bemoreeco

It’s true, but milder Scottish winters are causing Scotland’s wild breed of Soay sheep to get smaller, despite the evolutionary benefits of possessing a large body, according to new research.

The new study provides evidence for climate change as the cause of the mysterious decrease in the size of wild sheep on the Scottish island of Hirta, first reported by scientists in 2007. The researchers believe that, due to climate change, survival conditions on Hirta are becoming less challenging, which means slower-growing, smaller sheep are more likely to survive the winters than they once were. This, together with newly-discovered so-called ‘young mum effect’ whereby young ewes produce smaller offspring, explains why the average size of sheep on the island is decreasing.

Classical evolutionary theory suggests that over time the average size of wild sheep increases, because larger animals tend to be more likely to survive and reproduce than smaller ones, and offspring tend to resemble their parents. However, among the Soay sheep of Hirta, a remote Scottish island in the St Kilda archipelago, average body size has decreased by approximately 5 per cent over the last 24 years.

Researchers analysed body size data for Soay sheep over a 24 year period

The research team analysed body size and life history data, which records the timing of key milestones throughout an individual sheep’s life, for Soays on Hirta over this 24 year period. They found that sheep on the island are not growing as quickly as they once did, and that smaller sheep are more likely to survive into adulthood. This is bringing down the average size of sheep in the population over all.

Lead author Professor Tim Coulson from Imperial’s Department of Life Sciences, suggests that this is because shorter, milder winters, caused by global climate change, mean that lambs do not need to put on as much as weight in the first months of life to survive to their first birthday as they did when winters were colder.

He explains: “In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta. But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year, and survival conditions are not so challenging – even the slower growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”

In the past, the harsh Hirta island winters meant only the biggest, strongest Soays survived

Their results suggest that the decrease in average body size seen in Hirta’s sheep is primarily an ecological response to environmental changes over the last 25 years; evolutionary change has contributed relatively little.

In addition, the research team also discovered that the age at which a female sheep gives birth affects the size of her offspring. They realised that young Soay ewes are physically unable to produce offspring that are as big as they themselves were at birth. This ‘young-mum’ effect had not been incorporated into previous analyses of natural selection, which explains in part why the sheep of Hirta are defying biologists’ expectations.

“The young mum effect explains why Soay sheep have not been getting bigger, as we expected them to,” concludes Professor Coulson, “But it is not enough to explain why they’re shrinking. We believe that this is down to climate change. These two factors are combining to override what we would expect through natural selection.”

The research was carried out in collaboration with scientists from the Universities of Leeds, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Stanford. It was funded in the UK by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)

Putting lime into the oceans could stop or even reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, according to proposals unveiled at a conference on climate change solutions last week4.

According to its advocates, the same technique could help fix one of the most dangerous side effects of man-made CO2 emissions: rising ocean acidity.

The project, known as Cquestrate, is the brainchild of Tim Kruger, a former management consultant. “This is an idea that can not only stop the clock on carbon dioxide, it can turn it back,” he said, although he conceded that tipping large quantities of lime into the sea would currently be illegal.

The oceans are a key part of the natural carbon cycle, in which carbon dioxide is circulated between the land, seas and atmosphere. About half of the CO2 released into the air by humans each year is soaked up by the oceans. This helps slow the rate of global warming but increases ocean acidity, posing a potentially disastrous threat to marine ecosystems.

The lime reacts with CO2 dissolved in the water, converting it into bicarbonate ions, thereby decreasing the acidity of the water and enabling the oceans to absorb more CO2 from the air, so reducing global warming.

Full article can be found at The Guardian

Today is the last day for people to complete their recycle week pledges. For the team at BeMoreEco WRAP Recycle Week has been a fun and very informative. We have have received loads recycling tips and will make sure that we keep on following them in the week, months and years to come.  I hope that the readers of BeMoreEco have enjoyed our Recycle Week Daily Blog, which formed part of the Recycle Now campaign. For a summary of our daily blog click here.

Please remember the team at MoreEco have been supporting the BeMoreEco recycle week campaign. Also as bonus if you sign up to MoreEco during June and July they will give you an extra 100 joining points, in addition to the 500 you receive when joining. Use offer code ‘recyclenow’.

Lunch (Recycle Week Pledge)

This is my last recycled left overs lunch. Last night we had a BBQ with some friends, so today I made some wraps with lefts over salad, new potatoes, and BBQ chicken breast. It was very good indeed.

Recycle Week Video

Expanded Polystrene foam recycling machine. Just listed to the video. ARHHHH!

We are now in day three of Recycle Week and we are getting more and more people to accept the fact that they need to recycle more. Our daily format is simple, we will talk about what we have been reading, having for lunch, discuss recycling bins and post any amusing and informative recycling video’s.

Recycle Week Reading

Last night I used Google to search for interesting Recycle Week news articles. My first favourite was provided by WRAP titled ‘More plastics could be recycled from packaging‘. Much of this plastic packaging ends up in landfill, but WRAP’s research based on the trials shows this does not have to be the case.

The work shows for the first time that collecting of non-bottle household plastic packaging, reprocessing it and finally manufacturing it into useful popular items, is both technically and commercially viable. Recycling of this plastic packaging is also the best environmental option. WRAP is also launching a £2 million capital grant competition to help the recycling supply chain build the capacity for recycling more plastics packaging.

The second article I found encouraging was at www.letsrecycle.com titled ‘Councils gear up for 2009 Recycle Week’. This article details the efforts being made by City of York and Cherwell local counsils.

Lunch (Recycle Week Pledge)

Day three lunch and what am I going to have today. Well last night we had roast chicken so I decided to make a soup with the leftovers. The office was very jealous of me today when I heated up my organic chicken and vegetable soup and ate it with a nice wholemeal roll. This has definitely been the best lunch this week.

Recycle Bins

This collection of recycle bins have been taken while on my travels around the UK. A few years ago they would off been a rare site, but now they are becoming more and more noticeable and prominent.

This is a positive sign demonstrating that Councils, Shops, Festivals, Beaches, Public Places and Museums are taking an active role in trying to encourage people to place their rubbish in the correct recycling bin.

Recycling Video

This recycling you tube video  may seem a bit corporate and boring, but I found it realy interesting on how rubbish can be sorted and recycled.

Did you know that Bywaters hosts the largest undercover dry recyclables Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in London? The MRF processes a wide range of co-mingled office and commercial dry recyclables and being largely automated efficiency and recovery rates are maximised.

Also as bonus if you sign up to MoreEco during Recycling week we will give you an extra 100 joining points. Use offer code ‘recyclenow’.

So WRAP’s Recycle Week has started!

First task of the day

My first task this morning was to make sure that our curb side recycling boxes were fully loaded and ready for collection, which i must admit I sometimes forget to put out. It was satisfying to see that by the time I walked to work they have been dutifully emptied.

Lunch

Before I left for work I had to prepare my lunch (Recycle Week pledge). The fridge door was opened, arms were extended and left over food items were taken out.

So what did I end up with. Well with some home made avocado humus, cucumber, roast chicken and finally a bit of sweetcorn, I made a lovely left over wrap. Sounds interesting, but tasted very good and healthy. I also used my kids school water bottle for my drink and had some left over red wine….joke.

Eco Recycling Bins

To keep my cost low I share and office and over the weekend there was an office move. It was agreed that we were going to buying our own office recycling bins. So I have now ordered two recycling bins (paper and plastic). Click here for a detailed description and of eco recycleing bins which has been put together buy the team at EcoTrendSpotter, or vie the slide we have put togther.

Daily Recycling Video

Each day I will be posting an recycling related video. This video was created by Animal Planet.

If you sign up to MoreEco, the green and eco cash back shopping site, during Recycling Week they will give you an extra 100 joining points. Use offer code ‘recyclenow’.

Now in its second year, The Sunday Times Best Green Companies awards, sets out to identify and celebrate the achievements of British businesses that are striving to improve their environmental performance.

The Sunday Times Best Green Companies Award is unique. They are the first to have both a robust methodology to measure corporate environmental performance and a survey of company employees to find out whether the company standards and procedures are executed all the way down to the shop floor.

Below we have listed the top 10 Sundays Times Best Green Companies.

1 Forster

Walking and cycling holidays take on a new meaning at Forster. For every journey to and from work that is made by foot or bike, employees earn five minutes’ holiday, which can add up to a total of 2½ extra days a year.

The company helps budding walkers and cyclists find route maps, has organised cycle confidence sessions, and helps them link up with colleagues who live locally. A quarter of staff are reaping the rewards of these initiatives, which not only cut emissions, but also have health benefits.

A top green score of 98% shows that people at Forster don’t associate being green with beards and sandals. They believe the organisation is getting better at protecting the environment (another 98% result) and receive regular communication on green issues (88%).

2 The National Magazine Company

3 Willmott Dixon Group Construction

4 Skanska UK Construction

5 Infinis Power generation

6 Milliken Contract Manufacturing

7 BT Group Telecommunications

8 The Environment Agency

9 MediaCom

10 Hain Celestial UK

For a full list of the top 60 Best Green Companies <click here>

Rumour has it that Brad Pitt is going into the Amazon.

He will play out the story of an enigmatic explorer in search of his personal El Dorado. The explorer in question was Colonel Percy Fawcett, a highly resilient English surveyor who set off almost 85 years ago on his final expedition into the Amazon.  Fawcett, a celebrated veteran of many journeys into the unknown, secretly believed he had discovered scientific evidence of a lost civilisation within the vastness of what today is known as the Xingu, in north-eastern Brazil. 

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he remained resolute and journeyed repeatedly into the forest, determined to find it.  Newspapers published despatches detailing his quest for many months, but then all news ceased. Like Livingstone 50 years before him, Fawcett had vanished into a dark continent; only this time, no-one ever found him. 

Source; Andrew Mitchell of the BBC

Carbon! We hear that word bandied around these days like nobody’s business …we’re meant to save it, offset it, think about how much of it we use, it’s the basis of life, we’re made from it and if we don’t start taking it a bit more seriously then soon it will all be gone and the world will explode – or something? Well, I’ll give it a whirl, but in between the school run, running a business, keeping up with the mortgage, dealing with the modern middle class nightmare that is homework and making sure there’s enough wine (organic of course) in the fridge (A++ rated) to last the week, I’m afraid my carbon footprint is the least of my worries.

Still, politicians and the media wag their fingers at us as though we’re teenagers – walk instead of drive, use low energy light bulbs (mercury-laden by the way), turn the thermostat down and put on a sweater. Okay, I’m happy to do this in the name of energy conservation and the future of the planet, but what I, and most of the rest of the population would really love to know is, is it really going to make a difference? And why should I be so worried about it anyway? Surely one person can’t be responsible for the entire world going to pot – isn’t that the plot of a Superman film?

All I know about carbon is that it’s a natural element trapped in vegetation, coal, the earth, oil etc, and that releasing it into the atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect which is why we should drive a Reliant Robin rather than a Range Rover Vogue monster. Why doesn’t someone tell us more about this stuff? I’m sure people would be a lot more willing to give saving it a go if we knew why and, more to the point, that we were being supported. But sitting shivering in our living rooms watching TV by the light of a candle seems a tad masochistic when, if you take a trip to London at any time of the day or night, half the city is lit up like Las Vegas with only five people actually using the light, heat, computers etc. How much carbon would be saved if the Gherkin building was to please switch off the lights at home time?

Does Gordon Brown give Sarah a hard time for using the Downing Street washing machine more than once a day? Is Barack Obama going to refuse Air Force One and switch to video conferencing in the hope we’ll all choose Dorset over Benidorm for our summer holiday? I doubt that very much. And we’ve all seen David Cameron publicly shunning cars but I bet he tucks into his Sunday roast every week – the global livestock industry reportedly uses just as much energy as transport. And how many times have I heard disinterested friends or family say to me, ‘Well Lisa, I’d readily swap my Trojan Warrior Trailblaster for a moped if I thought that those factories in China would stop throwing out smoke and fumes like there’s no tomorrow.’ (which by the way, there won’t be at this rate!). These are the very same people whose demand for iPods, supermarket clothing and Nikes is the reason for the factories in the first place!

It’s all very well for the Government to put the onus on the homeowner to use less energy and transport, and fine us for having too much rubbish but I can’t help feeling that’s like using a pneumatic drill to open a pistachio. What about ticking off the car companies, heavy industry, the supermarket chains and most of Canary Wharf?

I’m on my children’s Eco-schools Council and it makes me smile right down to my toes to see such passion and commitment about saving energy and doing good for the environment from children as young as seven, who this planet, after all, belongs to. But it also breaks my heart to think that unless everyone from individuals, business owners, governments and multinational organizations, pulls together and takes responsibility for cutting carbon usage then, it seems to me, the earth will surely be doomed.

Confused as Lisa? You can find out more and have your say at http://tinyurl.com/CO2debate

This is a copy of my recent column which appeared in the latest issue of Sustained Magazine…. http://www.sustainedmagazine.com/

Author & Source – Lisa at Eurydice PR

On March 28, 2009, 3,922 cities in 88 countries around the world turned out or dimmed their lights in commemoration of Earth Hour. Below we have selected two of  our favourite pictures from the Earth Hour.

Brisbane, Australia

Hong Kong