Notes from Britain: it isn't going to get better soon

Two sour notes from the sceptered isle. First their scientists are telling us we should expect to lose up to 50% of our fellow creatures. They are not giving odds on whether homo not-so-sapiens is likely to be one of the goners. Studying the entire known fossil record, the British researchers found climate shifts and massive extinctions go together across the eons.

The press release describing their findings says, "Global temperatures predicted for the coming centuries may trigger a new ‘mass extinction event’, where over 50 per cent of animal and plant species would be wiped out, warn scientists at the Universities of York and Leeds." With temperatures like these, who needs an asteroid? And if the potato or hops go extinct, I'm outta here. New solar system anyone?

Renewables revisited

In the political realm, the United Kingdom government is backing off its goal for renewable energy. The government had set 2020 as the target date when they wanted 20% of the British energy supply to come from renewable sources. That's just been reduced to 15%.

The entire European Union's goal is 20% renewable energy by 2020, so somebody's going to be a whole lot greener than the UK if the EU meets that goal. Scandanavia, Germany and Spain are all moving quickly toward using renewable energy scoures. And we recently blogged about Portugal building the world's largest wave farm.