target in the struggle for a resilient and sustainable post-carbon society.
Mr Hansen will no doubt be on Michael O'Leary's Chritmas card list this year

Selective Seratonin

A Greenpeace report implicates our obsession with beef - which pumps out 57 times more GHG emissions than would a similar obsession with potatoes - in up to 80% of deforestation.

Researchers believe that a build up of seratonin is at the root of the destructive swarming behaviour of locusts.

We at Throbgoblins International think studies should be funded into the effects of dangerous build ups of beef on the destructive swarming behaviour of humans. It might prove illuminating.

Thanks to Susan Anderson for the nod

Plots and Plans

Sowing and reaping becomes a more unpredictable affair as weather begins to dance to a new tune

Obama keeps his momentum going.

Please complain to the BBC about their shameful and cowardly refusal to broadcast appeals for humanitarian aid to Gaza. It won't take a minute.

Meanwhile, turbines get tougher, racism gets weirder and yeast levels begin to stabilise

New Balls Please

In our ongoing quest to make a bollocks of our entire planet, we have unwittingly de-bollocked the biosphere by pouring as much gender-bending chemistry over everything as our enterprise can muster.
This global castration is a profitable affair and currently has the full support of the UK government.

The new McFly (Manchester Climate Fortnightly) is available for your perusal, here

After 500 years of demonstrating their manifest superiority over the natives, Europeans doing business in South America turn to the wisdom of pre-Columbian societies to dig themselves out of the hole that their superiority has so cleverly dug.

Meat continues to be murder, one way or another.

Every cloud has a silver lining, apparently

Throbgoblins International tried over the weekend to get themselves listed on a comics website, with the object of furthering the old world domination plan - which has gone a bit flat of late. We were ineligible, as it happens, because of the (frankly) embarrassing traffic levels that we :"enjoy". Were we to quadruple our traffic we would qualify. We are getting it ALL wrong. C'est la vie. Fortunately none of us here have the good sense to be disheartened by this state of affairs and will plough on regardless. The sense of futility will no doubt reach critical mass at some point and we shall run colourfully amock at the Trafford Centre with a potato gun.

Dead man's chest

"War-torn" is such a compact description, isn't it. It leaves out the economics and the politics and the machinations of great powers, and concentrates on the trauma in the here and now, as though it had sprung fully formed upon an innocent world.
So we watch the seizing of an oil tanker by desperate men from a failed state - whose climate and conditions get crueller by the year - and we imagine that it is not a portent of things to come, but an abberation in an otherwise purposeful, perfectable world. We choose not to look down the path from whence this monster came.

One of many links from today's extensive coverage, and another one not so well covered, and another BIG ONE - not for the feint hearted

Monsieur McCudgeon is sporting this year's must-have look - pirate chic. I think it suits him