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Africa lurches from one humanitarian tragedy to another. Nobody has found the answer yet. People talk about causes – poverty, drought, disease, civil wars, debt….
What Africa needs is a continent-wide vision for the future, a framework for its nations to co-operate to tackle the problems listed above. The OAU, perhaps, tries to fulfil this role but it needs to be able to turn swords into ploughshares, to turn Mugabes into Mandelas.
I am a straight man, 100% heterosexual. I generally prefer female company to male company socially too. If I was female I’m certain I would be a lesbian. There, can’t be more honest than that, can I?
Ah, but did the railway line look like a railway line?
The Highway Code carries the advice, when using unmanned level crossings, to “always give way to trains”. Good piece of advice, that.
Someone I once knew witnessed a car (mercifully unoccupied, parked on a crossing in a quayside area) being mangled by a train.
Cars damage people through accidents. That is the big damage they do. Whether man-made CO2 emissions damage the environment is still open to question as the recent TV programme showed (to me at any rate).
The big environmental crisis facing us is not global warming, which is probably a natural phenomenon related to sunspot activity, but the drying up of the supplies of oil and gas to fuel our lifestyle.
However there is nothing wrong with car advertising except when it glorifies speed and recklessness. These motoring journos who glorify bad driving are the equivalent of Pete Doherty etc. glorifying illegal drugs!
If a government is serious about the environment, in particular the looming fuel gap they should forget road pricing and introduce fuel rationing!
There is also thought to be major oil reserves around the Falklands but again, the sea is so deep (1500-2000metres) that extraction would be difficult.
But even with extra oil discoveries we will run out or run low in a few decades so given that and the ‘jury-outness’ of the global warming debate it makes sense to push the renewable energy technology too.
The nuclear industry is totally safe. It has a 100% safety record, if one doesn’t count Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and a few leaks at Winscale / Sellafield. (LOL please!)
If building more nuclear power stations is necessary to meet growing demand, then I suppose we will have to have them. But if we can do without through using renewable energy and energy-saving technology, so much the better.
First ‘greenhouse gases’ were CFC’s used in aerosols and fridges. They were banned and so CO2 became the greenhouse gas. Now there is doubt as to whether CO2 has any part in global warming and rising CO2 levels might actually be a result of natural global warming which is largely related to sunspot activity. Funny old world!!
When the oil and gas starts to run out, as it will, I wonder if the global warming debate be seen as a big red herring?
We all know oil and gas will run out, but there is a sort of assumption that big new reserves will be found. But will we see any of those reserves coming here or will they all go to India and China, who have as much right to them as we do?
I have never heard of this and I don’t recall anyone at school playing games like this. I know some kids used to play ‘chicken’ by running in front of cars which is clearly so stupid that even a chicken wouldn’t try it except through ignorance!
I read this article too. I have read theories that in the past pieces of the Earth’s crust have collapsed into the mantle. This ‘open wound’ might be newly discovered but it’s not new, it’s probably thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of years old.
I don’t see how it challenges the theory of tectonic plates as it seems that it’s quite possible for movement along plate boundries or in this case along the widening Mid-Atlantic Fault to cause a section of crust to be forced down allowing it to be covered by molten magma. New crust is being formed in the mid-Atlantic as the ridge widens – we’re talking only a matter of centimetres per year, of course!
Also, could this have been the site of a huge volcanic explosion or meteor impact?
I just watched this programme, belatedly, as it was recorded.
I would count myself as an environmentalist but I have never been convinced by the the CO2 scare story. As I understood we had a model for how increasing CO2 in the atmosphere would tend to assist in raising temperatures but now that even seems to be questionable, and in fact increased CO2 is possibly a product of natural warming.
It would seem that our current trend of rising temperatures is most likely to be just natural variation – temperatures rose from 1900-1949, cooled from 1949-1975 and have been rising from 1975. During the time when temperatures were cooling (I remember this) we were told by some scientists that we were possibly entering the next Ice Age!
Global annual average temperature variations seem, according to the programme, to bear an almost exact relation to the level of sunspot activity.
One crucial item that was not mentioned at all was a previous scare about global warming which centred on CFC’s, used in aerosols and refrigerators. These were banned in the mid 1980’s amidst a scare that they would drift up into the upper atmosphere and degrade the ozone layer. Rather surprisingly, Margaret Thatcher, a former scientist, was a leading light in the movement to ban CFC’s. If we are, after all, experiencing man-made global warming now, it could even be the predicted legacy of CFC use.
Whatever the pros and cons of global warming theory, will the vested interests still be debating it when the oil and natural gas begins to run out? I said I am an environmentalist and the depletion of our finite resources is the inescapable environmental issue that faces us all and has been foolishly relegated to the back-burner as we get obsessed with CO2, plastic bags, disposable nappies, the congestion charge etc. etc.
My environmental mission is to keep on about how we are using up or finite resources and even if there is more oil /gas to be found, it might not come our way as China and India are needing more and more as they develop their economies. So a sustainable economy and renewable energy are still things we need to push hard.
