Don't Print This!

When I was a teacher I was always complaining to students about the amount of paper they waste. By the time they'd printed work a few times, used worksheets, exam papers, made a few paper airplanes and got newsletters they must have been well on the way to using the average office worker's 10,000 sheets per year.

Paper is environmentally expensive to produce and most people are not aware of its effect on the environment.
So let's look at this on a 'per sheet' basis ; (standard copy paper).

• Each sheet weighs about 5 grams
• Just over 15 grams of wood are used to make it.
• For each sheet 5 grams of sludge is produced which has to be disposed of.
• To make each sheet requires 200 KJ of energy of which 95 KJ are bought in as coal/gas/oil or electricity.
• Each sheet produces 12.9 grams of carbon dioxide during its manufacture, transport and eventual disposal by decomposition or burning.
• Each sheet used adds 6.1 grams of carbon dioxide to global warming (the remaining 6.8 g is used by the trees grown for the next sheet).
• Each sheet of paper produces 0.06 gram of sulphur dioxide and 0.04 grams of nitrogen dioxide in its manufacture. Both cause acid rain.
• Each sheet adds a tiny amount of nasties such as dioxin to the environment.
• Recycling means less trees are cut down but does not significantly affect the amount of undesirable gases produced due to its reprocessing costs.
• White recycled paper adds a disastrous amount of bleach and sludge to the environment. The ONLY sensible way to recycle paper is to use it for unbleached cardboard. I've seen 'recycled' toilet paper. Hopefully that should be 'toilet paper made from recycled paper' but somehow, recycled brown toilet paper just doesn't appeal. And NEVER use brown paper in place of the paper you use for cooking - those nasties will get into your food!

Now since that average office worker is using 10,000 sheets of paper per year this means they are adding:

• 61 Kg of CO2 to global warming
• Using enough water to fill a small swimming pool
• producing about 130 Kg of acid rain causing gas.
• adding 45 grams of 'nasties' to the environment

Make what you will of this post. Just one thing - don't print it!

You can't hide the truth (but you can obscure it)

Greenpeace is upset about Donald Trump after he pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord and now says "Climate change is a hoax"

Who is right? - Neither of them.

Donald Trump is wrong - there is absolutely no doubt that the climate is changing. Average temperatures are creeping up, the jet-stream is not following it's 'normal' route and we are experiencing extremes of weather with violent storms, heavy rainfall and droughts becoming ever more common.

Greenpeace is wrong in blaming climate change entirely on the actions of man and suggesting that we can legislate to sort this out.

So what are the facts?

• The earth has been getting steadily warmer for the last 12,000 years
• Carbon dioxide is NOT the most powerful 'greenhouse gas'
• The amount of carbon dioxide in dry air is rising. It was 0.03% when the chemistry books I studied in the early 1970s were written. It's 0.04% now. Some of that is due to industrial emissions, some to vehicles, some to forestry, some to pollution of sea water, some to volcanoes. Global engineering projects could reduce it but we are scared of the impact that could have. It may make things much worse.
• Computer models of climate have been most unreliable so far with up to 400% variation. 
• Even if every bit of ice in the world melted there wouldn't be enough water to create a 'Waterworld'. Sorry Kevin.
• Our method of measuring average temperatures leaves a lot to be desired.
• Cities are warmer than the countryside but most of the temperature gauges are in cities. They apply a 'correction' to allow for this - largely guesswork.
• The places most prone to flooding in the world are also the places where the land is subsiding.
• It's easier to build on a flood plain than on a mountain
• Cow farts produce more greenhouse gases than cars do. So do termites.
• Volume for volume, water vapour produces four times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. There is on average 25 times as much of it in air as there is carbon dioxide. That means water vapour has 100 times the effect of carbon dioxide
• In the northern hemisphere if the jet stream is north of you it will be hotter. If it's south of you it will be colder and if it's over you it will be windier and stormy. Slight changes in average temperature can make the jet stream move like a rope being shaken.
• When sea ice in the arctic melts it has no effect on sea levels. Only ice and snow melting on land changes that.
• In the antarctic, when it gets warmer you get more snow. This increases the amount of ice there as it packs down. The antarctic is normally very dry - an ice desert. Wind does blow existing snow about there though.
• Sea levels are rising. They've been doing that since the last ice age by about the same amount each year. We have great difficulty in measuring this since land levels change up and down too. You never hear of that though.

Global temperatures follow patterns of long cool spells - ice ages followed by rapid temperature rises. We've been on a temperature rise for the last 12,000 years and are approaching a peak.

At the peaks climate becomes very unstable for a while before plummeting into the next ice age. We have a record of this available in antarctic ice cores.

Click the graph to see it more clearly.

The ice cores also provide a record of carbon dioxide in the air. In the past there was a much greater amount of it in the air but life survived.

We still can't say with certainty what caused ice ages but suspect variation in solar output and interstellar dust clouds.

Carbon trading won't reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we emit but will make some rich people richer.

If we take care of the environment we'll get:

• Clean water
• Clean air
• More jobs
• Better food
• Healthier
• Fewer extinctions
• Lower cost of living
• A nicer place to live

Have you heard about aerogel insulation? You can put an ice cube over a blowtorch and separate the two with a quarter inch of aerogel. The ice won't melt.

In hot areas we can use air conditioning to cool us down and get higher fuel bills and more pollution OR we can insulate our houses, pay less for cooling and reduce emissions.

In cold areas we can use heating to warm us up and get higher fuel bills and more pollution OR we can insulate our houses, pay less for heating and reduce emissions.

Which do you think the fuel producers want you to do? If governments really want to take action against global warming why don't they help people insulate their homes? Instead of researching new power stations it would make sense to invest in new insulation methods to reduce our power requirements.

The great plastic bag con.

Just recently the Prime Minister was in the news talking about introducing legislation to reduce single use plastic bags (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7101075.stm). Now I may be a cynic but I suspect he's more interested in the tax other countries have introduced on plastic bags rather than any real green motive.
Ireland has introduced such a tax and now charges 15 cents per bag. In the UK the tax would probably be 10p.

Now, admittedly the Irish tax has slashed the number of plastic bags used dramatically - by 277 million says the Irish government, but it's also raised 2½ million pounds in tax. In the UK if a similar pattern was followed it would raise 70 million pounds in tax. Now this is a drop in the ocean as far as UK tax is concerned - it would cost each of us in the UK just over £1.00 per year and would save 8.4 billion plastic bags each year! That would probably make our environment a lot tidier. But would it actually be much use as a way of combatting global warming?

Let's work it out:
On average each of us in the UK uses 150 bags each per year.
Each one weighs 8 grams - that's 1.2 Kg of plastic which if burnt would produce 3.7Kg of carbon dioxide.
Now that's not quite a true figure because a) CO2 is produced in the manufacturing process and transport of the bags b) many of the bags are disposed of in landfills where they do not decompose but instead remove carbon from our environment.
Let's take a worst case scenario and assume that all the bags are incinerated and that an equal amount of CO2 is produced in the bag manufacture. That would mean each of us is producing 7.5Kg of CO2 each year by just using plastic bags.

Now, let's compare that with other things.
An average motorist in the UK uses 1143 litres of fuel per year and produces 2700Kg of CO2 from it. By reducing his car use by just 0.3% (3/1000ths) each year Mr Average would save his 7.5Kg of CO2
If we all bought 0.3% more local products rather than foreign imports we could save ten times as much CO2 (from transport production of CO2) as we would use with plastic bags.
If we each used 900 fewer sheets of paper each year then that would save the same amount of CO2 as we use in plastic bags - That's equivalent to a magazine per month, two books less per year or just ten fewer newspapers. (Before you say it using recycled paper actually produces more CO2 since there are extra processing costs)

In fact we could produce less CO2 than we use in plastic bags by:

• fitting a single low wattage bulb as a replacement
• turning down the thermostat by just 0.3 degrees (wouldn't it be nice if thermostats were that accurate?)
• fitting an extra 1cm of loft insulation (of course you can't buy insulation that thin so you'll save much more than this)
  
• switching the TV off at night rather than leaving it on standby
• recycling glass bottles
• recycling aluminium cans
• unplugging your mobile phone charger when not using it
• fixing a sheet of aluminium foil to the wall behind your radiators (use Blue-tac).

There are lots of other ways - try a search for 'reducing greenhouse gasses' (Watch out for that misleading 'recycle paper' though)

Now what does this mean.

• Putting a tax on plastic bags and pretending to be 'green' is foolish. It's easy to say, makes the government a little extra cash and achieves very little other than tidying the environment.
• Shops like the idea. Those plastic bags cost them about 2p each. I find it interesting that firms like Tesco offer a 'green point' worth 1p every time you reuse a large bag which holds at least twice the amount you put in single use bags. (2 x 2p = 4p, less 1p for a green point = 3 p extra profit)
  
• There are far more effective ways of reducing greenhouse gases and almost all of them save you money.
  

Having said all that - Lets get rid of the bags but only because of the litter problem they create not because of the greenhouse problem.

Don't print this!

I'm always complaining to students about the amount of paper they waste. By the time they print work a few times, use worksheets, exam papers, make paper airplanes and get newsletters they must be well on the way to using the average office worker's 10,000 sheets per year.

Paper is environmentally expensive to produce and most people are not aware of it's effect on the environment.

So lets look at this on a 'per sheet' basis ; (standard copy paper).

• Each sheet weighs about 5 grams
• Just over 15 grams of wood are used to make it.
• For each sheet 5 grams of sludge is produced which has to be disposed of.
• To make each sheet requires 200KJ of energy of which 95KJ are bought in as coal/gas/oil or electricity.
• Each sheet produces 12.9 grams of carbon dioxide during it's manufacture, transport and eventual disposal by decomposition or burning.
• Each sheet used adds 6.1 grams of carbon dioxide to global warming (the remaining 6.8 g is used by the trees grown for the next sheet).
• Each sheet of paper produces 0.06 gram of sulphur dioxide and 0.04 grams of nitrogen dioxide in it's manufacture. Both cause acid rain.
• Each sheet adds a tiny amount of nasties such as dioxin to the environment.
• Recycling means less trees are cut down but does not significantly affect the amount of undesirable gases produced due to it's reprocessing costs.
• White recycled paper adds a disastrous amount of bleach and sludge to the environment. The ONLY sensible way to recycle paper is to use it for unbleached cardboard. Somehow, recycled brown toilet paper just doesn't appeal.

Now since that average office worker is using 10,000 sheets of paper per year this means they are adding:

• 61Kg of CO2 to global warming
• Using enough water to fill a small swimming pool
• producing about 130Kg of acid rain causing gas.
• adding 45 grams of 'nasties' to the environment

Make what you will of this article. Just one thing - don't print it!

Useful websites:Paper Vs plastic bags? http://www.angelfire.com/wi/PaperVsPlastic/
The paper calculator http://www.environmentaldefense.org/papercalculator/