Also by Graham Thompson

On Tuesday, the Energy Bill we’re all so exercised about (oh yes you are) went for its second reading in the Lords. Their lordships Teverson, Deben, Prescott, Oxburgh and others spoke well. Stern and Worthington are actually worth reading.  

Polling conducted for Carbon Brief shows that the public primarily blame profiteering by energy companies for recent increases in energy bills. Only 7% of those polled blamed ‘green’ taxes, despite a concerted campaign by certain newspapers to persuade them this was the culprit.

In a shock to the scientific community, neonicotinoids, - or neurotoxic agricultural insecticides - have been shown in laboratory tests to cause brain damage in bees.

Actually, it wasn’t that much of a shock. There’s never been any doubt over the potential of these chemicals to harm bees - the recent controversy has been over dosage.

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.