April 2013

Three years ago last Sat­urday, an oil rig around 50 kilo­metres off the coast of Louisi­ana exploded. The explo­sion killed eleven work­ers instant­an­eously, and marked the begin­ning of an 87-​day period of uncon­trol­lable crude oil spillage into the Gulf of Mex­ico, the sea-​floor well spew­ing out around 4.9m bar­rels of oil before it was finally capped on 15 July 2010.

This week, the Office of National Statistics will tell us if Britain has slipped into a triple dip recession, and if the news is grim we may be treated to the sight of George Osborne – the most stridently anti-environment chancellor for a generation – blaming it all on climate change.

Last Saturday, more than 10,000 people came together all across the globe to take a stand for the Arctic. Organisers hosted human banners in the shape of a heart, spelling out 'I Love Arctic', in more than 280 cities in 38 countries from Chile to New Zealand and from Norway to South Africa. Looking at these beautiful photos, I think the results speak for themselves.

Ancient ice cores, drilled from the thickest glaciers in the Arctic, allow you to examine the atmosphere from thousands of years ago when the ice was last water, by analysing the gases contained in the bubbles trapped in the ice. It’s the carbon content scientists are particularly interested  in – they’re looking for carbon bubbles, and they’re willing to go to the ends of the earth, quite literally, to find them.

But there’s another type of carbon bubble which is even more important in the climate debate, and so far we’ve been doing our utmost to ignore it. This week that began get more difficult.