Tim Flannery came to London

My housemate Julia and I joined up with my friends Trent and Belinda to hear Tim Flannery speak about his new book, The Weather Makers.

Yes, there's something very greenhouse-UNfriendly about seeing an Australian talk about climate change when we've all flown across the planet to be there (not Jules, she's a pom).
For those who haven't heard him speak, or read his work, Flannery does an awesome job of making science easy to understand... and even interesting!! (Not just to energy nerd like me.)

For the record, he thinks that biosequestration (storing carbon in trees) is a pile of malarchy - for two reasons. First, because burning fossil fuels (which took millions of years to create) and then hoping that planting a few trees (that live, at most, a few hundred years each) will soak up the damageand KEEP it soaked up, is just unsustainably STUPID. Second, the total amount of carbon sucked up by trees is infinitisimally small compared to the amount of carbon sucked up by certain soil types. So by all means, we should invest in trees for biodiversity, salinity, and all those other things, but if we're doing it to save carbon, we're barking up the wrong, erm, ...you get the idea... I'm paraphrasing, but basically, if we want to stop global warming, we could be doing it in much smarter ways.

He also signed my copy of his book, which my last workplace gave me as a parting gift. Thanks guys!