Charles on… anything that comes along

Put a frog in hot water and it jumps out; put it in warm water and heat it up and it cooks, as the tale goes. (I don’t think we need to test this empirically, though. Let’s just accept it as metaphor.) Peat bog gases ‘accelerate global warming’ reports on some work by Chris Freeman of the Uni of Wales at Bangor, which found a positive feedback loop between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the extent to which carbon trapped in those bogs gets released. And there’s a huge amount of carbon in those bogs - more than all the fossil fuels we burn.

I spoke to him ahead of the publication in Nature. He was pretty clear: if you don’t want it to get a lot worse, you need nuclear power.

In this he joins a growing list along with James Lovelock (as in Gaia), Peter Cochrane (formerly BT’s head of R+D), and, in a hint, Tony Blair (easily missed in his grilling by MPs earlier this week; I’ll find the relevant Hansard later.) OK, Tony, so there are no WMDs; what about some Weapons of Mass Construction instead?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Dreadful, truly dreadful: New Scientist on nuclear power (25 April 2006; score: 62.97%)
• Environmentalists will embrace nuclear power and GMOs, and other contrary thinking (18 April 2005; score: 53.93%)
• At the Guardian: nuclear power!, Phorm's bad publicity, tiny speakers and another podcast (7 March 2008; score: 53.7%)