Waiting to Exhale

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Thanks to Sarath Guttikunda for bringing this to my attention

Demolition Man

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Thanks to Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate for giving me a multi-storeyed idea, that I built a bungalow out of.

Insecticide in the first degree

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Another bad year for bees.
I'm sure that some rugged individualist bees with entrepreneurial flair will ride to their rescue at the last minute.

Let's hope our own hives can develop a little more resilience.

Choosing Choice

Many folk are wondering just how to get the seriousness of this thing across to a willfully ignorant section of society;

Monbiot

Nicholas Kristof

Randy Olsen

Rigorous scientific debate

Personally, I'd feel a lot happier about the evidence in favour of Genetically Modified crops if that evidence wasn't wholly owned and selectively released by corporations whose legal obligation is to maximise profit above all other considerations, and who are not legally obliged to release any contrary data under the protection of "commercial sensitivity".

By the way, where IS all the necessary fertiliser going to come from once the accessible oil runs out?

Feed the soil, not the plant

Who wants to be a Millionaire?

The Future is Another Country

So much mud is being thrown that the slightest speck sticking to a labcoat seems enough to persuade Joe Public that the bigger scientific picture is irrelevant and that it must, therefore, all boil down to moustache twirling evil-doers Mwa-haar-haaring under ill-gotten showers of public gold. We do love a soundbite. So I guess it must be OK if the glaciers start to disappear in 50 years, not 20, and the African harvests collapse in 40 years, not 20, and if a quarter of Holland is lost to the sea, not a half. That'll be fine. Nothing to worry about. Party on dudes.

Lest we forget - it was the IPCC and the UEA themselves that brought their own errors to the attention of their peers.

Elephants in da house

I didn't have room for the elephant.

We're going through the housekeeping like there's no tomorrow, borrowing ourselves into the middle of next week, whilst the tabloids bark nonsense. Oh well, what's the worst that can happen?

Some interesting background to the swine flu pandemic, from Craig Mackintosh

Divine Interventions

The old sunspot chestnut raises its head again, threatening to give comfort to the denialists and maybe temporarily mask some of the unpleasantness so it can all crash down on us at once.

We at Throbgoblins International all trooped off to our local independent cinema yesterday, to watch "In the loop" and duly laughed our collective teeth loose. I mention this because the Westminster Prince of Darkness has set up a rival energy and climate power-base to scupper environmental legislation on behalf of business, in a manner befitting an Ianucci satire.

Creative Differences

Shock-horror. It seems that the big polluters actually suppressed evidence and denied the conclusions of their own scientific advisors! Who'd have thought it. Shocking and wholly unexpected. I, for one, am shaken to the core that such paragons of civic and environmental virtue would stoop to such shit-splattering levels of sociopathic deceit.

Meanwhile, our fellow creatures continue to vacate history apace, whilst the diverse inheritance of evolution gets reduced cut by cut to what biologists refer to as "fuck-all".

More shock horror as humungous hive-building is seen as potentially risky strategy

The text of Al Gore's statement to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environmnent, (courtesy of Climate Progress)

"The Lotto way of thinking"

No time to piss about

Slim down

Drinking for England

The director of WWF Scotland - Dr Richard Dixon - has suggested that energy wastage should be regarded in the same anti-social light as drink-driving, and should be punishable under the law.

We are invited to stop passing the buck, seeing as it is easier to regulate one person who consumes a thousand watts, than a thousand people who consume one each.

Elsewhere - NCAR research suggests that we are not quite toasted yet, and Cuba and Rwanda are allowed some lifelines.

More troubling interference (from the charity commission this time) in the affairs of activists; this one an instance that will be easily dismissed by the press and much of the public, as it involves the exasperating George Galloway.

Three Times Denied?

This weekend many of you will be celebrating the annual festival of Easter - when we commemorate the point at which our nation traditionally goes into ecological debt - consuming beyond our means and damning us and the rest of the planet to a joyful future of instability, expensively shagged soils and dry taps. We celebrate this with over-packaged chocolate eggs to demonstrate that we are blessed with the requisite amount of kiddy-friendly blind faith, and that we really couldn't give a toss.

The prognosis is poor, and we don't have time to "rinky-dink" with half-arsed, poorly financed quarter-measures.

Some folk would have us believe that what we need is to wait for the same people who got us into this mess - respectable, wealthy folks in nice suits - to come up with a new visionary realism that supersedes the green agenda and saves us at the last minute without upsetting anybody. And if they fail? Well, after 3 days we shall rise again....

We are steeped in messianic, exceptionalist thinking.

But on a brighter note - check out Kate Evans' new revamped website for a host of comic goodies.

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.

Wheels Within Wheels

Gordon Brown and sheep-dog Boris both make extravagant claims about the greening of their budgets and the blissful cornucopia of fairy dust technology that will miraculously trump the ugly realities of a finite planet. Should be worth a few votes.

It's a shameless re-tread of this early Frank strip.



Meanwhile the Lords of Saudi Arabia make a surreal plea for special consideration, and plans are laid at the Doc Fiendish Institute

It seems to be very deep in our genes, this buying and selling lark

We at Throbgoblins International are very pleased that Al-Bia Wal-Tanmia (Environment & Development) magazine in Beirut have translated some strips into arabic for middle-eastern distribution; Reproduced here

Baby, you're a rich man too.

Opportunities abound for those who dare, as China asks he who calls the tune to pay the piper, and we are all cordially invited to Cap the rich

Elsewhere, both Shell and the UK government go into bat for the opposition

Cognitive Malfunction

Our closest cousins show definite signs of being... well... our closest cousins, while the Heartland Jamboree keeps churning out the misinformation. There's a lot of it about

I'm not sure whether I'm contravening RealClimate's "Advice to Climate Bloggers" number 6, or adhering to number 13 here. It's a complex situation

Oh, and this story sums us up nicely, don't you think?

Human Sacrifice?

I may be being a bit previous here, as I have only one source for this story. Any confirmation or rebuttals welcome.

We in the west are so swamped with Christian and Islamist fundamentalisms that we spare very little media space for their Hindu co-delusionists.

As ever, the sea gets more toxic, and there's going to be a lot more of it, whilst clocks are cruelly turned back in DR Congo and the North of Ireland

Text is a verb

Here is a video

Today's stolen punchline comes with apologies to Roy Bailey who I saw today with Tony Benn at the Salford Lowry - inspiring as ever.

Holiday on Ice

Bits crack off and bits fade away until the doo-doo is as deep as a philosopher's nightmare. Ho hum.

Feeding The Hand That BItes you

There's been a lot of debate lately about whether this or that extreme weather event - from China to Australia - is a symptom of Global Warming or merely a surprisingly large cluster of normal freak events. Are these disasters the last of the rare disasters or the first of the common disasters? This seems to me to be like asking - whilst under violent assault - whether one's assailant is the familiar local nutter or a scout for the rampaging army of zombie psychopaths that are on their way to ravage your neighbourhood but at present are still some miles away enjoying a breakfast of griddled brains in a nearby town. The fact of imminent zombie invasion should surely be focusing our minds rather better than it is. But the general consensus seems to be that, untill our shopping malls are actually being over run with slavering mutants, there is no need for any action that might interfere with the day's business.

Changing the lightbulbs in the mall isn't going to stop an army of zombies. We may need to choose a different battlefield