Just Before Dawn

Afternoon all. The fog this morning was pretty impressive over the Lincolnshire Wolds - patchy freezing fog with temperatures around or marginally below freezing and visibility down to approximately 30 yards in the really thick patches.

Nah, that suggests forward thinking and planning in an industry notorious for month-by-month readership triumphs and catastrophes. It's an attempt to sell newspapers on the back of no evidence, They know apocalyptic headlines sell chip-wrappers, so they find someone who's prepared to exchange long-term credibility for short-term publicity and Bob's your mother's brother. When this doesn't happen (yes, I know it might) if the Excess ever refer to it again, which I doubt, then they can roll their eyes and blame Corbyn, or the Met or whoever and go back to stories about death-bring asylum-seekers, or miniscule changes in the housing market or headline number 18645443867543 on some new Princess of Wales conspiracy theory. Ha ha ha - here's the link to the Express website (identified through Google as 'The World's Greatest Newspaper' - no hyperbole there then. Guess what the three top headlines are about. Go on, guess!! http://www.express.co.uk/news.html

Interesting, but 1.8 whats? I was assuming that ramping has its own equivalent to the Fujita or the Saffir-Simpson scale. Perhaps the 'GPH' - (Gritters Per Hour) Scale. Thus we have the full range of ramp from the lowest scale - 0 ("A gritter went past earlier but it was on the back of a breakdown truck and it's August") through the usual scales of 1 and 2, to 3 ("The Gritter has stopped going up and down our road and is now circling the road in front of our drive, it's so bad here"), the more serious 4 ("We had a gritter come past two hours ago, but the driver's just had to dog-sled his way from the truck which is encased in ice") to the catastrophic 5 ("The gritter has just been air-lifted out of the road by Army Chinook."). Another option is the 'Revelations' scale, with the bottom of the scale being 0 ("nothing to report out of the ordinary"), 1 ("Raining fish, darkness three days long, but otherwise no big deal"), 2 ("Well, the local river appears to be running blood and these damn locusts are everywhere), 3 ("That's nothing, the earth is spitting out the dead here, Helen Willetts didn't mention that on Breakfast this morning"), 4 (Well, here the Beast - insert 'From The East' as appropriate - and the whore of Babylon are cavorting openly across the landscape, I bet the Co-op's out of milk and Mother's Pride tomorrow.") to 5 ("I'll be working from home all the rest of the week, the Four Horsemen rode past and the one with the mittens and earmuffs was riding up front. Best get the pools coupon sent off early.). I'd volunteer for service, but Lincolnshire's the last place where sound thinking and reason will take off as a valid concept.

OK I'll bite. When it comes to snow, look east my son. 251206 - Inverness - 3 080107 - King's Lynn - 2 260107 - Scarborough - 4 040207 - Dundee - 2 180207 - Nottingham - 3 180207 - Lincoln - 4 040307 - Ipswich - 2 So that's me scuffed if the Easterly stutters and croaks over Denmark then.

The World in Winter has already had a mention - it's one of Christopher's better novels (I find his stuff a bit reactionary for my taste, but it's got some interesting concepts in it and I like the way it unfolds). Another good one (not climate change per se, but natural disaster on a global scale) is A Wrinkle In the Skin (1965) about a series of massive, earth shattering earthquakes. Also in the same genre is John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes (1954), which is about an alien invasion, though the buggers land in the ocean and after a brief battle decide to flood us all out by raising global temperature. Different reason, same end result. Other apocalyptic novels dealing with climate change include: The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard (1962) (still the best climate catastrophe novel ever written IMHO) Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand (1997), which starts out as a sea-level rise thriller and becomes a more gloomy meditation on human capacity to take a bad situation and make it worse. Deus X by Norman Spinrad is a pretty conventional global warming disaster novel Hope this helps....

It is, particularly in Autumn after the mosquitos of death have disappeared. The Volcano at the time was fairly quiet, though there had been some glacier-melt that summer on a scale greater than normal summer retreat. It is beautiful though, the Volcano rises out of the side of Cook Inlet and has a fantastic glacier on its landward side. There were USGS personnel there when we were there and understand it's quite a well-researched volcano. When we came off the peninsula I was on a seaplane (no roads!) with a guy from the ADGGS, so clearly they were very interested in it even back then. If I recall correctly, there were concerns about the possibility of a lateral eruption causing a major landslide into Cook Inlet, the north-eastern end of the Inlet has Anchorage, so a large enough landslide into a narrowing inlet like cook presents some interesting flood defence complications! I do remember it being cold - It's not high compared with some of the other peaks in the Aleutian Range but that far north you don't have to climb that high for the cold to get painful. It was also the only place we actually caught up with a wolverine and it's supposedly the best place in the world to see brown bears - we regularly blundered into them (not literally, you understand!) For anyone else interested in the Fourpeaked volcano, it's part of the Katmai National Park and Wilderness Preserve. http://www.nps.gov/katm/index.htm

They're regular summer visitors to us here on the East coast - it's quite an unusual year here we don't get the odd humming-bird hawkmoth. It's interesting to note that there are now thoughts that the critters over-winter. They're one of a range of invertebrates seemingly expanding their range northwards in Europe - the convolvulus hawkmoth maintained populations here in Lincs for a good few tears in the 1990's, even though the books stated it as an erruptive migrant. Similarly both the hornet and the bee-wolf (a huge parasitic wasp of honey bees) has marched northwards in the last twenty years. The Bee-Wolf in particular has spread north spectacularly - in 1993 it was confined to coastal dunes and heaths in Kent, by 1996 it had reached suffolk, 1998 Norfolk and was recorded in Lincolnshire in 2000. I understand it's now in North Yorkshire. This equates well with a range of traditionally migrant dragonfly species now probably resident - especially red-viened darter. A word of caution, though - this needn't be global-warming related - the lizard orchid went from one site in kent in the 1910's, to as far north as Yorkshire in the 1950's and has subsequently retreated back to the South Coast (and Cambridgeshire). Some species are just wierd.

Good stuff Viking - I always felt volcanic activity was an underappreciated element of worldwide climate conditions. I've been on Fourpeaked, about 7 years ago, doing some survey work on wolverines for the Alaska state wildlife service. Interesting to see the photographs now!!!

Good post - with two pertinent points - you're right about the differences in approach of different companies - some are extremely sensitive to a range of environmental issues, others don't appear to understand what the words sustainable development actually mean. You're also spot-on about the sensitivities of some on-shore sites too, which is why it simply isn't acceptable to approach this in a piecemeal fashion and why Government needs to look at wind-farm locations in the round, rather than the present situation with individual companies submitting individual applications for four turbines here and six there on the basis of which farmers they can negotiate with to take them. Lewis is one of the bigger 'mid-sized' developments. I think when the full number of 'blocks' in the greater Wash area are fully developed, there will be somewhere around 460 turbines.

Thanks fellas. Re-reading my first post, it comes across rather stridently, for which I apologise. There's likely to be an environmental cost to energy generation however it's generated and wherever the generation facilities are located. There may be some locations off-shore where environmental considerations are less pressing and therefore there could potentially be some capacity, similarly some on-shore sites are as sensitive as off-shore one, so the only realistic option is a balance of on-and off-shore sites. That said - if you take an environmentally precautionary approach to siting, off-shore turbines will cost more to build, need more maintenance which will be more expensive to carry out on a job-by-job basis, will require replacement more often. They're viable only because they're proposed on a scale which would never be considered acceptable on land. I guess it's a trade off to which (the argumentative sod said disappointingly ) there probably isn't a straightforward answer.

As someone who is presently working on a number of off-shore windfarm projects from an environmental point-of-view, it's complete fallacy to suggest that it's less environmentally damaging to place them off-shore. As HC and a few others have said - costs of Offshore sites in terms of construction and operation are hugely greater than terrestrial sites, therefore an economy of scale comes into play - it only becomes economically viable to have turbines in blocks of 40 or 50 at a time (I'm dealing with one case with over 100 turbines of a scale twice as large as on-shore turbines). The costs of protected on-shore cabling is great too so developers like to place these blocks close together. This has implications for effectiveness. The environment is more hostile and the lifespan of the turbines shorter, therefore they require more maintenance and earlier replacement andding to cost and environmental damage. There are noise impacts on cetaceans and seals, they can significantly affect bird migration and can impact upon bird mortality and are often placed in or adjacent to internationally important bird wintering sites. They are usually located in fairly shallow water, these often support important benthic habitats, including commercial fishing grounds. There is certainly an element of out-of-sight, out-of-mind about shoving them in the sea, but it isn't an environmentally friendly option, unless the only realistic concern about the environment is what it looks like. So does the Solway Firth and The Wash, but no-one seems to have a problem in trashing them.

Showery here in Grantham on and off all day, presently a thunderstorm.

There's the past history of a range of accidents at nuclear power plants and re-processing facilities, not just in France, but across the world. The monitoring of the safety performance of these sites is only really available from the US where legislation exists that forces disclosure of accidents. The US has had a range of partial meltdown events, unforseen discharge events and fires, not just at Three Mile Island, but at Savannah River, Hanford, Detroit, Erwin, Long Island, Santa Susanna, Athens, Dover and Menlo Park, and this list isn't definative. Even the WNC only identifies immediate deaths as a result of these accidents, because no-one knows how widely contaminated the areas around some of these plants were - The sodium reactor meltdown at Santa Susanna is credited with releasing over 1300 curies of Iodine 131 and 15 grammes of Plutonium, all within 50 km of Los Angeles. Nuclear might be the only realistic short-term answer, and the health impacts of nuclear power may be smaller than coal-power (in terms of asthma, for example), but we need to be honest about the risks and past history of nuclear power generation safety.

I found the figures extraordinary - kudos to those who were stating it for keeping a straight face. In the whole debate there has been hardly any discussion on the safety of nuclear power - I suppose in order to have this debate, you need to have the facts, and they're rarely made available.

Why then does the IAEA term all states with nuclear power generation capabilities (with the exception of one or two countries with reactors incapable of producing sufficient HEU or plutonium) as latent nuclear weapons states? Why did Swedish physicist Hannes Alven, a Nobel Prize laureate call 'the peaceful atom and the military atom' siamese twins'? Civil nuclear programmes are intrinsically linked to military programmes. That doesn't mean that all countries who have a civil programme choose to engage in military research (though most do) or that they intend to create nuclear weapons (most probably don't), but the vast majority could do so with a change of policy which is, at the outside, an election away. Civil nuclear programmes are therefore by nature contributory to proliferation, whether the nation states involved chose to create and deploy nuclear weapons or not. That's not emotive, it's a dispassionate assessment of the process of acquiring sufficient equipment, raw materials and personnel skills to run a civillian nuclear programme. It's also reflected in evidence gathered by the IAEA during NNPT compliance checks. That's not to say the risk isn't worth taking, but dismissing the risk as emotive doesn't stop it from existing. If we're going to have a genuine, open and realistic debate on our future energy requirements, then we need all the cards on the table, and we need to be open and honest about the risks, impacts and benefits of all methods of power delivery, including realistic assessments of what energy conservation could deliver. The original subject of the thread, the programme on the impact of Chernobyl, was an interesting watch, though it was very careful to use the term 'attributable' deaths - very careful wording, for a reason I suspect. Similarly, the Chernobyl radiation issue is complicated by the general rise in background radiation as a result of open-air weapons tests, reactor meltdown tests, reactor disposal and poor-quality storage and re-processing facilities largely, though not exclusively in the former Soviet Union. I also wish, when the safety of nuclear reactors are discussed, that we get a bit more on the real safety record. Everyone knows about Chernobyl, and a fair number remember Three Mile Island in 1979. In the UK we are aware of a fire and then beach discharge at Windscale, then Sellafied in 1957 and 1983. There are, of course many others.

Recent moderate snow shower in grantham has left a covering on everything except the main roads.

Light snow falling here - has been for approx 45 minutes - very fine but a light covering on cars, pavements.

bitter wind chill (though temp is presently hovering between 3 and 4 degrees c - frequent showers of rain and hail in the last hour, sunny in between.

Light snow in Grantham and parts of Lincolnshire south and west of Sleaford. Very light and settling on cars but not on roads.