On 15th Nov 2015 Mike Berners-Lee, author of the Burning Question, and consultant at Small World Consulting spoke at the bi-annual Budgett-Meakin lecture at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution.
The full set of his slides are here: Highgate CBM lecture MBL 151122.
For a real time view of the COP21 negotiating text Carbon Brief have published their ‘bubble‘.
Carbon Brief also have a list of all of the first day speakers. Game changing announcements included one from India that offered some hope of a change from the coal stance of this major emitter and from global business leaders seeking to use their influence and resources to lower greenhouse gases.
“The dress will digitally display data which will show the impact of climate change on our physical world. It will show our planet as it will be, if we do nothing. The dress has been developed in partnership with the interactive creative agency Holition, and the data has been extracted from a major study of the global risks of future shifts in ecosystems due to climate.”
The installation encourages people to use social media to “start to make sense of what climate change means to us… ” Click here to join in “How One Person Can Make a Difference“.
The Highgate Neighbourhood Forum (HNF) has set up ‘Community Action Groups’ to work on topics such as volunteering and to support cycling, and one group is called ‘Community Energy’.
The group met in July to see if there was scope to set up a community scheme in Highgate, and one site that looked very hopeful for installing Solar PV panels was Camden’s Holly Lodge estate. This consists of 32 Blocks with flat roofs, typically suitable for 4kWp of solar PV panels each and one block already has a small installation. More
Muswell Hill Sustainability Group will have a stall
outside Muswell Hill Sainsbury’s on Saturday 10th October
selling “bags for life”. See Tim Minchin’s ballad.
Why discourage Plastic Bags?
There is no ‘away’ in the idea of ‘throw away’. They end up in the Ocean. A report on the BBC news on 1st Oct said that “recent worldwide research that estimates that 90% of all seabirds have swallowed plastic – and that by 2050, it’s virtually certain that any bird found dead will have plastic in its stomach.”
At the recent talk about the Antarctic wilderness the speaker Charlie Drew showed this slide, showing the concentration of plastic particles in the World’s Oceans. 
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