A brilliant talk that punctures current discourse on climate ambition in Scotland, setting out what's really needed, by @KevinClimate for @ScotClimateCA

📽️ https://t.co/i02FtSkJT8 📽️

Well worth watching. Otherwise, here's a summary thread 👇
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Long thread here... from Keith, on tree guards:

I really don’t want to spread 120,000 plastic tree guards across the side of our lovely hill, the hill where I grew up and now farm, on the eastern edge of the Black Mountains. So, I’ve taken a good look at the pros,... 1/25

the cons and the alternatives, to try and decide rationally, which is the best approach for our plant on the Bryn Arw.

It has become the accepted norm in the UK that to plant a tree, you need to put your sapling in the ground and then wrap a plastic tree guard around it.

This is simply ‘how it’s done’ now. This practice uses a huge amount of plastic; worse still, it disperses plastic extremely efficiently around the countryside. In some rural places, un-retrieved tree guards are by far the biggest source of plastic pollution.

And yet the first commercial plastic tree guards only came on the market 38 years ago. There are many perfectly healthy woodlands and trees that are older than this, and which became established without plastic – which begs the question: do we really need guards?

Plastic tree guards have several uses, some of which did revolutionise tree planting when they first came out. In particular, they:
•protect your saplings from things that want to eat them;
•provide a microclimate, which enhances tree growth, according to the manufacturers;

Oh fuck. I am listening to Gormley's interview w/ Patrick Moore about climate change from Jan 21. Gorm is being fed a pile of horseshit and just happily swallowing every word. This is garbage. /1

Moore says you can't go out in the field & see what CO2 is doing. Which is just false. You can go in the field & measure atmospheric CO2 & its change directly. And he calls himself a sciencey guy? /2

Then he's saying, b/c some on the left believe GMOs are bad w/ no evidence, therefore everything they believe they believe w/ no evidence so therefore scientists who say the climate is changing are making up stories? This is ridiculous. /3

Often when I tune into climate deniers, there's stuff I hadn't heard before that I have to do a bunch of reading to find out what's real & what isn't. So far with Moore, I don't even have to make a list of stuff to check to know this is all nonsense. /4

I'm saying, he's going over old, long debunked talking points. This is tired & boring. /5

There's a huge gap between what climate scientists are willing to say privately and what we're willing to say publicly, in terms of how dire a situation we're in. Colleagues, integrity demands we close this gap.

The Sixth Carbon Budget (2033-2037) charts the decisive move to zero carbon for the UK. The CCC shows that polluting emissions must fall by almost 80% by 2035, compared to 1990 levels – a big step-up in ambition. (1/12) #UKCarbonBudget 🧵

Our recommended Sixth Carbon Budget would achieve well over half of the required emissions reduction to 2050 in the next 15 years, but decisive action must start today. (2/12) #UKCarbonBudget

The recommended Sixth Carbon Budget and UK NDC also reflect the goals and requirements of the Paris Agreement, recognising the UK’s responsibility as a richer developed nation and its respective capabilities. (3/12) #UKCarbonBudget

When we recommended the UK’s #NetZero target for 2050, we demonstrated that any negative economic impact was likely to be small and the overall impact could turn out to be positive. Our analysis for this report reinforces that finding. (4/12) #UKCarbonBudget

Our estimate of the annualised resource cost (which measures the net additional cost each year to deliver the same services with lower emissions) has fallen to less than 1% of GDP through to 2050. (5/12) #UKCarbonBudget