18th July - Today's News: More Flooding in Scotland

Well, ot quite such a washout round here after all, with the rain expected yesterday mostly fizzling out over Wales, and over all a not unpleasant, at times sunny albeit a bit breeze day. Typical English summer weather! And just another 1.6mm to add to the month's tally, and we're still running at below average. Somehow, I can't see this ending a particularly wet month in this area. Although, other places did see rather more rain with homes and roads flooded in Inverness and Perth while in northern England, a road bridge near Carlisle collapses in flood.

In Canada, violent storm topples Ottawa concert stage

Christchurch hit by 7,500 earthquakes since last September

Apparently, a new study suggests forests soak up a third of fossil fuel emissions - but it's not quite as simple as that, because

At the same time, the ongoing and barely constrained destruction of forests - mainly in the tropics - for food, fuel and development was shown to emit 2.9 billion tonnes of carbon annually, more than a quarter of all emissions stemming from human activity.

Which is about 0.5 billion tonnes more than is absorbed by the remaining trees ..... Although it's also suggest that tropical rain forest regrowth (where???) also removes a further 1.6 billion tonnes. Anyway, the net result is that we'd do far more good if we concentrated on trees and stopped worrying about taxing cars. But then, I've been saying that for years .....

And with that in mind, as energy costs escalate in order to subsidise wind farms, will we see British jobs gone with the wind? It does look like more shortsightedness from the coalition incompetents ..... I do wonder if they're just trying to outdo Blair and Brown in coming up with the daftest schemes to destroy the country? They are certainly not doing anything to help reduce anthropogenic climate change.