Science Cafe

I'd been meaning to go to a Science Café for a while to see what they were like, and on Tuesday I finally got round to it (it was the same night as the Cusop History Group talk, but never mind.).

The Science Café meets once a month in the Green Room at the Swan Hotel, and this month the subject of the talk was Climate Change, given by Mike Thompson, who used to teach at Cardiff University. He mentioned trying to introduce architecture students to green and environmentally friendly issues, without a lot of success....
It would have helped if he had been able to see some of the captions on his slides, but he did give an interesting talk, and we did get the gist of the information on the slides, which was all that was needed. There were quite a few graphs, showing steep increases in greenhouse gases since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for instance. He also explained the work of the IPCC, which collates scientific papers on climate change from around the world to give an overall picture of what the science is telling us.

Laurence Matthews, who seemed to be organising the meeting, made an interesting comment about half way through. He wrote a book with his wife Alison called Framespotting, with the sub-title "Changing how you look at things changes how you see them". He pointed out that Mike had, up until then, been framing the problem as one that could be solved by individual action - using less plastic, eating less meat, using the car less and turning the heating down, and so on - but that the problem was actually with governments and corporations rather than individual consumers. This point was touched on later in the talk.
The discussion got quite lively when it came to the politics of climate change, and what should be done about it, and was also quite wide ranging, even mentioning the recent school strikes.
We wondered whether Powys County Council still sent plastic waste to China (their website says they do for some things, but may not be up to date), and talked about the supply chain of the Co-op. Consumer choices are not enough to encourage the suppliers to use less plastic in their packaging, and putting several carrots in a sealed bag, for example, encourages waste as the customer can't buy just the amount they need. One of the ladies at the Café was from the Plastic Free Hay group, so was quite keen to see change in this area.
So it was an interesting evening.
Next month, the subject is Nuclear Power.