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A lot of us are disappointed with the weather this summer. Apart from a few sunny days in June we are now left with grey cloudy days and lengthy downpours. For this reason many people may take the latest statement by the Environment Secretary Hilary Ben as good news. He stated that

by 2080, London will be between 2C and 6C hotter than it is now

. This hotter weather however will result in extremes with greater flooding in the winter and drought in the summer.

If these statements are true then measures need to be put into place so that we can plan for the future.

Most of us would agree that we need to stop polluting our planet as in the long run everybody suffers; Crops stop growing and clean water becomes scarce. The solutions in trying to clean the planet up cost millions if not billions of pounds but it is often the case that it is big corporations drive for wealth that have caused the massive environmental problems that we are facing today, and many of them are still unwilling to cut back on the amount of pollution they omit on a daily basis.

Some worrying statistics from the World Health Organisation state that around 4.6 million people are killed every year across the world due to air pollution and that 80% of deaths in developing countries are a direct result of diseases carried in the water supply.

What will it take for us all to make a change? Governments can put policies in place, but it will take a conscious effort from us all to start looking after the planet that we live on.

We are all looking for ways to save energy, whether the reason is to help the environment or to save money, every little helps. Two students from Kenya who have been looking into ways to save energy have come up with a way to charge your mobile phone while you cycle. If this goes into production it will be a great way for Kenyans to easily charge up their phones. Currently many of the population who own a mobile phone have to travel to their nearest shop, which could be miles away, to charge their phone at a cost of $2 a time.

The two electrical students Jeremiah Murimi and Pascal Katana both in their early twenties are selling the charging device for $4.40 The device can fully charge a mobile phone with an hour of pedalling. There are already similar devices in other countries across the world but we need to continue to be imaginative and creative we are going to find solutions to the problems of climate change.

Reduced cloud cover may sound like a good thing…more blue sunny skies. However clouds help protect us from a lot of the sun’s rays. This is why a recent study in the journal Science gives cause for worry when it claims that the clouds over the north east Pacific are dissipating as the ocean warms up.

Low level cloud cover is said to help cool the Earth by reflecting the sun’s rays away, therefore without this cloud cover it is possible that the Earth’s oceans could warm up. Scientists have as yet been unable to predict by how much this would affect global temperatures in the future, but it is yet another sign that governments around the world need to make significant policies to reduce carbon emissions.

How are we ever supposed to produce a viable source of renewable energy if plants such as the turbine manufacturing plant in Newport on the Isle of White are set to close? The plant, which is the only major wind turbine manufacturing plant in Britain is being closed after the cash rich company who own it decided they were going to shut it down.

This had lead to the unusual collaboration of trade union and environmental campaigners marching together to try and save the plant from closure.

Only last week the energy and climate secretary, Ed Miliband was talking about how thousands of new jobs would be created in the attempt to use more and more renewable energy sources. This now seems hard to believe after the events of this week with workers at the Newport plant fighting hard to keep their jobs.

Scientists are key in researching and understanding the effects of global warming and what measures need to be put into place in order to slow down the process. For this reason you would expect the government to work very closely with scientists in order to put effective measures into place. However, it has been stated by the Innovation, Universities, Science and skills committee that ‘knowledge from experts is not being properly used to make informed policy decisions’.

This is worrying, especially when only a couple of weeks ago Al Gore compared global to warming to that of the Nazi threat.

Quite rightly the same committee stated that the prime minister should be talking directly to scientists so that informed policies can be made.

It seems fundamentally flawed to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund scientific research if the findings they make are not going to be listened to.

By now we are all aware of global warming and many people, like myself are keen to do what they can to slow this inevitable process down. It’s no surprise that emissions from cars is a major pollutant but have the governments being focusing too much on cars and not enough on air travel.

It has been suggested that the EU should put more funds towards looking into using biofuels for aviation. After all, we already have hybrid cars and some car plants are even set to mass manufacturer electric cars in the years to come. With this alternative it seems silly not to turn more attention on planes.

Although a viable alternative to fossil fuels needs to be found will we just be destroying our planet in other ways when rainforests are cut down to make space for farmland growing biofuels?

As many politicians make new policies to try and combat the effect the of global warming, experts have stated that plans to trap carbon dioxide, known as carbon dioxide sequestration will not be an effective measure.

While plans for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power will help towards climate change in the long term, trapping carbon dioxide and storing it underground will have little effect. Researchers who have been looking into the speed of change in global warming have calculated that the heat energy in the atmosphere equates to only 6.6% of global warming whereas heat stored in the ground equates to a significant total of 31.5%

With these findings, governments across the globe will have to think again about a immediate solution to cutting emissions if we are going to slow down the effects of global warming.

Al Gore continued with his mission to raise awareness on Global Warming last week. During a speech to students at Oxford University the former vice president compared the urgency in combating global warming to that of the threat from the Nazis. During his speech he talked about reducing carbon dioxide emissions and about how the fight to achieve this would require a heroic leader such as Britain had in Winston Churchill during World War 2.
Al Gore stated that global warmin

“The only way politicians will act is if awareness raises to a level to make them feel that it’s a necessity.”

With members of the G8 Climate Pact not reaching any sort of agreement that will have a great impact on pollution we could be looking for this heroic leader sooner rather than later. When climate change is demanded by the public only then may the politicians react with any sense of urgency.

So what has the G8 Climate pact with developing countries really achieved? Well on the surface of things…not much. The developing countries have not been able to persuade their rich counterparts to adopt their emission cuts by 2020 and neither have they been able to get the G8 Leaders to pledge billions of dollars towards green technology.

Although the climate declaration agreed at the G8 meeting doesn’t go far enough for many it has symbolised a change with many of the big players such as the USA and Australia, who under President Bush and John Howard would never have happened.

We can only hope that this is a good sign and that the new global climate treaty set to be discussed this December at the UN summit in Copenhagen will see many countries pledging money towards renewable energy sources.