Scotland Green Living — News on the environment
News on the environment
The United Kingdom will face natural disasters on an unprecedented scale in future brought about by climate change
and global warming. The media such as the BBC have given most focus to transportation accidents in the decades gone by,
such as air crashes, sea accidents and road crashes. Also terrorism, massive fires and oil explotions as well as oil tankers
running aground are not uncommon to see on the news. Yet the UK's geographical location exposes it to the risk of
serious natural and life threatening disasters such as hurriacanes, storms, heat waves, low temperatures and flooding.
A brief history of natural disasters in the United Kingdom:
November 26, 1703: a great storm and destructive cyclone struck central and southern England leading to 8,000 deaths and destroying 700 ships. This led on to a major drawback for marine transportation in Britain.
Settember 1782: 3500 people were killed during the Central Atlantic hurricane.
1783: Laki Volcano fissure eruption in Iceland killed 20,000 British people in Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire with air poisoning caused by outpouring of poisonous gases such as hydrogen fluoride and sulphur dioxide.
1816: Year without a Summer with low temperatures and 65,000 deaths
2003: 2000 people died in the UK from a summer heatwave.
The great storm of 1987 taught us that forecasting the weather is difficult and weather forecasters can get it wrong. The weather in Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole
is changeable and unpredictable. There are over 1000 satellites in space, which are needed to predict the Earth's climate as well as for modern day communications.
Satellites enable faster Internet connectivity between continents throughout the world as do under sea cables, so as well as satellites the British Navy are important in maintaining under sea cables with submarines.
Equally, tracking space debris and cleaning it up is important and will reduce the risk of asteroids hitting the Earth, causing carnage and injuring people.
Entrepreneurs should work on finding novel means to track satellites and space debris. The UK Space Agency is encouraging this. For more on this, see
BBC News article on New approaches to tracking satellites and debris in orbit are to get a boost from the UK Space Agency (2020).Internet links on climate events and news stories
Websites for environmental awareness