Hi everyone
First of all thanks for all the feedback on the article, it's been really interesting and mostly encouraging to read from the sidelines. For those who haven't read it, the main article is here
http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=2038, with a discussion linked to it, and there is another discussion at
http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=368650
Understandably there were quite a few direct criticisms of the article. I’ll deal with the ones I’ve spotted one by one.
-You only used one scientific source.
I thought about this a lot when I was writing the article. Primarily I didn’t want it to become a review of the science, but I wanted there to be enough science in there to give background to what I was discussing from the interviews and my own opinions. I chose to use the IPCC because it is not really “just one source”, rather a review of a body of scientific evidence from which predictions and recommendations are made.
-The changes we can make as individuals won’t add up to a hill of beans, what we need is widespread international change, and without this we shouldn’t bother to do anything.
I wasn’t trying to say in this article that individuals could solve climate change with collective action alone. In fact I emphatically stated my opinion that this is not feasible. What I tried to make one of the central points was that there are reasons we might choose to make changes in our own lives as part of demanding the wider changes required of national and international governments. We should consider doing this partly because it makes us feel better and partly because it gives legitimacy to the calls for wider changes. An article I read just yesterday makes this particular argument more eloquently than I managed to:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/climate-change-forum/message/612
-It’s fine for him to say we should get the train instead of flying, he’s a freelancer who can slack off whenever he likes!
This may be true now (except for the financial worries of earning your own crust!), but it wasn’t true when I first decided that I wasn’t going to fly within Europe. That trip was to the Eiger in autumn 2005, and between then and autumn 2007 I had a job with normal amounts of time off, I did lots of trips without flying, around the UK and to mainland Europe. I was also living in Scotland, so travelling to the Alps was harder than it is for me now from the Peak District. So it’s easier now, but that is not the only reason I’m able to do it. I’ve got good enough on the trains now that from the Peak District I actually find getting to the Alps by train is less hassle and involves no significant loss in time in the hills.
-You only looked at the impact of climbing/flying, what about the rest of life?
Perhaps I should have made this clearer in the article. I certainly wasn’t trying to say we should be minimising the effect of our climbing and ignoring everything else in our lives. But there are plenty of books and websites that can help you with reducing the carbon footprint of your everyday life, and the article was quite long enough as it was. What I wanted to explore was the difficulty I have, and I think many people have, with squaring what they do in order to go climbing with their environmental consciences. I suspect there are many people who consider the rest of their lives quite “green” but still fly to go ice climbing. I think this situation is even more interesting because of how directly threatened many aspects of our sport are by climate change.
-What about CO2 from breathing? You haven’t accounted for that and you must get pretty out of breath running up all those hills!
CO2 from breathing doesn’t count because the carbon you breathe out when you breathe is the same carbon that the plant that you are eating absorbed when it grew, so the process is carbon neutral. Of course there are lots of greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production that do matter, beyond that carbon you are breathing out, and the reason I didn’t really discuss them is covered in the point above.
I think most of the other questions have been answered by other posters, but if I’ve missed anything feel free to post back up here and I’ll see about answering it.
Finally, to those few but vociferous posters who’ve replied at length on the previous threads expressing doubt as to the whole idea of anthropogenic climate change: consider that to reach your viewpoint you must have had to:
• apply such a severe level of prejudice to information coming your way on climate change that anything supporting it is dismissed while any small thing apposing it is seized upon and canonised, despite the huge majority of scientific opinion siding with the former, and much of the latter having been repeatedly and publicly discredited;
• concoct or buy into far-fetched and elaborate conspiracy theories;
• convince yourself that somehow vested interests in the environmental movement, or in science, could have won an argument against the much greater interests invested in “business as usual”, even though all their science was wrong.
I’m not a climatologist, and I don’t want today to get drawn into endless arguments about whether or not climate change is real, so I’ll leave it at that. I’d rather focus on solutions rather than getting side-tracked by sun-spots.