Noise? Trees??....huh??!

If this is what you're thinking right now, read on for an explanation.

So there I was sitting on a train the other day thinking how no-one told me before I decided to "go green" (i.e. do my bit to save the world from burning to a crisp via global warming etc.,) that this business of going green really isn't very easy at all. For example, the particular train I was on was running half an hour late. Not such a big deal? Well, in actual fact, that meant that I was going to miss a connection, which meant I'd have to sit around at Peterborough train station for forty minutes waiting for the next connecting train, which meant that my journey would end up being one hour and ten minutes longer than it should have been. Again, not that much of a big deal, you might think? Trust me, it's a pretty big deal when your journey is supposed to be eight hours long in the first place.

Now I'm a frequent commuter between Scotlandshire and Englandshire and I have to say unfortunately this wasn't the first time my journey had been thus disrupted. Time and again people have said to me, when I'm having a moan about the abysmality that is the East Coast train service, "Why don't you just fly?". The answer, plain and simple, is that getting on a plane to travel a relatively short distance, such as from regional capital to regional capital, is horrendously bad for the environment. I can't remember the precise technicalities, but I think that for a journey of this distance, a train emits around a third of the total carbon dioxide emissions that your average Mr Ryanair tin can (sorry, "aeroplane") would. This is why I will continue to endure savage delays and disrupted schedules on a near antique railway line, instead of getting on a plane and supersizing my carbon footprint. I wish, however, that before I got all environmentally concerned, someone had told me what a pain in the ass being green is.

So, to the title of this blog (sorry, I did promise an explanation, didn't I?). A lot of people might be familiar with the old riddle, "If a tree falls down in a forest, but no-one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?". The answer of most rational, scientifically-minded folk is yes, of course it makes a noise, because of sound waves travelling through the air and all that. A lot of climate change deniers, or even those who aren't so sure, when questioned why they think global warming isn't happening tend to come out with "Well, they say global warming's happening, but I don't notice the temperature going up" or, on a rainy summer's day, "So much for global warming, eh?". To these people, I ask a simple question. Just because you don't notice something happening, does it mean it isn't happening at all?

xx