Copenhagen talks –act on CO2
We need to consider what we, as organisations and individuals, can do to reduce our own carbon footprints. It’s all very well to talk about it, but this winter, this extreme weather, shows just how close global warming could be. For Britain, global warming doesn’t mean getting warmer, it means getting colder – we’re on the same latitude as Alaska, and we should expect that sort of weather.
The talks in Copenhagen didn’t seem to be about us – they seemed to be about the way nations handle it. But macro-economics is about influencing what many individual people and organisations do, and that means that talks in Copenhagen were about to you and me, and our individual actions.
So what is this to you and me? I know I, for one, take the train whenever I can. I walk to the railway station, just over a mile, even when it’s wet, or cold, or dark, or snowy as it has been in the last few weeks. I don’t feel smug about it, in fact I am almost frightened, because the weather seems to be a little bit freaky.
What action can you take?
People receiving care in hospital reduces the number of carbon miles that your staff run up to give health care. But what about the carbon miles that patients run up coming to hospital, either for treatment, or to visit their friends and relatives? What about the costs of heating and lighting a hospital, when the patient’s own home is going to be heated and lit anyway?
Perhaps it’s time to look again, with fresh eyes, and what can be moved into the community. To look at what GPs can commission, and even what GP provider organisations can provide.
The results could be outstanding! Not only could you reach your targets for moving Healthcare out of hospital and into the community, you could also hit your financial targets at a time of constraint, spreading your finite budget to care for more people with more conditions. What are you in Healthcare for? This has to make sense!
Applied Knowledge - how much is enough?
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So “scientists" have come up with a response to the Varroa bee mite.
The story reminded us of how great and complicated is the world we live, and how little of it we understand.
Without bees to pollinate crops, we would staff. No more fruit, large numbers of other crops would suffer, who knows how many other pollinators besides bees would be affected, who knows how many other crops and foodstuffs other animals would fail?
We've known about tiny parasites for a long time. Tiny ichneumid wasps are scattered around caterpillars in greenhouses, they lay their larvae inside the caterpillar which stops the damage within one generation and save the crops. We've been able to create and spread parasites of this nature, but have not been able to stop the parasite of the bee that threatens our very way of life. At last we have a solution.
And yet, it relies on an enormous amount of detailed scientific knowledge. Understanding how the mite spreads (hiding in the base of brood cells, waiting for the next larva to be laid). It meant understanding how the nursing bees go about their daily business – spitting a little bit of brood food into the base of the cell. It meant understanding how to give something to the nursing bees that they would then place into the cell. And of course it meant identifying something that was safe for the bees, and yet deadly to the mite (in this case, something that the mite assumed was a virus and chewed up, ending up chewing itself up), and more challenging, how to make sure that the mite was in contact with this substance for long enough to kill it.
This is theoretical research (from University of Aberdeen and National Bee Unit in York) combined in a novel way to make something immensely practical. It would be difficult to say that watching nursing bees spit a little bit of something into the base of the cell could ever be turned into something practical. It would be difficult to look at any step in this chain of events, especially the bit where they found that the mite had to be completely immersed for a long period, and say "eureka we have the solution". Yet someone managed to put this whole chain of events together.
Successive governments have turned to universities and demanded more and more practical research. Closer to exploitation – less theoretical. We've done less and less theoretical research, less and less fundamental understanding. What will we find in a few years time that we have missed?