The North Briton

Still knee-deep in CRU climate gossip. Every spare minute of my otherwise uncharacteristically relaxing weekend (wander into town, buy paper, lunch, overpriced jumper) was spent trying to keep up with developments as hundreds of people tore their way through thousands of emails like puppies through underwear (for those of you who have been living under a blog for the last few, it started roughly here). Even the increasingly in-flightish FT offered no sanctuary, with a profile of ten “top” climate scientists. Number two on the list? Why Tim Lenton of course, who works a few doors down from everyone’s new favourite emailers at University of East Anglia. It’s a smaller scene than the arts scene, this one. 

And speaking of the arts scene, the climate-themed weekend started innocently and fun enough: David Thompson’s piece read over friday morning coffee on Cape Farewell, a peer-reviewed, Arts Council-funded expedition of mainly art blowhards to the Arctic to expel various gasses on the subject of you-know-what for a few days. Notable gasses included Jarvis Cocker’s learned observation that an iceberg “basically pisses on” all of art; Marcus Brigstocke, on the trip simply because he is the closest a live human has ever been to being a greenhouse gas, and a man who bravely dedicates his music—human-beatboxing, the CO2 emissions of which are measurable in PPMPMC (parts per million per MC)—to the cause of global warming. Less notable and more predictable (than Marcus Brigstocke, an achievement worth an arts council grant alone) was Francesca Galeazzi, with her “performance/action/intervention” of opening an actual canister of carbon dioxide gas. Reports from the site suggest Galeazzi countered initial hostility to her action among the small audience by making everyone a sodastream. At least she didn’t waste more of our atmosphere by talking, you say. We should be so lucky. 

The fun continues.