Philip Boucher-Hayes Profile picture
TV & Radio shaped journalist.
kate varley Profile picture 1 subscribed
Mar 22, 2023 11 tweets 4 min read
Five facts that the climate scientists of the IPCC wanted you to know that the petro-states successfully lobbied to bury or fudge.
1/ Image This weeks report is the product of a long negotiation in which all the governments of the world horse trade.

Luckily there are minutes kept of who vetoed what. Some of it is important but not critical 👇 Image
Apr 4, 2022 12 tweets 3 min read
I've just finished the latest #IPCCReport. It's written in the usual barely comprehensible climate wonk speak. But behind the jargon there's a blueprint that seems as revolutionary now as Das Kapital must have in 1867... Image The climate scientists don't do anything like call for the overthrow of the capitalist classes. But they use science to point to how society has to be re-ordered from top to bottom.
e.g. If we want to keep warming below 1.5 global emissions will need to peak in 2025 – three years
Feb 1, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
This is quite a slap in the face from Brussels for Ireland's care for the environment. It comes from the Director in charge of environmental implementation at the Commission speaking at a recent online conference.
Thread ... 1) "About 50% of Ireland's urban waste
waters are still not collected and treated in compliance with the Urban wastewater treatment
directive"

2) "Many bird species are in serious decline, and there is even a serious risk of extinction of certain breeding species"
Jan 30, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Journalist Murray Sayle wrote this piece about #BloodySunday just 5 days after the murders. It was spiked by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, but fifty years on remains an astonishingly accurate account of what the Army was up to. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/… Perhaps it was telling that it took a man from a colonised country (Australia) to recognise the British Army account for the tissue of lies that it was. And it was an unforgivably supine decision of Evans to not run the piece. Sayle did the right thing and resigned
Jan 12, 2022 10 tweets 3 min read
Four climate experts have just made statements to the Oireachtas Environment & Climate Action Committee which is considering Carbon Budgets. Some of their analysis really raises fundamental questions about whether we are getting this right at all. In no particular order ... Ireland is subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of €2.4bn a year (CSO, 2019). At COP26 we agreed to start phasing those out, but for now Ireland plans only to produce a road map for cutting subsidies in 2024.
- Prof John Sweeney
Dec 15, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
What scientists are projecting will happen to the Thwaites Glacier in the next three to five years should be front page news everywhere today.
Short thread. The Thwaites Glacier (roughly the size of Britain) is mostly held in place by a massive shelf of ice that slows its flow in to the sea.
Nov 29, 2021 7 tweets 3 min read
47% Irish people against nuclear power. 25% in favour.

@AmarachResearch ran a poll of 1600 people prompted by this evening’s Hot Mess on @RTERadio1

We posed a number of questions 1/ Image Q1: Should Ireland consider nuclear energy to achieve its climate change targets?

Yes: 31%
No: 42% Image
Apr 29, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read
This story sent me down a late night research rabbit hole wondering how quarantines were enforced during the Black Death. A lot of it is still the same five centuries later.

Thread

itv.com/news/anglia/20… In Damascus at the start of the 8th century the Arab world had already come up with an embryonic form of hospital.
They then had the good sense to build entirely separate units for the treatment of leprosy.
Feb 21, 2020 9 tweets 2 min read
What the hell is happening to Britain?

I have been travelling to London since the eighties but I have never come across the volume and depth of despair as presently. It has taken me until now to process something I saw on The Tube yesterday.

A man begging, reduced to involuntarily howling in exhausted anguish. Met with everything from indifference to anger.
Nov 1, 2019 23 tweets 3 min read
Dublin tech bro heading to Lisbon for Web Summit is putting his best moves on a Brazilian girl in the row behind me. This is very thread-worthy. In fact this is worthy of a title:

Missed connections: A possible explanation of why the tech-bro’s failed chat up routine led to species extinction.
Mar 27, 2019 7 tweets 3 min read
The Brexiteer who launched a thousand #HannanIrishHistory tweets also dabbled in futurology. Daniel Hannan’s wrote this prediction for a glorious Brexit just before the referendum I’ll just leave these excerpts here.
Feb 26, 2019 11 tweets 2 min read
History and Geography were dropped as core subjects in Britain. Only 40% now study it at GCSE (junior cycle).

It’s a bit of a leap from there to #Brexit but it must be part of the background picture. History is compulsory in Britain only up until age 14. The most recent figure I can find from 2009 suggests only 4% sat a History GCSE exam. Making it less popular than Design & Technology.