johnadams.org.uk

Snowdrops

Originally uploaded by John The Geologist

The first snowdrops of the year appeared a couple of days ago. A sure sign that spring is on the way.

It’s been mild so far, hasn’t it?

The World Pipe Band Championships were held on Glasgow Green yesterday. The week before had been sunny and warm, but the day of the championships saw continual light rain and leaden skies - truly dreich. That didn’t put off the pipers, who were well prepared with capes.

The competition involves 200 bands (that’s 8000 musicians) from Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, the rest of Europe, Canada, USA, Australia, Pakistan, New Zealand, Brazil and Oman, among others. There are arenas covering all seven grade competitions, as well as Drum Major competition and Highland Games. And plenty of chip vans.

The best place to watch the best bands at the Grade 1 final tuning area, where the bands make their last minute preparations before entering the competition arena. They concentrate on tuning, tightening up the drumming…

…and getting tricky tunes right…

… before marching off into the competition arena.

Interestingly, Strathclyde Police band were the only band who didn’t use electronic tuners to check the tuning - instead they had two guys who listened and made careful adjustments to the drones. Now that’s serious musicianship.

Results

The Grade 1 results were…
1st Field Marshall Montgomery Pipe Band from Lisburn, Co. Antrim
2nd Simon Fraser University Pipe Band from Vancouver
3rd Scottish Lion 78th Fraser Highlanders from Toronto
4th= The House of Edgar Shotts and Dykehead
4th= Strathclyde Police Pipe Band

Field Marshall Montgomery have secured their second World Championship in two years. That makes up for us losing in the rugby.

More pictures on Flickr.

As part of our Climate Change Week at work, I watched An Inconvenient Truth, a film that follows Al Gore as he delivers his lecture about climate change around the world.

This mashup from Malcolm Daniel is a great 4-minute summary of the film:

Two things particularly struck me:

Firstly, Gore presents evidence from Antarctic ice cores, showing the atmospheric CO₂ levels over the last 650,000 years. Recently, certain climate-change sceptics have tried to throw doubt on the nature of the human-induced global warming by citing cyclical events through the Pleistocene glaciation. This graph indeed shows such cyclical events with glaciations interspersed with interglacials.

See also 600,000 year graph.

However, look at present-day CO₂ levels, at 380ppm, much higher than the historical maxima of around 280-290ppm. We are not in a cyclical interglacial, but in completely new territory.

The second thing that struck me was the fact that we have the technology, right now, to solve the problem (or at least to mitigate the worst effects). We don’t need mirrors in the sky, we need simple measures, but taken by everyone. These include energy-efficient appliances, industry and transport; renewables; and even carbon sequestration. With these, we can reduce our CO₂ emissions to 1970 levels!

As Scotland is cancelled tonight, we’re off to bed.

Happy New Year!

It’s been a lovely few days of an early summer heat wave in the west of Scotland. The thermometer in the garden read 28°C on Saturday. Perfect weather for mooching around the garden. The courgettes went in this weekend, and the tomotoes are all staked up in the greenhouse, with lots of flowers.