Local heroes: helping the ecosystem – with or without leaving your backyard

Thomas Henry Huxley, A.K.A. Darwin's Bulldog and the man who coined the word 'agnostic' (and less-than-incidentally, my hero) once remarked that "We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it." With this years' UN Climate Change Conference about to start in Paris, there have been around 2000 marches around the world as current generations advise their governments that cleaning up our planet cannot be postponed any longer.

Meanwhile, like something out of a typical piece of Hollywood schmaltz, New Zealand law student Sarah Thomson is taking her country's government to court over lack of progress on climate change. Unfortunately as this is the real world - and since the UN's Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) targets aren't legally binding at nation-state level - the outcome is unlikely to provoke a Spielberg-style public cheer when the case is decided.

From a New Zealand-centric view, we may seem removed from the overcrowded, polluted hell-holes scattered around the world, but there are plenty of problems in store for this little corner of paradise, and not just from climate change. New Zealanders have only recent begun to understand that far from the '100% Pure' tourist brand, there has been a long-term degradation to their ecology, primarily from invasive species and an unsustainable level of development.

But although we may seem powerless in a wider context, individuals in any nation can still make a difference to help maintain or even restore their local environment without a great effort and at minimal cost. You might think: why bother? One household can't help an entire planet! But then, if everyone dropped one piece of litter every day we would rapidly become swamped with rubbish, so the antithesis holds true. Whilst the following are tailored towards New Zealand, the majority of actions can be undertaken anywhere. So enough proselytising: on with the show!

1) Reducing your carbon footprint. This week the New Zealand Herald website launched a climate action tool to show where households could reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. I'm never fond of quoting statistics, but if the country's emissions really have increased by the quoted 21% since 1990, then clearly something is going very wrong. Among the most basic methods - that at the same time can reduce household spending - are reusing bags when grocery shopping; and cutting down on food waste (which in New Zealand equates to half of household rubbish) by buying less and then having to bin out-of-date food. It's not rocket science!

2) Careful consumerism. Stop being a slave to fashion and don't just upgrade to a new smartphone when the old one still works perfectly well. It may be difficult to cut down on methane-hefty dairy products, but it's easy to avoid items that contain environmentally unfriendly materials, such as nanosilver or palm oil that comes from unsustainable sources. After all, two American girl guides spend five years on a successful mission for clear food labelling and the introduction of palm oil from deforestation-free sources. If they can do it, why can't we all?

3) Reduce, reuse and recycle. I discussed this back in 2010 and think that all the points are still relevant. Again, this can actually save money. If you have a garden, then a tiger worm farm is a pretty good way to get free fertiliser and soil conditioner from the likes of vegetable peelings, egg shells, tea bags and even discarded hair.

4) Encouraging wildlife. Talking of gardens, you can easily help the local fauna with the right type of vegetation and feeders. Of course, it's not all plain sailing: although I feed native silvereye birds during the winter with fruit, my seed feeders are most likely to be utilised by non-native species imported to New Zealand from the UK in the late Nineteenth Century. You win some, you lose some.

5) Discouraging invasive species. From marine fan worms on the underside of ships' hulls to pet cats, New Zealand's native species have long faced the onslaught of aggressive outsiders. Current biosecurity regulations are very important, but in NZ sometimes have the ring of the stable door about them, in this case with the (foreign) horses having bolted into the stable - and promptly munched their way through much of the local biota. One simple thing I have done is to discourage South African praying mantises by methods such as changing garden planting and moving hatchlings to more conspicuous places in the garden where birds might find them. In this way numbers have reduced from hundreds of individuals three years' ago to seeing just one hatchling this year - and no adults - despite carefully examination of the garden. As for cats, don't get me started! NZ has over 1.4 million of them, and whoever can prevent them catching native birds and lizards would probably deserve a Nobel prize.

6) Eco-activities. Talking of trees, various local groups are more than happy to accept volunteers for tree-planting, pest trapping and litter removal schemes. In New Zealand, Tiritiri Matangi has gone from being a denuded patch of scrub to an island sanctuary for endangered bird species in just three decades, largely thanks to volunteers planting over 280,000 trees. As for litter, volunteer beach patrols are unfortunately a necessity, as an example from 2011 shows: 130,000 pieces of rubbish were collected from the uninhabited island of Rangitoto in just one day.

7) Joining organisations. There are plenty of societies ready, willing and able to use membership funds for ecological activities, from global giants such as the World Wide Fund for Nature to local groups such as New Zealand's Forest and Bird. As a member of latter I've been pleased to study their new 25-year strategic plan, aimed on raising important environmental issues and presenting detailed information to the NZ Government in support of campaigns. The good thing is your subscription money is being used positively regardless of how much or how little active time you yourself can dedicate.

8) Armchair petitioning. Even for people unable to get out and about you can also petition your local politicians and other relevant figures without leaving home. A good example in recent years has been British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's fish discards campaign, which gained massive public support and succeeded in less than three years in not only gaining an update to European Union by-catch legislation, but had positive knock-on effects in other aspects of commercial fishing within the EU. Nice one, Hugh!

9) Citizen science. A fairly recent definition, this encapsulates an enormous range of passive and active methods. The former includes crunching science project data whilst your home computer is idling, whilst a painless example of the latter would be participating in wildlife surveys; recent New Zealand examples include one-off garden bird and butterfly counts, through to monthly assessments of a single square metre of rocky beach. There are numerous projects that are suitable for children to participate in, so a side-effect is to encourage children to accept science as an integral component of their lives, not just something to do at school.

10) Education. Talking of school...saving the most difficult to last. I was recently accosted on the street by an admittedly junior employee of a petroleum giant whose argument - if I can dignify it as such - was that snowfall in New Zealand in October was clear proof global warming isn't occurring. Clearly, there is a severe lack of public understanding of basic science, this particular case relating to the fact that climate change can include local cooling at the same time as warming on a global scale. Thanks to the ubiquity of information channels from climate change-denier News Corp (now the proud owner of National Geographic, for crying out loud), it seems certain that grass-roots environmental education needs to be the way forward, considering how much misinformation and nonsense is being spread by global news networks. So don't be afraid to talk - spread the word!

I'd like to end on two quotes: the first is by American cartoonist and author James Thurber, who said: "Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness." The second comes from a decorative plate that hangs on my wall: "Other planets cannot be as beautiful as this one." Let us hope we can leave a legacy such that our descendants continue to think so.

Weather with you: thundersnow, hosepipe bans and climate punditry

I must confess to have not watched any of the current BBC series The Great British Weather, since (a) it looks rubbish; and (b) I spend enough time comparing the short-range forecast with the view outside my window as it is, in order to judge whether it will be a suitable night for astronomy. Since buying a telescope at the start of the year (see an earlier astronomy-related post for more details) I've become just a little bit obsessed, but then as an Englishman it's my inalienable right to fixate on the ever-changeable meteorology of these isles. If I think that there is a chance of it being a cloud-free night I tend to check the forecast every few hours, which for the past two months or so has proved to be almost uniformly disappointing; as a matter of fact, the telescope has remained boxed up since early May.

There appears to be a grim pleasure for UK-based weather watchers that when a meteorology source states that it is currently sunny and dry in your location it may in fact be raining torrentially. We all realise forecasting relies on some understanding of a complex series of variables, but if they can't even get the 'nowcast' correct what chance do the rest of us have?

So just how has the UK's mercurial weather patterns affected the science of meteorology and our attitude towards weather and climate? As far back as 1553 the English mathematician and inventor Leonard Digges included weather lore and descriptions of phenomena in his A General Prognostication. Since then, British scientists have been in the vanguard of meteorology. Isaac Newton's contemporary and rival Robert Hooke may have been the earliest scientist to keep meteorological records, as well as inventing several associated instruments. Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, formerly captain of HMS Beagle (i.e. Darwin's ship) was appointed as the first Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade in 1854, which in today’s terms would make him the head of the Met Office; he is even reputed to be the inventor of the term 'forecast'.

Modern science aside, as children we pick up a few snippets of the ancient folk learning once used to inculcate elementary weather knowledge. We all know a variation of "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning", the mere tip of the iceberg when it comes to pre-scientific observation and forecasting. But to me it looks if all of us in ever-changeable Britain have enough vested interest in the weather (once it was for crop-growing, now just for whether it is a sunglasses or umbrella day – or both) to maintain our own, personal weather database in our heads. Yet aren't our memories and lifespan in general just too short to allow us a genuine understanding of meteorological patterns?

One trend that I consider accurate is that those 'little April showers' I recall from childhood (if you remember the song from 'Bambi') are now a thing of the past, with April receiving less rainfall than June. This is an innate feeling: I have not researched it enough to find out if there has been a genuine change over the past three decades. Unfortunately, a combination of poor memory and spurious pattern recognition means we tend to over-emphasise 'freak' events - from thundersnow to the day it poured down at so-and-so's June wedding - at the expense of genuine trends.

For example, my rose-tinted childhood memories of six largely rain-free weeks each summer school break centre around the 1976 drought, when my brother had to be rescued from the evil-smelling mud of a much-reduced reservoir and lost his shoes in the process. I also recall the August 1990 heat wave as I was at the time living less than 20 km from Nailstone in Leicestershire, home of the then record UK temperature of 37.1°C. In contrast, I slept through the Great Storm of 1987 with its 200+km/h winds and don’t recall the event at all! As for 2011, if I kept a diary it would probably go down as the 'Year I Didn't Stop Sneezing'. City pollution and strong continental winds have combined to fill the London air with pollen since late March, no doubt much to the delight of antihistamine manufacturers.

An East Anglian beach, August 2008

Our popular media frequently run stories about the latest report on climate change, either supporting or opposing certain hypotheses, but rarely compare it to earlier reports or long-term records. Yet even a modicum of research shows that in the Nineteenth Century Britain experienced a large variation in weather patterns. For example, the painter J.M.W. Turner's glorious palette was not all artistic licence, but almost certainly influenced by the volcanic dust-augmented sunsets following the 1815 Tambora eruption. It wasn't just painting that was affected either, as the UK suffered poor harvests the following year whilst in the eastern United States 1816 was known as 'Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death'.

The influence of the subjective on the objective doesn't sound any different from most other human endeavours, except that weather professionals too - meteorologists, climatologists, and the like - also rely on biases in their work. Ensemble forecasting, which uses slightly different initial conditions to create data reports which are then combined to provide an average outcome, has been shown to be a more accurate method of prediction. In other words, this sounds like a form of scientific bet hedging!

Recent reports have shown that once-promising hypotheses involving singular factors such as sunspot cycles can in no way account for most primary causes of climate change, either now or in earlier epochs. It seems the simple answers we yearn for are the prerogative of Hollywood narrative, not geophysical reality. One bias that can seriously skew data is the period being used in a report. It sounds elementary, but we are rarely informed that even the difference of a single year in the start date can significantly affect the outcome as to whether, for example, temperature is increasing over time. Of course, scientists may deliberately only publish results for periods that support their hypotheses (hardly a unique trait, if you read Ben Goldacre). When this is combined with sometimes counter-intuitive predictions – such as that a gradual increase in global mean temperature could lead to cooler European winters – is it little wonder we non-professionals are left to build our level of belief in climate change via a muddle of personal experience, confusion and folk tales? The use of glib phrases such as 'we're due another glaciation right about now' doesn't really help either. I'm deeply interested in the subject of climate change and I think there is serious cause for concern, but the data is open to numerous interpretations.

So what are we left with? (Help: I think I'm turning into Jerry Springer!) For one thing, the term 'since records began' can be about as much use as a chocolate teapot. Each year we get more data (obviously) and so each year the baseline changes. Meteorology and climatology are innately complex anyway, but so far both scientists and our media have comprehensively failed to explain to the public just how little is known and how even very short-term trends are open to abrupt change (as with the notorious 'don't worry' forecast the night of the 1987 Great Storm). But then you have only to look out of the window and compare it to the Met Office website to see we have a very long way to go indeed…

Warp engines offline, Captain: has science fiction become confused with science fact?

The current bickering in Copenhagen seemingly ignores a rather pertinent issue: our skills and experience in reversing climate change are almost exactly zero. Of course we can drastically cut back on fossil fuels, increase energy efficiency and possibly even slow down population growth, but there is little on the technological horizon that can profoundly alter the climate in favour of our species. Yet the implicit view seems to be that if a political solution is found then a practical solution will follow in due course.

So why is it assumed that given enough Government funding, the people in white lab coats can perform miracles of climate engineering? This attitude is symptomatic of an ever-widening gap between the scientific forefront and public perception. Many strands of contemporary science are so detached from everyday life that they inhibit straightforward public assimilation, whilst the ubiquity of electronic consumer goods may be lulling us into a false sense of security regarding our abilities. We are surrounded by 'space age' gadgets and technology from Wii to Wi-Fi that only a generation ago were strictly for James Bond. And with Virgin Galactic seemingly about to usher in a new age of space tourism, becoming an astronaut will be akin to a very expensive form of air travel, though a sub-orbital hop hardly counts as boldly going anywhere.

Another possible cause that doesn't seem to have gained much notice is the influence of science fiction films and television series. With their largely computer-generated visual effects, most Hollywood product effortlessly outshines any real life counterpart. For example, doesn't the International Space Station (ISS) resemble nothing so much as a bunch of tin cans linked by Meccano struts? Yet the ISS is about as good as ultra-expensive high-technology gets, being by far the largest man-made structure ever assembled in orbit. Given a choice between watching ISS crew videos (Thanksgiving dinner with dehydrated turkey, anyone?) and the likes of Bruce Willis saving mankind from doomsday asteroids, most people unmistakably opt for the latter.

Now that the majority of humans live in crowded conurbations far removed from our ancestral peripatetic existence, the desperation for new horizons is obvious. Yet our exploratory avatars such as the Mars rovers hardly qualify as charismatic heroes, hence the great appeal of fictional final frontiers. The complex interplay between reality and fiction is further confused by the new genre of "the science behind…" book. Frequently written by practicing scientists for the likes of Star Trek, The X-Files, Dr Who, etal, the blurring of boundaries can be exemplified by one buyer of The Physics of Star Trek who compared it to A Brief History of Time (although admittedly Stephen Hawking did write the foreword to the former).

Furthermore, the designers of such disparate items as medical monitoring equipment, flip top phones and military aircraft instrumentation have been inspired by Hollywood originals to such an extent that feedback loops now exist, with arcade simulators inspiring real hardware which in turn inspire new games. Articles discussing quantum entanglement experiments seem obliged to draw a comparison with the Star Trek matter transporter, though the transportees are as yet only photons. Theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre has even spent time exploring the fundamentals for a faster-than-light 'warp' drive, although it's unlikely to get beyond calculations for some little while. Blue-sky thinking is all very well, but there are plenty of more pressing issues that our finest minds could be working on...

Closer to home, it appears that a lot of the hype surrounding sustainable development is just that. Are we simply in thrall to companies hoping to make a fast buck out of fear, flogging us technologies about as useful as a chocolate teapot? A recent report suggested that the typical British home would gain only minute amounts of electricity from installing solar panels and wind turbines, although the development of spray-on solar cells may drastically improve efficiency in the next few years. But where does this leave us now? Although our species has endured sudden, severe climate changes such as the end of the last glaciation ten thousand years ago, current population density and infrastructure forbid anything as simple as packing our things and moving to higher ground. Cutting back on fossil fuel consumption is clearly necessary, but isn't it equally as important to instigate long-term research programmes in case some of the triggers are due to natural causes such as the Milankovitch cycles? If global temperature increase is inevitable, never mind potential cooling in Western Europe due to a diverted Gulf Stream, then reducing greenhouse gas emissions is merely the tip of the iceberg (sorry, couldn't resist that one).

Anyone who looks back at the grandiose pipe dreams of the 1960's can see that our technological ambitions have profoundly reduced in scope since their idealistic heyday; what we have gained in the micro-scale technologies, we have lost in the giant engineering projects envisaged by likes of Gerard O'Neill, Freeman Dyson, and Arthur C. Clarke. Yet Thunderbirds-style macho engineering is presumably the type we will need to develop if we are heading for a chain reaction of environmental change.

Restructuring an ailing climate will take more than a few decades of recycling and installation of low-voltage light bulbs - we will have to mobilise people and funds on a unique scale if we are not to prove powerless against the mighty engine of Planet Earth. To this end we need to spread the message of our own insignificance, mitigated by research into alleviating the worst-case scenarios: there can be no Hollywood-style quick-fixes to the immense forces ranged against us. No-one could argue that even short-term weather forecasting is an exact science, so discovering whatever trouble the Quantum Weather Butterfly has in store for us will keep earth scientists engaged for many years to come (and there I go again, confusing fiction with reality, doh!)