April 2013

This week, the Office of National Statistics will tell us if Britain has slipped into a triple dip recession, and if the news is grim we may be treated to the sight of George Osborne – the most stridently anti-environment chancellor for a generation – blaming it all on climate change.

Ancient ice cores, drilled from the thickest glaciers in the Arctic, allow you to examine the atmosphere from thousands of years ago when the ice was last water, by analysing the gases contained in the bubbles trapped in the ice. It’s the carbon content scientists are particularly interested  in – they’re looking for carbon bubbles, and they’re willing to go to the ends of the earth, quite literally, to find them.

But there’s another type of carbon bubble which is even more important in the climate debate, and so far we’ve been doing our utmost to ignore it. This week that began get more difficult.