In a recent AA poll respondents were asked “It is proposed that a new Carbon tax be introduced on petrol and diesel fuels. To what extent are you in favour or against this proposal?”. The results from the 9021 respondents is listed below. completely against 4.5% Somewhat against 7.1% Neutral 7.1% Somewhat in favour 22.9% Completely in favour 58.5% The full poll can be accessed here

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Fr. Seán McDonagh, SSC (February 11, 2010 Pax Christi International is a non-profit, non-governmental Catholic peace movement working on a global scale on a wide variety of issues in the fields of human rights, human security, disarmament and demilitarisation, just world order and religion and violent conflict. Recently, Pax Christi together with the Fellowship of Reconciliation released a document entitled  Security for the Common Good. The document makes grim and sober reading. The document begins [...]

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Sean McDonagh SSC 2010-02-14 Another area of controversy in climate science centres around what is called the hockey stick graph which was developed by Michael Man, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes in 1999, and which subsequently appeared in the 2001 Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The metaphor hockey stick graph was coined by Jerry Mahlman the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s  (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics.  It plots [...]

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Fr. Seán McDonagh, SSC (February 14th . 2010). Recently, Professor John Sweeney, Director of the Irish Climate Change Analysis and Research Unit at NUI Maynooth acknowledged that scientists were ‘lousy’ at communications their ideas to the general public.  They have allowed journalists and lobbyist to fill this vacuum and thereby undermine the public’s belief in climate science.1 A number of things have happened during the past few months which have led to questions been raised [...]

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Fr. Seán McDonagh, (February 14th , 2010). The second setback for proponents of climate change reached right up to the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC).  This body was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human behaviour.   The IPCC does not conduct its own original research, rather its main activity is to [...]

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Special Areas of Conservation (SAC) Watch is an Irish Wildlife Trust training course which provides information and conservation training to potential SAC site monitors about Special Areas of Conservation in their locale and nationally. It is hoped that this project will foster a sense of understanding, pride and ownership over nature conservation sites amongst the community. This year the course will be focused in counties Cavan, Monaghan, Longford and Leitrim. The course involves 10 workshops with fieldtrips [...]

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