Politicians dither as climate crisis builds

 

GLOBAL heating appears to have entered a new and fast-moving trajectory. Amid record-breaking temperatures, melting ice and a sharp increase in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures during the month of July, veteran climate scientists are now becoming increasingly alarmed about the pace of change.

“A few decades ago some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon but we are now witnessing things happening at a terrifying rate,” said Prof Peter Stott, leader of the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has also warned of record temperatures and extreme heat in the near future after confirming the latest climate-heating El Niño event had “arrived”.

The last major El Niño was in 2016 – which to date remains the hottest year on record. But for 2023, it comes on top of increasing global heat driven by human-caused carbon emissions, an effect described by the WMO as a “double whammy”. Its officials say urgent preparations for extreme weather events are now vital to save lives and livelihoods.

“As El Niño builds through the rest of this year, adding an extra oomph to the damaging effects of human-induced global heating, many millions of people across the planet and many diverse ecosystems are going to face extraordinary challenges – and unfortunately suffer great damage,” added Stott.

The WMO estimates there is now a 90 percent probability of the latest El Niño continuing to the end of 2023 at a moderate strength or higher, with the added risk of it supercharging extreme weather.

New records for high temperature have been broken almost daily on every continent in recent months whilst in the UK, the average temperature for June was beaten by nearly a full degree with an unprecedented heatwave also affecting the country’s coastal waters.

Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, admits that he doesn’t fully understand what’s going on with this summer’s crazy climate data.

“It feels to me like the climate may have shifted into some sort of new regime of global heating that scientists don’t yet understand. And yet the media and everyone keep acting like things are basically fine and leaders keep expanding fossil fuels,” he says.

Cambridge University’s Prof Emily Shuckburgh, a leading climate scientist and director of Cambridge Zero, says that after the UK’s record-breaking month of high temperatures, it looks likely the rest of the summer will be warmer than normal too as global temperatures continue to rise.

“We’ve been warning of these changes for 30 years and warning that the planet is overheating,” she told listeners on BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme (3 July 2023).

“We’ve got record melting in Greenland occurring right at this moment, we’ve got record low levels of sea ice in Antarctica. From pole to pole we are seeing dramatic changes and it is nature as well as humans that is witnessing the impact.

“Those extreme temperatures of 40 degrees that we saw in the UK last summer had a dramatic impact on our wildlife and a dramatic impact on us. Across Europe thousands of people died prematurely in that heatwave.

“Sadly the UK used to be a global leader in terms of climate change and it was only two years ago that we hosted the big international climate conference COP-26. We’ve now relinquished that leadership.”

Prof Shuckburgh says the recent progress report from the UK Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) on how the UK is doing against its own decarbonisation plans was “covered with red” because goals and targets were not being met.

“We should be responding to the cost of living and energy crisis by investing in insulation, in solar, in wind, offshore and onshore,” she suggested.

Prof Shuckburgh urged people to accept the global scale of what is at risk. “We know that if we don’t respond to climate change as a country and as a world then the risks are enormous,” she said.

“They are potentially catastrophic in terms of our food supplies, the global spread of disease, the risk from migration by communities that have been impacted by climate change, the risk of conflicts and, most importantly of all, the risk of passing catastrophic tipping points.

“This is what’s at stake. The really frustrating thing from my perspective is that we know what the solutions are. We have them at our fingertips and what we need are stable policies in support of them.”

Such stark warnings are echoed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, who also described addressing climate change as a “human rights” issue.

Evoking a “dystopian future” if urgent action isn’t taken, he said: “Our environment is burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying. We, the generation with the most powerful technological tools in history, have the capacity to change it.”

He accused world leaders of performing “the choreography of promising to act” before getting stuck in a rut dominated by short-term political expediency. Turk called for an immediate end to “senseless subsidies” of the fossil fuel industry and said the Dubai COP28 (2023 UN Climate Change Conference) climate summit in November and December needs to be a “decisive game-changer”.

At the end of June, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was accused by a resigning government minister and environment campaigner, Zac Goldsmith, of being “simply uninterested” in the environment and climate emergency.

Lame political leadership – mirrored by many of those in power and supported by the fossil fuel industry and elements of the right-wing media – along with a cost-of-living crisis and war in Ukraine, have all contributed to a prevailing laissez faire attitude.

At the start of 2023, when Sunak introduced his five key policy pledges, the climate and environment were noticeable by their absence, a clear indication that the country’s third prime minister in as many years does not view them as a priority.

Nothing has changed and, despite mounting climate relasted emergencies around the world this summer, Sunak, who favours flying about the country on short-haul private jets and helicopters, also shunned a recent Paris summit on the climate, debt and poverty hosted by the French President Emmanuel Macron.

If there can be a final thought and persepctive (for now) on this challenging issue then perhaps, somewhat surprisingly, it might go to the actor William Shatner.

As Captain James T Kirk of Star Trek’s Enterprise spaceship he explored the universe, espousing a vision of the future where humanity had not only survived but overcome many of the Earthly problems we face today.

Last year, 90-year-old Shatner had what he described as a “life-changing experience” when he physically travelled into space for the first time, expecting to experience “a deep connection with the immensity around us” and “a deep call” for endless exploration.

“The strongest feeling I had, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief I have ever experienced. I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death,” he said.

“I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

“This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside.

“I did my share in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. It is the final and only frontier, and we have been ravaging it relentlessly, destroying it at an unprecedented rate and making it uninhabitable.” 

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This article by Clive Simpson was first published by Central Bylines under the title, 'Politicians drag their heels as the climate crisis intensifies'.

Space debris problem needs urgent action

 

THE chief of global satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat has issued a stark warning to space leaders calling for immediate action to stem the proliferation of space debris in Earth orbit.

Counselling against complacency, Raveej Suri, Inmarsat’s Chief Executive Officer, said: “So far we have been lucky that we haven’t seen any major collisions in space, but we would be foolish to rely on luck alone.”

His wake up call to governments and industry was delivered during a no-holes-barred keynote speech to more than 100 delegates at the New Space Atlantic Summit, organised by the Portugal Space Agency (PSA) in Lisbon this week.

“It would be irresponsible of me not to call out that I believe we are at a crisis point regarding space sustainability which requires immediate and decisive action,” he stated. “Every year that we fail to act increases the cost of future actions and makes it more technically difficult to deliver an effective cleanup strategy.”

At Inmarsat we do not take the operating environment for granted but I am concerned that the world is now entering a system wide emergency, with low Earth orbits (LEO) particularly vulnerable, and we no longer have the luxury of patient action.

Suri, who transferred from Nokia to head up the London-based satellite services provider in 2021, welcomed moves in the past year which have seen more countries signing up to the ASAT (anti-satellite testing) ban, ESA proposing a zero space debris policy by 2030, a new five-year rule for satellite disposal after reaching the end of their operational life, and space sustainability policy initiatives from the UK.

But he said even these initiatives were “insufficient” compared to the gravity of the problem, citing examples of increasing space debris proliferation and the rising number of orbital near misses - including one by two defunct satellites earlier this year that came within 10 m of each other.

Suri also highlighted the work of Prof Hugh Lewis at the University of Southampton who recently released data that showed in March alone SpaceX Starlink satellites performed more collision avoidance manoeuvres in a single month than in the entire first 2.5 years of Starlink deployment.

Based on statistical models produced by the ESA space debris office, it is estimated that there are 36,500 objects larger than 10 cm, one million objects between one to 10 cm and an extraordinary 130 million objects between 1 mm and 1 cm.

These tiny objects could be anything from paint flecks from rockets to small fragments created from in-orbit impact, but travelling faster than a bullet they can still cause an incredible amount of damage to something else in orbit.

“These numbers and the risk to incumbent services will only increase as tens of thousands of satellites are launched into orbit over the coming years, many as part of so called mega constellations in low Earth orbit,” he said.

“So far we have been lucky but we would be foolish to rely on luck to keep to space commons - areas and resources that fall outside national jurisdiction - open for sustainable use. We urgently need to align to a shared understanding of the problem and agree on principals of action.”

Suri proposed a series of guiding tenets - understanding the constraints of the operating environment, bringing scientific consensus to orbital capacity, and providing equitable and fair solutions to benefit all - to help address the problem.

He also suggested that equity considerations should reach beyond the boundaries of space into Earth’s atmosphere where space environmentalism is already asking questions about the effect of industrialising the de-orbiting of spacecraft and what that does to the precipitous chemical balance of the upper atmosphere.

“We need to make gains in each area, we need to acknowledge that space is finite and move to an urgent scientific consensus on orbital capacity parameters,” he said. “We need to create the means to deal with space debris and we need to keep equity considerations front of mind.”

Whilst acknowledging that UN and ITU (International Telecommunication Union) processes are important, he declared it was time for a “like-minded group of countries” to commit collectively to shared principles, to share regulations and coordinating mechanisms for safe space operations and orbital development.

“This could be achieved by countries such as the UK, US and those in the EU coming together to agree a baseline understanding of the issues and set out basic standards,” he argued. “The collective influence of such a grouping would create a powerful precedent for new entrants to space and those that wish to do business with us.”

He said one of the most effective measures would be to make market access reliant on sustainable and responsible behaviour. “Of course, withholding rights should not be done lightly and it is not a substitute for a global regime which could give full meaning to equity considerations.

“As the CEO of a satellite communications company, space sustainability is an existential issue for my industry. Taking immediate action is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to protect considerable global investment in R&D and infrastructure to ensure that we will continue to operate and provide valuable services well into the future.

“Likewise the stakes for governments are extremely high. The global economy is dependent on satellite-enabled applications, now taken for granted as part of our daily lives whether for safe transit, banking or complex logistics.

“I submit to you that 2023 is a make or break year for our future as a space faring community. Governments and leaders need to take urgent action and demand that operators maintain an open, predictable and sustainable space commons. The stakes have never been higher and the time to act is now.”

Keynotes and panel discussions at the Summit, held at the premises of the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) and the sixth in series of events focused on the theme of ‘A Global Effort for Space Sustainability’.

Speakers included Peter Martinez, Executive Director of the Secure World Foundation, who drew parallels with the development of the environmental movement and said space sustainability needed a similar multi-faceted approach.

International Institute of Space Law (ISSL) President Kae-Uwe Schrogl referred to “out-dated and unenforceable laws” governing outer space. “Sustainability can only be reached on a level playing field and at present we don’t have an architecture for space law. Flags of convenience cannot be allowed,” he stated.

Daniel Smith, CEO of Edinburgh-based AstroAgency, a strategic space marketing and media firm, brought an industry perspective to delegates and urged them to "grasp the opportunity" while there was still time.

“The last thing we really need are more strategies without action,” he said. “The NewSpace economy can be shaped by new space players if we act in unity now.”

Portugal Space Agency president Ricardo Conde described sustainability as “underpinning the country’s expanding efforts in space” and said the agency was targeting “pragmatic solutions” that would help the country tackle today’s most pressing problems, including the impacts of climate change.

“Today, two of the big long-term motivations for space exploration are mining and the extension of territory. Portugal is not interested in mining other worlds and we don't have a vision for the geopolitical extension of territory. We will use our tools and expertise to make space work in a sustainable way."

 

Pumping up the weather

THE year 2022 effectively tied for Earth’s fifth warmest year since 1880 - and the last nine consecutive years have been the warmest nine on record, according to the latest analysis released by NASA.

Scientists from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), NASA’s leading centre for climate modelling in New York have reported global temperatures in 2022 were 0.89 degrees Centigrade (C) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951-1980), continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend. Earth is now about 1.11 degrees C warmer than the late 19th century average.

“This is alarming,” admits NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a former Space Shuttle astronaut. “Our warming climate is already making a mark. Forest fires are intensifying, hurricanes are getting stronger, droughts are wreaking havoc and sea levels are rising.”

He says NASA is deepening its commitment to addressing climate change and adds: “Our Earth System Observatory will provide state-of-the-art data to support our climate modelling, analysis and predictions to help humanity confront our planet’s changing climate.”

“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” explains Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS.

NASA scientists, working with leading international climatologists, have determined carbon dioxide emissions were the highest on record in 2022, despite a short-lived dip in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Levels of these human-driven greenhouse gas emissions have rebounded since.

Using the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument that launched to the International Space Station last year, they have also identified some super-emitters of methane – another powerful greenhouse gas.

Earth’s Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends – close to four times the global average – according to GISS research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, as well as in a separate study.

Communities around the world are already experiencing the impacts that scientists see as connected to the warming atmosphere and ocean – intensified rainfall and tropical storms, severe droughts and increased storm surges.

Among many other climate-driven weather events around the world – including the UK’s hottest ever daytime temperatures which peaked at 40.3 C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire – last year brought torrential monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and a persistent megadrought in the US Southwest. In September, Hurricane Ian became one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes to strike the continental US.

NASA’s global temperature analysis is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations, as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys.

Scientists analyse these measurements to account for uncertainties in the data and to maintain consistent methods for calculating global average surface temperature differences for every year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are consistent with satellite data collected since 2002 by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua satellite and with other estimates.

NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to understand how global temperatures change over time. That baseline includes climate patterns such as La Niña and El Niño, as well as unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.

Many factors can affect the average temperature in any given year. For example, 2022 was one of the warmest on record despite a third consecutive year of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

NASA scientists estimate that La Niña’s cooling influence may have lowered global temperatures slightly (about 0.06 degrees C) from what the average would have been under more typical ocean conditions.

A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that the global surface temperature for 2022 was the sixth highest since 1880.

NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Although rankings for specific years can differ slightly between the records, they are in broad agreement and both reflect ongoing long-term warming.

NASA’s full dataset of global surface temperatures through 2022, as well as details with code of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS. 

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This article by Clive Simpson was first published by Central Bylines under the title 'Heating Earth drives more extreme weather'.

UK voters suffer Brexit 'bregret'

A NEW poll to mark the third anniversary at the end of January 2023 of the UK leaving the EU has suggested most voters think voting for Brexit in the 2016 referendum was now a mistake. The term coined by observers to describe the change of heart is 'Bregret'.

The survey by Unherd and Focaldata asked voters across England, Scotland and Wales whether ‘Britain was wrong to leave the EU’ and in all but three of 632 constituencies, more people now agree than disagree.

As it happens, the three constituencies that are still in favour of having left – Boston & Skegness, South Holland & the Deepings, and Louth & Horncastle – are all in Lincolnshire, England’s second largest county which sprawls around the Wash.

In his recent book ‘Edge of England’ on this enigmatic area, author Derek Turner dubbed Lincolnshire ‘England’s forgotten county’. It was perhaps something of a prophetic insight and, having reviewed it for Central Bylines, it seems to me there are undoubtedly some answers lurking within its pages as to why this should be so.

Despite holding on to the number one anti-Europe spot though, the number of people in Boston & Skegness follows the survey’s national trend. Those expressing faith in Brexit have fallen from 75 percent at the time of the referendum in 2016 to 41 percent now, just four percentage points above those agreeing Britain was wrong to leave the EU.

In the past, one could say that by and large the UK was properly governed and MPs in the main were public servants. Indeed, leaving the EU was hardly in the minds of the British general public until it was elevated to the top of the political agenda by Prime Minister of the day, David Cameron at the beginning of 2016, for party political reasons.

In one way, it was a politically-naive way to silence a small but increasingly vocal anti-Europe brigade on the fringes of the Conservative party and in UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party).

But it was also a handy smokescreen for those with vested interests who felt threatened by a soon-to-be-introduced EU Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive to control offshore tax havens, including questionable tax dealings by either those holding power or those wealthy enough to influence it. 

That would certainly would help explain a lot of things because at present many MPs, though not all, particularly those serving in the current cabinet and government, look like they are there to best their own personal influence and financial self-reward.

As the UK marks the third anniversary of having left the EU, it is not Brexit per se that has done the real damage but the incompetence and ignorance of politician after jingoistic politician who have proclaimed much but delivered nothing.

Figures released today (31 January) reveal the UK is the only leading economy likely to fall into recession this year, and this even behind Russia! The IMF forecasts that the UK economy will shrink 0.6 percent in 2023 as it is weighed down by the disadvantages of having left the European single market, combined with a toxic mix of sky high energy prices, rising mortgages and higher taxes.

It all adds up to a very bleak forecast for a vacuous government without a long term plan that pinned its hopes on ‘recovery’ and it leaves Rishi Sunak, the country’s third Tory prime minister in a year, mired in the sleaze and the false rhetoric of his predecessors, particularly Boris Johnson.

In the real world away from the Palace of Westminster, one business person after another describes Brexit and the form it has taken as an unmitigated disaster for the country.

One of them, entrepreneur and business leader Deborah Meaden, who regularly features on the TV programme ‘Dragon’s Den’, says: “Brexit is definitely a factor in 99 percent of businesses that I talk to. They are suffering, they’re bewildered.”

In the 2016 vote, Brexiteers got what they wanted. But despite the extensive promises, it hasn’t heralded a new dawn or a new age of prosperity for the country. Instead Brexit is costing the UK economy a million pounds per hour; it means the UK has around £20 billion a year less available for public spending; and it has lost around 330,000 workers from the UK economy.

After more than a dozen years of Conservative-controlled majority government, the country and its economy is in very poor shape. Promises are never going to be delivered, and the lies about the benefits of Brexit told during the referendum campaign and repeated ad nauseam since, only add to the image of deceitfulness at the very heart of this hard Brexit government.

Meanwhile, the government is preparing later this year to delete thousands of laws that largely benefit the ordinary people of this country, including the right to compensation for delayed trains or flights, the right to paid annual leave, equal pay and bank holidays, parental leave and pay and pension protection when a company goes bust.

These things won’t affect the super-wealthy but they will affect everyone else. Is it really what people voted for back in 2016? Probably not, given the results of the poll discussed at the beginning of this piece.

As the latest figures show, decline for the UK is now very real and continued Brexit denial will no longer cut it. Perhaps a corner is being turned at last as people finally realise what has been foisted on them?

Brexit doesn’t necessarily need to be undone wholesale but the country does need to rejoin the single market and customs union as soon as possible.

Such a dramatic reset to the country’s political direction and agenda might only be delivered in one of two ways – a General Strike that brings down the current government, or an unscheduled General Election after a vote of no confidence in which enough MPs decide to put the country and its future first for once. 

What is certain, however, is that the UK urgently, urgently needs mature, proper politicians who will put the interests of the people they represent first and, in doing so, pave the way for the country to rebuild and prosper.

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Editor's note: this article is an amended version of an opinion piece written for and published by Central Bylines. 

 

 

 

England’s forgotten county

Lincolnshire's wild North Sea coast at Sutton on Sea.                   Photo: Clive Simpson

 

England’s second-largest, yet least well-known, county comes under the literary spotlight in a new book full of evocative and often elegiac descriptions of landscape and wildlife, alongside fascinating reflections on the area's history, countryside and people, from prehistory right up to the present day.

 

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IN THE early 1960s my parents relocated from their birth town of Derby (it was only consigned city status in 1977 despite having always had its own cathedral) to start a new life in rural Lincolnshire, the second largest county in England.

I was therefore destined not to grow up in the peaks and valleys of Derbyshire but in the flat Fenlands surrounding the small market town of Spalding, renown at the time for its tulips, sugar beet and potatoes. It is where I attended secondary school and subsequently began my journalistic career on the local newspaper.

So, it is with residential impunity and a little insider knowledge, that I can assert with some authority that the county of Lincolnshire has always had something of a reputation as a political, economic and cultural backwater. By the same token, the propensity of its adult population - at least up to the present time - to vote conservatively in such large numbers was always a bit of a mystery to me.

In the referendum of 2016 it was not hard to predict therefore that such entrenched voting behaviour would culminate with a huge tranche of the county - and most notably the towns of Grimsby, Boston and Spalding - voting to deliver one of the country’s highest collective ‘anti-Europe’ votes.

But the sprawling county, with a surprisingly varied topography allied with an indistinct coastline that barely defines its boundary with the North Sea around The Wash, is so much more than the political summation of its largely ageing and traditional population.

All this, along with Lincolnshire’s unexpected role in defining significant eras of the nation’s history, is brought into sharp focus in the excellent new book ‘Edge of England - Landfall in Lincolnshire’ by Dublin-born novelist and poet Derek Turner. It’s publication by Hurst in the summer of 2022 was as impeccably timed as the content is revealing.

Unsurprisingly, the reader soon learns that after spending two decades exploring and reading about England’s “forgotten county” Turner is now a solid gold Lincolnshire “Yellowbelly” resident himself, keen to pay a long overdue homage to the land of big skies, mega agriculture and an ever-changing way of life.

While much of the book’s prosaic beauty lies in acute observations of time and place, noted in detail on every page via Turner’s poetic turn of phrase and language, the historic importance and influence of the county also comes as a revelation in itself.

Laying out his raison d’etre for his book in the introduction, Turner states that the “proverbial mentions” of Lincolnshire he found during his extensive research were all seemingly “disparaging”, showing the county as “decaying, boorishly rustic”, and even a target of “diabolical ire”.

When asked about Lincolnshire not many, he says, responded with a good word, while others seemed “nonplussed” even to be asked. “The mere word could almost be a conversation killer,” he writes. “Lincolnshire started to look like a continent apart - a large, and largely blank, space, almost islanded by cold sea, great estuaries, soggy wastes, and a filigree of fenny waterways.”

In the book’s opening, Turner defines the county as “an ill-defined, in-between transit zone lazily assumed to have no ‘must-see’ sights and little that was even interesting”. 

He goes on to say the county was “notable chiefly to agronomists and economists as a high-functioning English version of Ukraine, sometimes even called ‘the bread-basket of England’, where steppe-sized harvesters combed squared fields between equally angular chicken sheds. It was a county very hard to comprehend”.

Turner readily describes his book as "amorphous" and his narrative duly wanders amiably through the different regions, building as it does so a fascinating - and no doubt to many readers unexpected - portrait of landscape and place.

Indeed this county-wide tour covers pretty much every quarter, taking the reader from the "huge and muddy maw" of The Wash and the flat, reclaimed fenland of "South Holland" to Lincoln "the City on the Cliff" and the beautiful Wolds, before heading north-east to the Humber and the once great fishing town of Grimsby.

Turner thinks the county is already less distinctive than when he moved there because every day it becomes “a tiny bit more like everywhere else”. There are “more roads, more traffic, more bland homes, and fewer small shops, fewer mouldering old buildings, fewer quiet places, fewer wild animals”.

Lincolnshire, he also observes, has more than its fair share of bungalows with plastic windows, caravan parks, garden centres and chicken farms. “Is it so surprising that so many passing through shake their heads and tap the accelerator?” he asks.

The book is punctuated too with poignant insights and anecdotes, such as: “Lincolnshire people, like people everywhere, have often misused their environment, would probably have exhausted it long ago had they had the means, and must often have resented their lot. But some at least must have loved where they lived, finding a locus for patriotism in the disregarded plain, just as other English see Jerusalem in Barking or Huddersfield.”

As a true convert to an “unfashionable” county, Turner says he first alighted on the prairie-like plains and marshes of Lincolnshire in search of his own “understanding” and, in doing so, discovered a “huge new side to England”.   
                                           
“For all its problems - past, present or projected - Lincolnshire is still a county like no other,” he concludes. “This is an England time half-forgot, where you can still find an unabashed past inside an unpretentious present - and freedom and space on a little offshore island.”

For any potential visitor, armchair traveller or existing resident, whether born and bred in the county or a relative newcomer, this is so much more than a mere guidebook or informative travelogue.

Lincolnshire’s understated chronicles, unfashionable towns and undervalued countryside conceal fascinating stories, as well as unique landscapes - its Wolds are lonely and beautiful, its towns characterful, and its marshlands and dynamic coast metaphors for constant change.

Turner has produced a hauntingly beautiful and honest lament to a rural existence threatened by encroaching modernity, materialism and standardisation as well as the accumulating effects of climate change. If ever a county deserved a book all of its own then it must be the oft overlooked one of Lincolnshire. 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor's note: This review was written by Clive Simpson for the Central Bylines website and published under the title 'Testament to Lincolnshire' in January 2023.

'Edge of England - Landfall in Lincolnshire’ was published by Hurst in 2022, ISBN: 9781787386983. 

Purchase from your local independent bookshop!

Spotting leaky pipes from orbit

PRIVATE utility Anglian Water, which supplies water services to around seven million people across eastern England and is under pressure to cut back on excessive wastage from leaky pipes, is turning to out-of-this-world technology for help.

The Huntingdon-based company is using space age technology, originally developed to detect water lying below the surface of Mars, the red planet, to locate hard to find underground leaks. Information gathered by the latest Earth-orbiting satellites is crunched by specialist computer algorithms and then turned into images as a way of helping engineers solve the costly environmental problem.

The system was first created to detect water on Mars and pioneering space firm Asterra is now redeploying its space know-how to help utility companies like Anglian Water solve a long-standing problem.

“It’s not just water that is wasted by leaking pipes – every drop also represents a substantial emission of carbon,” says founder and chief technology officer of the London and Tel Aviv-based company, Lauren Guy.

Anglian Water admits it loses 182 million litres of water per day across its network, an equivalent leakage of approximately 16-18 percent when compared to the amount of water running through the network each day.

“We recently used the Asterra technology to pinpoint some significant leaks that would never have been identified due to the relatively low percentage loss”, a company spokesperson said.

“These non-visible, underground leaks were in remote areas and would never have been reported by a customer, or indeed found using traditional detection sweeps.

“They often run through agricultural and rural farmland where traditional detection, or even smart distribution leakage technology, is difficult to use due to the lack of fittings and the sheer geographical size of an area.”

The water firm says the Asterra expertise allows it to use satellite data to detect leaks from otherwise difficult-to-inspect transfer pipes and trunk mains right across its system.

Before space technology stepped in, staff from water utility companies had to ‘walk the line’ in search of leaks, often manually inspecting mile upon mile of pipes each day in the hope of catching the sound of trickling water.

More modern techniques, such as installing acoustic sensors to listen automatically for leaking pipes are effective but can only cover limited areas before becoming cost prohibitive. Planetary scientists searching for the holy grail of Martian water then realised that orbiting spacecraft with special radar sensors could be used to spy out water lying below the red planet’s surface.

Asterra’s adaptation of this space-based solution for terrestrial use came after Guy realised that if satellite technology could locate water under the surface of Mars it could also be used to help track down water leakages closer to home. His discovery was made possible by sensors known in the space business as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which are used on many of the latest low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and can peer through cloud and below Earth’s surface.

L-band SAR uses the motion of a radio antenna to build up images which typically cover areas of around 3,500 square km at a time. It works by transmitting radio frequency waves and recording what is reflected to the receiver, revealing details on the nature of the reflective material, including the moisture content of soil.

Asterra’s breakthrough relies on sophisticated data processing using proprietary geophysical modelling and analysis. “It allows us to pick up the signature of leaking water in densely populated urban areas packed with interferences to SAR imaging”, explains Guy. “The observations are much more than high-quality images and, since perfecting the art of extracting a signal from the noise, we can provide game-changing insights to the water industry.”

All this means city and county-wide systems for transporting drinking water and wastewater can be more easily analysed to identify subsurface leaks that otherwise go undetected. (See satellite image from JAXA at top of article with blue lines showing water pipes and yellow dots “points of interest” where satellite data indicates a leak).

“It goes without saying that if leaks can be plugged, then the volume of water saved can amount to an entirely new water source and the requirement to drill new wells, raise dams or invest in expensive desalination plants is significantly reduced,” says Guy.

“Cleaning, treating, pumping and distributing water is an energy-intensive process, and any water going to waste represents unnecessary greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere. Our mission is to help water infrastructure companies improve the distribution of clean water and cut back on waste.”

 Editor's note: an original version of this article was published on Central Bylines.

Satellites lost in UK launch failure

AN INVESTIGATION has been launched after an attempt to make space history by launching satellites from British soil for the first time has ended in failure due to an anomaly in the second stage of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket.

After successfully taking off from the runway at Spaceport Cornwall and travelling to the designated drop zone, Cosmic Girl, the customized 747 Jumbo Jet that serves as the LauncherOne system's carrier aircraft, successfully released the rocket.

The rocket ignited its first stage engines, quickly going hypersonic and successfully reaching space. The flight then continued through successful stage separation and ignition of the second stage but at some point during the firing of the rocket's second stage engine, and with the rocket travelling at a speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, the system experienced an anomaly which prematurely ended the mission.

The first stage burns for around three minutes before reaching main engine cutoff (MECO) and stage separation occurs some three seconds later. The second stage’s NewtonFour engine ignites four seconds after separation to begin the first of two planned burns.

The payload fairing separates from the nose of LauncherOne about 20-30 seconds after second stage ignition. The first burn was to last about five and a half minutes, ending with second stage engine cutoff 1 (SECO-1). With this complete, the second stage would enter a coast phase, performing a barbecue roll to help manage thermal conditions.

Around the D+47 minute mark in the mission, the second stage was planned to begin to reorient itself to make its second burn. This burn would have commenced about six and a quarter minutes later, with the burn lasting a few seconds to circularise the orbit. Payload deployments were expected to begin about a minute after the end of the second burn.

A Virgin Orbit spokesperson said: “Though the mission did not achieve its final orbit by reaching space and achieving numerous significant first-time achievements, it represents an important step forward.

“The effort behind the flight brought together new partnerships and integrated collaboration from a wide range of partners, including the UK Space Agency, the Royal Air Force, the Civil Aviation Authority, the US Federal Aviation Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, and more, and demonstrated that space launch is achievable from UK soil.”

The company said that out of five LauncherOne missions carrying payloads for private companies and governmental agencies, this is the first to fall short of delivering its payloads to their precise target orbit.

Earlier in the evening the Start Me Up mission had got off to a seemingly perfect start as Cosmic Girl - which had previously only been launched from its Calfornia base the Mojave Air & Space Port - took off from Newquay Airport in Cornwall on the south west coast of England.

On a cold and windy night, it was cheered on by around 2000 spectators who had been lucky enough to receive tickets to witness the start of the mission from special viewing areas at the airport and on giant screens. The plane took off precisely on time at 1701 EST (2201 GMT) Monday (January 9, 2023).

Piloted by Sqn Ldr Matthew Stannard, a Royal Air Force test pilot, it headed out over the Atlantic to the south west of Ireland to reach a height of 35,000 ft (10,700 m) where it performed a ‘race track’ manoeuver before releasing LauncherOne.

The two-stage, expendable launch vehicle is designed to place small satellites of up to 500 kg (1,100 lb) into a wide range of low Earth orbits (LEO). Rather than launching from the ground like a conventional rocket, it is carried to launch altitude by the 747 aircraft which has its own mission control room in the plane's former Premium & Economy cabin.

Among the nine satellites onboard were the UK's Ministry of Defence, the sultanate of Oman, the US National Reconnaissance Office and British startups including the Welsh company Space Forge, which is developing reusable satellites. All were lost before reaching orbit and are likely to have burnt up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit CEO, said: "While we are very proud of the many things that we successfully achieved as part of this mission, we are mindful that we failed to provide our customers with the launch service they deserve.

“The first-time nature of this mission added layers of complexity that our team professionally managed through; however, in the end a technical failure appears to have prevented us from delivering the final orbit. We will work tirelessly to understand the nature of the failure, make corrective actions, and return to orbit as soon as we have completed a full investigation and mission assurance process."

The UK-launched mission - titled Start Me Up in honor of the Rolling Stones' 1981 hit - brought timely publicity to the emergence of a competitive small-launch sector, just as Europe grapples with reduced launch capability due to the Ukraine war, which has cut access to Russian Soyuz vehicles, as well as Ariane 6 delays and the grounding of Vega rockets after a failed launch last month.

Matt Archer, director of commercial spaceflight at the UK Space Agency (UKSA), said he was hugely disappointed that the mission had not been successful but still pleased that the first launch of satellites from Europe had taken place from British soil.

“We don’t know what caused the anomaly but we achieved a launch,” he added. “A lot of positives have been achieved but space is hard and we knew that this had a risk of failure because launches don’t always work. But we’ve created the conditions for launch here. We’ve shown we can do it and we’ll look to do it again.”

Spaceport Cornwall received the United Kingdom’s first-ever spaceport license from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in November and in late December Virgin Orbit was issued launch and range control licenses, which ensured all regulatory, safety and environmental requirements had been met.

Expressing her own disappointment, Melissa Thorpe, head of Spaceport Cornwall, said: “We put our hearts and soul into this and it is absolutely devastating. But this isn’t the first time we’ve been knocked but this is definitely the biggest definitely. We’re a resilient team and we’ll get up and we’ll go again.”

Virgin Orbit’s previous four operational launches, which all lifted off from California, were all successful and had deployed a total of 33 small satellites. Despite its latest failure to orbit satellites on Monday night, the mission notched up a number of space firsts including the first orbital launch from the United Kingdom, the first international launch for Virgin Orbit, and the first commercial launch from western Europe.

The idea of releasing a rocket from a converted jetliner was pioneered by Orbital Sciences in the 1990s as a novel way of offering a flexible and low-cost route to orbit as the demand for sending small satellites into low Earth orbit grows exponentially.

Chris Larmour, CEO of UK-based rocket company Orbex, said: “Space is never easy, so we were sorry to learn that Virgin Orbit's first horizontal orbital space launch from the UK did not go as planned. We know how much time, effort and energy must have been invested to deliver that launch attempt, and we wish them well for their next mission.

“The Orbex team is fully focused on introducing the UK to vertical orbital launches with the debut of our UK-built environmentally-friendly rocket, Prime. We will be launching from our own pad at Sutherland Spaceport in Scotland in the near future.”  

Editor's note: Original versions of this article were published by Spaceflight Now and ROOM Space Journal.