To help predict global warming, scientists have two methods at their disposal: looking back at what temperatures were like when the atmosphere had comparable levels of greenhouse gases (through the study, for example, of ice-cores), and looking forward, using ‘models’ whereby supercomputers simulate future climate scenarios based on data that is available to us today.
Read full postEDITORIAL Dear Readers, When The Hourglass newspaper was launched last autumn, there was a desperate need for climate reporting in the press. Since then we’ve seen significantly more reporting, however, perhaps somewhat predictably given the slow erosion of democracy in Britain over the last decade, some news outlets have embraced climate reporting with a…
Read full postEmail us at hourglass@rebellion.earth STAR LETTER Building bridges As a visitor to Britain from Brasil, I have found a copy of The Hourglass in the parish church in Launceston. I read this with interest, taking particular notice of the front- page story about the deaths of environmental defenders. It made me upset and angry…
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Nature is in trouble – and her cries are largely falling on deaf ears. Yes, there are vast numbers fighting the good fight, being nature’s voice in this bizarre, worrying time. Inevitably, there are also vast numbers who aren’t, can’t, won’t… Those who need a little more encouragement to the idea that nature is essential,…
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Have you heard this said before? ‘Global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation.’ That is the view of a resident in No.10 Downing Street. Yes, the…
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Having worked in the film industry for two years I’ve seen first-hand how wasteful it can be. Stars and crew jetting over the globe, poor waste management. Assistants sent off in diesel cars to the same supermarket three times a day. Set build materials being scrapped and thrown away. Sometimes not even making it into…
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“As I went walking that ribbon of highway/I saw above me the endless skyway/I saw below me that golden valley/This land was made for you and me.” These are the immortal words of Woody Guthrie, the grandfather of 20th century protest music. There’s no question that critical music contributes to periods of significant…
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I alight at Dent station, at 1,150ft the highest in England. Up here even the names are short, as if to save breath. It’s from a lonely stop like this that I imagine Mary Lennox being driven in a carriage up into the moors to remote, mysterious Misselthwaite Manor in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The…
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I’m strolling in deepest Britain, on a course originally set by a Victorian theodolite. Empty fields stretch silently away. A wren, an animated ball of feathers, tizzes urgently across my path to break the purest peace. Far in the distance a dot gradually grows. Once it might have been the Oxford to London express,…
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