Global Warming isn't Madmade!

(WARNING: I donºt have anyone to enviro-rant with/at out here, so this has been building up for a few days now)
Hurrah! The news I had long been hoping for came in the form of last week's Channel 4 documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle". I brought it along for entertainment (sad, I know) and watched it somewhere off the coast of the Netherlands. It's OK to fly and drive and do all those things which I had been led to believe were socially irresponsible because of climate change. The elation, I felt, must be similar to the realisation by my parent's generation (x-1?) when the wall came down and people stopped worrying about being oblittered by nukes. So I need not have taken a freight ship to South Africa you say? Marvellous!

Oh wait, it turns out that the documentary wasn't all that credible. In fact wasnºt credible at all. That's unfortunate. There are so many rebuttles in the green online community, that the programme is now being abbreviated to TGGWS. The clearest debunking comes from In the Green, so have a read if you arenºt sick of this topic already. It would appear that last time this guy made a documentary, channel 4 had to broadcast a public apology for the misrepresentations made, in particular the improper editing of interviews. I'm not going to go into great detail, beecause other more intelligent and eloquent people have already done a great job (see link above). Shame on Channel 4 for allowing such flakey science to be portrayed as a documentary. I expected more from the last bastion of quality programming. After all, where would we be without [insert name of any reality TV show here]. I have to admit my mood was dulled :'| (That's a tear).

Quite a few people have asked me whether taking a cargo ship is actually any better for the environment than just flying (OK, 2 people), particularly in light of recent news articles showing that shipping account for more emssions than flights. It's a fair question. I had to admit each time that I had just assumed that it would be, having not done any calculations, but I can now set the record straight. This isn't designed to be an exercise in blowing my own carbon trumpet, I've done more than my fair share of flying in the past and driven around in some pretty ridiculous turbo charged cars, but I can now report that the freight ship is mother earth's chosen way to travel! Well, kind of. My share of the emissions for this journey work out at 0.014 tons of CO2 as against 1.06 tons for the equivalent flight. That's base on the weight of me and my luggage (0.15 tons) as a portion of the ship's total cargo (26,000) tons. ALthuogh it's lucky I'm so slender, the ship belches out over 120 tons of CO2 per day!

I'm leaving Lisbon in a few hours, so the blog will be quiet for a couple of weeks now. I don't expect to see much else apart from sun and sea until we reach Walvis Bay, Namibia, so bye for now.