The Energy Don's Blog

When it comes to setting targets, is 85 years the new 35? I'm not talking about some strange fitness plan for keeping elders as sprightly as youth, but instead looking far (?) into the future at climate targets for the years 2050 and 2100.
Those of us who follow the climate debate are well aware of targets - often expressed as a percentage of 1990 emissions. Now it would be nice to believe that they choose 1990 as being the year that I started work in the sector, but it's really just a...

The Radcliffe Meteorological Station in Oxford has just celebrated 200 years of daily weather observations, possibly the longest run of daily records for any single location in the world. Now located in the garden of Green College beside the old observatory...

My car gets 60.47mpg1.  How do I know?  Because I have recorded every litre of fuel put into it since I bought it three summers and four winters ago, and trust that the odometer gives me a reasonably accurate mileage driven.
So am I pleased – it does sound like a decent fuel economy, after all?  Well, not wholly, as although it is almost twice the number of miles per gallon of its predecessor, it is still a lot lower than the 85.6mpg the manufacturer's website would have...

In my last blog, I referred to the relative simplicity of calculating an (approximate) carbon footprint.  Of course there's a lot of mystique around it (and an increasing number of relatively well-paid experts), but the fundamentals are not exactly rocket...