Manners makith the Man (or Woman)

Young people today are accused of so many thing, mostly negative things. Okay, they are loud, wear daft cloths, listen to odd music very loudly and in general have an air of arrogance that only a young person can have. However, there is nothing wrong with all of that as it is just being a young person and once upon a time we were all like that. The vast majority of these young people are hard working, polite and caring, but of course we very rarely get to hear about them, they are not news and it is very difficult to make political mileage out of the fact that despite having to get over all the problems we old folk put in there way they still manage to turn out well, mostly.
No, if you want to see real ill manners, surliness and general antisocial behaviour you need look no further that old people, especially ones who use free passes on the buses. They seem to think that because they have a free pass it gives them the right to push past other to get on the bus then take up the space that is designated for wheelchairs and pushchairs with their shopping trolleys. The terms "excuse me" or "sorry" never leave their lips and if you don't give way to them and their rude ways they spend the entire time they are on the bus glaring at these "youngsters" who have dared to get in their way.
This is not a cry to get rid of free bus passes. Far from it as I have one myself and very useful it is to. But I am asking my fellow pass holders to start thinking about the world around them and start showing the manners to others that they expect to be shown towards themselves. Actually, thinking about it, it is not only bus pass holders who could adopt some manners, everyone could. There seems to be a notion evolved over the past years that you are not allowed to talk to other people in the street unless they are at the other end of a cell phone. Let me ask you how many times you have been greeted with a cheery "Good Day" as you passed someone on the high street? How many of you say "excuse me" when someone is blocking your passage along the isle of the supermarket, not to mention a "thank you" when they let you pass? Even a simple smile of recognition and a nod of the head would make life more pleasant. Unfortunately, these days you are more likely to be regarded as some kind of nutter if you do this, and if children are involved then the repercussions can be catastrophic.
The world is in a mess and I believe that we could solve a great deal of this if we all came out of our self imposed shells and started to relate to strangers, bringing them into our local society. Being suspicious of strangers on a tribal basis has always been part of human defensive strategy but these days the tribe is global. We can talk to someone in New Zealand as easily as we can speak to someone who lives down the street (and sometimes it is easier to talk to the New Zealander). But with this shrinking of our we have withdrawn into our own shell and stopped talking to real flesh and blood people who we can touch, taste, smell, hear and see. Adopting manners when we meet is a first stage of rebuilding a local community of friends and you never can tell what will develop out of a friendly "good evening" exchanged in the frozen vegetables isle of the supermarket.

Thinking the unthinkable!

As a Green there are a whole range of things that are taken as read, in fact to many to list here, but one of them is climate change and carbon dioxide production. The general Green attitude to this is that it is a bad thing and we must stop, as far as possible, the generation of CO2 . But why? The answer given is that as the CO2 in the atmosphere goes up it forms a kind of blanket that keeps the heat in and so the world heats up and melts the glaciers and makes deserts grow and will kill life on Earth. Absolute rubbish of course but with snippets of the truth woven in. Global warming and/or climate change will not kill life on Earth. Life is a very robust mechanism which can survive from the cold of the Antarctic (-40°C) to the heat of volcanic water pools (+70°C) so it doesn't matter how hot or cold the weather get life will survive, it is just us, humans, and a few other animals, birds and plants who will be killed off. Life will go on and evolution and chaos will take an unsuspecting species of something and give it its turn in the sun.

So here is an idea. Let's use up all the fossil fuels that are on the Earth up as quickly as we can. Bring back gas-guzzlers, coal fired power stations, anything that will destroy fossil fuels because once it has gone it is going to take a very long time (55,000,000 years approximately) to come back. The result of this would be to increase the CO2 in our atmosphere by vast amounts, which will increase global weather instability (it might get hotter or it might get colder we don't really know which.) Many species of plant will thrive in the extra CO2 rich atmosphere, a number of animals will die out but not all of them. As to humans I think that we have evolved into a resourceful species and we will survive as a species. That is not to say that the societies we know today will survive. In fact you can be pretty sure that they wont. We may finish up with a "Green and Pleasant Utopia" where we have learnt out lesson and now live in harmony, but it may not be and I will leave it up to your own imagination as to what human society will be like.

Do I want to live in a future world where the Greenhouse effect has wreaked its havoc on the present ecology of the planet? NO, not really, but then I won't have to. At my age I have only a couple of decades left before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I do not want to leave a legacy to the ones who are coming after me of some of the unthinkable scenarios that slosh around in my imagination. I believe in Humans. I believe that in the past they have done astonishing thing. It is why, when I hear people saying that places such as Stone Henge were built by aliens, I take it as an insult. People like you and me built these monuments using the strength of their muscles and their mind to alter their environments. Climate instability is a product of natural cycles along with human endeavors working in a synergic way to make our world go in a certain direction. I believe that we Humans have the ability to change that direction into something glorious. It won't be easy, epically for us and the next two generations. We will have to make great sacrifices and stop doing some things that give us great pleasure like flying off to Spain at the drop of a hat, but it can be done. We Humans stand on the brink and we could go either way, so we must think the unthinkable and go in the right direction.

I Hate Reading -but I love books!

I hate reading. I hate having to sit there and sort out all those squiggles on a sheet of paper into cohesive information or entertainment. The problem is that the stuff that is contained within the stuff I have to read is fantastic. I just wish that there was another way of accessing it. But there is not so I am stuck with reading. I am sure that there are many people old and young who also hate the mechanics of reading. Probably some of those looking at this now are feeling that I should have not bothered. It is a dilemma that I have never come to terms with because I love writing, I love books, I love the information gleaned, I just hate reading!

So what do you do if you are a kid at school who, like me, hates the process of reading? They are pressured into doing it at all stages of life but really given a good reason for actually doing it. Many of them find the information that the reading will expose to them as boring, irrelevant and of no use to them. What reading opens up to us is quite astonishing when you think about it. There is the whole of literature from the Beano to Pride & Prejudice to Beowulf, but there are other forms of literature that although you don't have to read, someone has to. Plays, poems, movies, TV all depend on someone somewhere reading a script. So no matter what we do we need readers before we can create.

So how do we get people who hate reading to give it a go? I have no idea, after all I am looking for an alternative. I suppose we could go the Graphic Novel route but there are still bits to read. Audio books are an option, but I think that listening to something like "A Brief History of Time" may just be the end of time and space as we know it. I would be fascinated to know the answer to this dilemma - any suggestion?

Better ways to boil water!

In order to generate electricity we boil a kettle of water and push the resulting steam through a turbine. Yes, okay there are slightly different ways of doing it but they still push a gas through a turbine which moves a coil through a magnetic field. But let's think about the kettle and how we get it hot. Burning coal, gas, oil or biomass are the traditional ways with all the associated side junk that they produce. Focusing sunlight with mirrors onto a hot spot is one of the less traditional ways. And there are a whole range of temperature differentiation methods that, in theory at least, could work. And then there is the nuclear option. This uses the immense energy loss when an atom breaks up to boil the water. This is nuclear fission.

Nuclear fission power station were first put on line in the 1950s and almost from the start they began to break down and spread unpleasant things into the environment. The problem with these nuclear power stations was that they were designed to be dirty. They were designed to produce side products from the decay of Uranium atoms which could be used to make very powerful bombs. If this sounds a little improbable consider this. The Iranian government want to develop up a nuclear power industry, so they say. The Americans and Europeans are having seven kinds of fit about this prospect, and why? Because they know that nuclear power stations produce what is needed to produce bombs and if the Iranian's get nuclear bombs they will use them.

There is a call now in Britain to produce "New" nuclear power stations. This would be great if they were actually new, that is the process they use to boil the water was new. The shell of the building will be new but the pile at its heart will be the same old dirty fission device that has changed little since the 1950s. I believe that Nuclear energy could be a good way to produce clean energy - some time in the future that is - not now though. Now we must continue to take a stand against these monstrosities and find better ways of boiling water. Ways that, if the kettle bursts, we can control. The nearest nuclear power station to me is at Hartlepool. Hartlepool may have its detractors but as far as I am concerned it is far preferable to Chernobyl.

Oh, and just don't get me on to fusion power!