Chris Smith -   Well I think that Paul has a point which is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  If you are suing energy it’s got to come from somewhere but the benefit in electric car offers is that it doesn’t produce pollution once it’s working as an electric car, obviously the pollution is all in one place, the power station, and that means that mitigating strategies to recover the waste from the power station, the CO₂, the particles etc. can be done locally where the power station is and probably more effectively than fitting scrubbers and things which will be less efficient to a car and also individual cars are all going to be inherently less efficient than one giant power station.  

So it’s the sum of lots of little inefficiencies adding up to a bigger inefficiency, the one big inefficiency – the power station.  So that’s why we think electric cars are beneficial.  They also are much better in traffic because stopping and starting burns enormous amounts of fuel waste, enormous amounts of energy.  Electric motors are absolutely perfect for that kind of thing because they don’t waste energy when they’re not actually moving.

Helen Scales -   Well what’s going on in the rivers and streams and lakes and fresh water inland is a different process than in the seas because what they rely on mostly for the levels of them is the rain.  It’s all about whether it’s going to rain more or less, and one of the things we really know about climate change and what’s going to change in the future is that there’s going to be a difference in how different areas respond, some will become drier, there will be less rain, and some will become wetter, there will be more and we are already seeing this and in some areas like Australia, we are seeing huge amounts of droughts, rivers are drying up and that’s likely to become even more prevalent in some areas but there will be also rain increasing in some parts of the world.  So it would definitely vary and not be a sort of general increase in sea level that we will see and the sea levels are rising of course because actually as that huge amounts of water heats up it will expand and the sea levels will go up and also more water will pull into the oceans and from the melting icecaps and things like that.  

So really the picture in the rivers will be very regionally diverse and it would depend on where you are in the world.  

Chris Smith -   So the bottom line is rivers are down to rain, sea level is going to rise anyway because of thermal expansion and ice melting.