As from today, you can obtain CLIMERICK CARDS and POSTERS from a newly opened CLIMERICK CARDS Etsy shop. Just follow the link in image below which, in case it’s difficult to read on a phone is http://bit.ly/46aZeaK
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As from today, you can obtain CLIMERICK CARDS and POSTERS from a newly opened CLIMERICK CARDS Etsy shop. Just follow the link in image below which, in case it’s difficult to read on a phone is http://bit.ly/46aZeaK
.
Within a couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS, POSTERS and downloads for sale. These are all intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.
Ahead of the launch, we are publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop
Here’s the second and third of the second cluster
Though One Person's Commitment Is Small by John B. Hobbs
Free Pixabay image - edited
Though one person's commitment is small
In saving the Earth for us all,
If billions try,
There's a chance we'll get by,
So GET OUT AND DO IT, Y’all!
Young People All Over The Earth.
Young people all over the earth,
need leaders who realise the worth
of the next generations,
the hope of their nations,
threatened by fossil fuel’s curse.
Within the couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS for sale. These cards are intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.
Ahead of the launch, we will be publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop
Here’s the first of the second cluster
Image credit: Pixabay Free images
Councils with streetlights bright
Are reducing insects in flight
Within the next couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS for sale. These cards are intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.
Ahead of the launch, we will be publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop
Here’s the third of the first cluster
Image credit: Amazingly Wonderful free
AI image on Pixabay
As of old, a Prophetic Voice
goes unheeded by many, through choice;
now with prophets arrested
our leaders attested
their shocking pro-fossil-fuel ploys.
This CLIMERICK looks back to Mid-October 2023 when Greta Thunberg was arrested for joining a Climate change protest in London.
Within the couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS for sale. These cards are intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.
Ahead of the launch, we will be publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop
Here’s the second of the first cluster
Hot cobbles: Adapted Pixabay free imageHow can someone think on their feet,
when pavements store hideous heat
of some fifty* degrees:
they must long for a freeze.
but it seems torrid heats will repeat.
(During 2025, pavement temperatures of 130ºF *(54ºC) have been experienced in India and in the USA)
WE are back on the beautiful Island of Lindisfarne in Northumbia, UK. Here, at times when the island is cut off from the mainland is a deep peacefulness which could very reasonably be described as ‘balm for the soul’. We have been coming to Lindisfarne since 2013 when we visited in November and gained personal experience of why Lindisfarne is also known as The Isle of Winds! But that did not deter us. This ‘thin space’, inhabited by saints and evincing a beauty which can be breathtaking, has called us back again, and again, and we are always delighted to make it safely across the causeway and be welcomed by the deep-throated song of the seals. This poem emerged within a day of arriving.
ISLAND RETURN
With an hour of safe-crossing still to go,
we coast across the causeway
in our newly acquired, zero emissions car.
We are heading for our oft-visited
Lindisfarne retreat.
To our delight, the seals
are once again waiting
to slither off the sandbags
as the wavelets, inexorably wash over them.
Is it too fanciful
to imagine,
that the last heads
to bob above the ripples,
might be deniers
of the inevitability
of rising water?
September 2025
Within the next couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS for sale. These cards are intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.
Ahead of the launch, we will be publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop
Here’s the first of the first cluster
If you take a regular shower,
turn it off while you soap,
keep it short to build hope:
you’ll be saving both water and power
We all need to take a new view,
that clean air technology’s tru-
ly a better investment,
by any sane judgement,
than fossil fuels’ oft fatal spews.
Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE
After the discovery of a gas field in Lincolnshire, Reform’s Greater Lancashire Mayor is demanding we “drill, baby, drill”and with Reform’s big party conference just days away, they’re trying to turn fracking into a rallying cry.
Here’s my response to that folly:
So Reform wants to push foolish fracking,
with little idea of the whacking
risks there might be
from tremors deadly,
and foul fumes spewed out from the cracking.
Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE
The image was AI generated, (from Pixabay free images)
but the CLIMERICK comes from the heart
Fossil fuels! O so dangerous and dirty,
need be axed by around twenty-thirty,
if the planet’s to live
and its creatures all breathe-
in air, fresh, life-giving and healthy.
Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE
This gyre may feature cans, as well,
but it’s the one-trip plastic that is the more pernicious.
Consider how dangerous are,
the fizzy drinks peddled afar:
their plastics pollute
their sweeteners recruit
more obese; and their water use, scars.
Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE
It’s an ongoing and critical theme!
Now lis’n up you politicians,
we know that you can’t be magicians.
But hear those who tell,
that we’ll all go to hell
lest you stop coal and oil-based emissions.
Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE
My response to the recent news that powerful petrochemical states opposed a global treaty to cut plastic pollution aimed at meaningfully reducing the harms to human health and the environment.
Disgusting! Disgraceful! It grates
that greedy petrochemical states,
should block the reduction
of plastics production,
for profit for them and their mates.
Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE
We’ve been away from CLIMERICKS for too long! So now let’s resume the collection of 'Climate Wisdom in five lines’
Mums and dads, now let’s talk it through.
What is it that you want to do
to keep your child living
with air that is giving
it life, and not gasps you’ll all rue.
Going deeper in thought about bubbles, apart from reflecting on the immediate joy they give children (and not a few adults), they are a small wonder of the sciences of physics and light, incorporating the mathematical properties of a sphere, the vital properties of surface tension, the balancing of internal and external air pressure, the iridescence which can show all the colours of the spectrum/ rainbow and at their last, the effect of gravity after each bubble’s brief flight
Children get a timed ‘slot’ to explore the bubble blowing on offer.
And in keeping with the Eco-themes of the sideshows, we can perhaps think of the fragility of each bubble as symbolic of the fragility of our home sphere, our planet, whilst dirty fuels remain.
OILY BEACH
Today’s sideshow derives from an experience many of us will have had, of finding a beach we love sullied by large globs of tarry oil which are quite vile, leaving thick deposits of oil on shoes or clothes or on the skin of a curious child.
Usually we will have no idea of the source which could be a major oil-spill, the deliberate discharge of oil from a tanker, to lighten load, or from a leak from an old or damaged tanker. Whichever it is, the mess it leaves on the beach will be s nothing compared to the destruction it will have caused on its journey to the beach. Sea-birds fouled and unable to fly, fish poisoned in the filth of the spill and who knows what damage done in the unseen parts of the sea bed. Yet another by-product of the dirty-fuel industry.
So, we reflect on this with numbered, scoring stones scattered, numbers down amidst large black-painted stones in a sand-tray, representing the disgusting disfiguring globs of useless oil.
Wait - No! Worse than useless - for who will clear them up? Not the fat-cat shareholders of the extractors of the poisonous lumps, but a local sea-side corporation, obliged to clear up the mess and spend taxpayers’ money to make the beaches we love, safe.
The concepts behind the sideshows will all be explained in a small pamphlet entitled ‘Our Sideshows: what they mean’, available to borrowers of the equipment. At the time of writing this post, the pamphlet is in embryo form.
For now, to better understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE
Following my last post,I’ll now give more information about the Eco-themed sideshows at our Children’s Science and Climate Change afternoon. Here’s the second ‘game’. It’s called ‘Knock The Dirty Fuels Down'. The targets are empty 415gm cans, with a wrap-around showing dirty fuel installations. They have to be knocked off their shelf with beanbags. Clearing 7 or more off the shelf earned winners’ tokens.
The sideshow had an associated placard (not seen in the picture of the sideshow) - but reproduced below the sideshow image.
Thus, the (revised) highest score of 10, needless to say, furthest from the player, features a Tokamak. A Tokamak is a nuclear Fusion energy generator. It operates at colossal temperatures and pressure, in effect emulating the method by which the stars produce heat and light. Tokamak processing, which leaves no nuclear waste, unlike the present fission power stations, has been under development for decades. The development costs have been so vast that only international collaborative funding has been able to put up the huge amounts that have been necessary for progress to be made. Then, in May 2025, CNN reported that a commercial enterprise was building a Tokamak just outside Boston USA. Amazingly, and encouragingly, funding of US$2billion is backing this enterprise. Clearly, even usually hard-nosed investors believe Tokamak will deliver, and a date of 2030 is slated. It is hard to envision just what this will mean, but with a projected target of producing four times the power input, the enterprise will undoubtedly be a game changer in the energy market. So the incorporation of the Tokamak at the top end of the sideshow scoring is intended to give a message of HOPE to children playing the sideshow. Not that many of them will want to be bothered with such detail, but on the basis that every child is likely to be accompanied by a responsible adult, this message maybe part of a drip-feed of encouragement to be optimistic that Clean Air Technologies will sweep away their dirty and dangerous predecessors in the not-too-distant future.
Scores of 5 - 9 (inclusive) are allocated to various established clean air technologies, wind turbines, solar panels, sub-sea (near surface generators, which operate in races of water and produce three times the energy density of wind turbines) sea-borne booms and tidal lagoons. There are no scores of 2, 3, or 4: the scoring drops to 1 represented by Coal, Oil, Gas and Shale - all dirty and dangerous fuels which also leave scars on the landscape when they are abandoned.
'Should these score at all?' one asks - but then, this is only a sideshow game!
The concepts behind the sideshows will all be explained in a small pamphlet entitled ‘Our Sideshows: what they mean’, available to borrowers of the equipment. At the time of writing this post, the pamphlet is in embryo form.
For now, to better understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE
On my ‘main’ blog, The Cross and The Cosmos, I have been posting about an outcome of a children’s event called ‘Science Faith and Climate Change’ That outcome is that we are building up a collection of sideshows all with an Environmental message to loan out to schools and churches, predominantly - but there could be other uses for the kit.
The set will be known as St Mary’s Fen Ditton, Mini Eco-Fayre collection. I will now repeat those postings over a few days and maybe into a couple of weeks, as, if you are in the Cambridge area, you might be interested in thinking about how you could use such an offering
Here’s a copy of the first post ...
Last Saturday afternoon, 17th May proved a warm, delightful few hours for our experimental Science, Faith and Climate Change event at St Mary’s, Fen Ditton, on the Eastern edge of Cambridge. The Faraday Institute, Schools and education team, provided fascinating insights into Fossils and faith, Our bodies in all their Godly complexity (children could make DNA bracelets and the fascinating nature of non-Newtonian liquids intriguingly demonstrated. The explanations of various sciency things were much appreciated by those who visited.
Meanwhile, outside in the churchyard, a sequence of Eco-themed sideshows provided entertainment and hopefully some education and HOPE for the young people present (and, later, for the older helpers, too)
Here is one of the sideshows entitled post-event, ‘Do You give a Toss?. You can see a beanbag which, having been tossed, didn’t quite make it to score on the right-hand side.
Fen Ditton Children’s Science, Faith and Climate Change Afternoon .
The Outcomes by Trevor Thorn
Saturday May 17th was kind to us in weather terms as those who came were able to enjoy an imaginative collection of Eco-themed outdoor sideshows. In the church. Indoors, the Schools and Education team from The Faraday Institute provided a fascinating array of ‘stations’ which included a spectacular collection of fossils, an opportunity to make a DNA bracelet and the wherewithal to make a suet-ball birdfeeder as a tangible expression of encouraging the bird-life in our gardens.
It would be dishonest to say that we were besieged by children from the three schools in which we promoted the event but there has been a promising development around the sideshow collection. The picture of the most popular of these, which will now be renamed ‘Do You Care a Toss’ will give a sense of what we might now regard as a prototype for a Mini Eco Fayre which we can offer to schools and other churches as a package. We will put the stalls into a nearby storage facility, so they are readily accessible and seek further support from the Cambridge Schools Trust to finance this second step of our Eco-venture.
One of the important elements of the display was to give children HOPE that Climate change need not be the disaster story that is all too constantly in the media. In order to make this message clear, a two sided slip was prepared, one side addressed to children and the other to their parents or carers. Here, for your interest are the two texts
Parents & Carers
OUR SIDESHOWS
The aim of our sideshows is to give children a sense that Climate Change is not the threat it is sometimes made out to be.
New clean technologies are developing all the time and are now attracting big investments, notably the TOKAMAK, a nuclear fusion generator which can generate huge energy output without nuclear waste, and is due to come on-line early 2030s. A TOKAMAK has attracted $2billion in investment (Source CNN) which might otherwise have gone into dirty energy production.
It does not take a lot of thinking to realise that investors will soon wake up to the idea that the future has to be one of clean, green, technologies and that money will move from dirty fuel generation into these far more attractive investment areas. The sideshows imply this message and are, thus, designed to give your children and teenagers HOPE – a vital message for their generation
And HOPE is also the greatest message of the Christian church.
Thank you for reading this
* * * * *
Message for Children about our SIDESHOWS
Please have fun on our sideshows.
As you try to win tokens for prizes you will be helping to raise money for remote villages in Africa who will be helped to build solar lighting to avoid using dangerous fuels, like kerosene.
If you look at the sideshows carefully, you will see that clean, green ways of generating energy score much better than the dangerous dirty fuels that have been part of your mum, dad and grandparent’s history.
Clean, green ways of making power are getting better all the time and the world is waking up to that fact.
In the not too distant future, lots of people will want to put money into supporting these clean methods rather than the old ways – and then Climate change will not be as bad as some people say.
So why not talk to the older people of your family and ask them to consider Solar panels, Heat pumps and electric cars if they haven’t already. That could be YOUR way of helping this change happen
Let’s hope this next step proves to be a positive one in our efforts to link the church to concern for the issues of climate change and the effects this is having on some children.
Another sideshow will feature in our next post.
IT IS NOW THE INTENTION THAT THE SIDESHOW EQUIPMENT IS PUT INTO STORAGE IN THE CAMBRIDGE AREA AND CAN BE MADE AVAILABLE TO ANY CHURCH OR SCHOOL THAT WOULD LIKE TO RUN A MINI ECO FAYRE OR INCORPORATE THEM INTO A LARGER EVENT (SUCH AS A VILLAGE FEAST).
WE ALREADY HAVE 2 PROSPECTIVE USERS!
IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN THIS POSSIBILITY AND WOULD BE ABLE TO COLLECT AND RETURN UP TO 5 STALLS (BEING SUPPLEMENTED PRESENTLY AND SHORTLY 10 WILL BE AVAILABLE), Email crossandcosmos@gmail.com Head your enquiry ’Side Show information and start ‘Hello Trevor Thorn’
I hope this might be of interest in raising the profile of the anxiety some young people are experiencing, and help them to find someone to talk to, who will allay their fears with a confident message that dirty dangerous fuels must be abandoned - for the world’s sake. And that they can play a part in bringing this change about.
You can view the original, and more recent posts at The Cross and The Cosmos blog
As I pondered this, the nonsense poem below came to me - at least it relieves my feelings - just a little...
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, just outside Boston USA, announce (CNN 6th May) they hope to have an unlimited power-generator called a Tokamak up and running by 2030. This will totally transform the energy map of the world.
Nuclear Fusion means energy clean,
Far more power than ever yet seen.
The Tokamak shape
Will be perfectly safe:
Unlike mining’s dangerous extremes.
A Writers’ Retreat:
A Bovine Quest (with Climerick to finish).
We are on an island writing retreat.(Iona)
‘Go. Listen to a sound of the island – and reflect it in a written format of your choice’, we are bid.
I decide I will go and listen to the sound of cows chewing cud.
I walk to the gate that leads to the hill – no sign of any cows.
I walk on round two further bends - not a cow to be seen anywhere.
I see a woman feeding sheep. As she turns her car to leave, I knock on the window: it is reluctantly rolled down.
'Are there any cows around, or are they all being overwintered?' I ask, with scant idea of whether that is a sensible question in the second half of March.
'There’s cows up there', she says, jerking her thumb towards the north, ‘But none down there’. The thumb is jerked in the opposite direction and, feeling my visitor-ness, I set off, at least knowing I am not travelling in vain.
I walk to the gate to the North End; no sign of any cows.
I ask a young woman ‘Any cows up there?’
She looks at me and my walking stick slightly strangely, and says she has seen two or three.
I know I am not travelling in vain.
I ascend towards the top of the elevation: not a cow to be seen anywhere.
Aha! I think. If I climb as high as I can, I will surely see any cows there might be, wherever they may be lurking.
And sure enough - there are cows some 100 feet below and they are troughing it.
Gone is my notion of putting my voice recorder as close as I dare, to a constantly chewing soft mouth and retreating to transform the sound into writing.
Instead, there is the violent chomping of a bovine tea party, but joyful, I feel a CLIMERICK come upon me.
And so it did come to pass,
that I listened to cows chomping grass.
Then horror! They’re belching:
it’s clear they are belting
out methane, a vile greenhouse gas.