The timber harvest was carried out under the strict criteria of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and is destined for woodwind instrument manufacturers in the UK.

The harvest is the first step in a new campaign called Sound and Fair which aims to realise a sustainable trade in African blackwood through a fully-certified chain of custody linking village communities in Tanzania to woodwind instrument musicians in the UK.

The timber was felled in late 2009 in a Village Land Forest Reserve managed by Kikole village, in Kilwa District, south-eastern Tanzania. Kikole received a payment of around £1,200 in return for 15 cubic metres of African Blackwood.

Previously the community would only have received around five pence per log. In all Kikole were able to realise an income nearly 400 times more than they would have received previously on the 63 logs which were sold.

Kikole intend to spend the money they have raised on improving the road to the village, improving market access for impoverished farmers and providing local employment.

Mr Mwinyimkuu Awadhi, Chairman of Kikole village, comments: “In 2009 the communities of Kikole Village we have realized for the first time the benefits from selling our own timber. All the money was paid to the villages unlike in the past where by this money would have gone to the government. We the villagers now have full control of our forest resources and we will benefit even more when we do more harvesting in the near future.”

Local resident, Mwanaisha Likoko adds: “Changes have come to our village through the forest we own and manage under our control, the money we have received will be used within our village to improve our social services.”

Kikole’s forest reserve was established in 2006 after the District Council approved a management plan which the community had prepared setting out how they intended to manage the forest sustainably.

In 2009, Kikole became the FSC certified, community-managed forest in Africa, via an FSC-group certificate managed by the Mpingo Conservation Project, the Sound and Fair campaign’s Tanzanian partner.

Neil Bridgland, Sound and Fair Campaign Manager says: “This harvest represents a sea change for forest communities in Southern Tanzania. For the first time, they have security over their natural resources and can reap the benefits from them. The challenge now is to persuade UK classical music instrument manufacturers and users to accept FSC certified timber as standard so creating the necessary demand for African blackwood that will enable the roll-out of Kikole’s success across Southern Tanzania.”

Jasper Makala, National Coordinator of MCP in Tanzania says: “Community forestry is not just about giving local people a stake in how the forests are managed, but ensuring they can reap the benefits. This is both social justice and effective conservation.”

From Kikole village, the wood will soon be taken to an FSC certified sawmill, where it will be sawn into billets for export to the UK.

Dr Azim Fazal, Director of the sawmill, Sandali Wood Industries, says: “This is a proud moment for us. Now we hope that Western buyers will embrace FSC certification and start discouraging enterprises who harvest and process irresponsibly.”

On arrival the wood must then be properly seasoned (dried out), a process which takes at least one year. It is expected that the first FSC-certified blackwood instruments will be available in the UK from summer 2011.

It is often said by perceptive observers that a disconnect is in evidence in many countries between a public that want stringent action to tackle climate change and what governments are actually doing.

The United States, for example – which for many years has had no forward-looking policies in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) – is still encumbered with a large number of senators unwilling to act on account of partisanship or scepticism about the science of climate change.

It is a well-known fact that powerful vested interests and those opposed to action on climate change are working overtime to see that they can stall action for as long as possible.

The Centre for Public Integrity in the US has found that some 770 companies and interest groups have hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence America’s federal policies on climate change in the past year, just as the stakes became higher with the prospect of far-reaching climate legislation in the US. That translates into more than four lobbyists for each member of Congress in Washington DC.

The climate sceptics have also been active in other ways. Take the hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia and the use of private communications between the scientists involved to discredit the science contained in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which I chair. These scientists are highly reputed professionals, whose contributions over the years to scientific knowledge are unquestionable.

But, more importantly, even the allegations made on the basis of the stolen emails have proved incorrect. The papers which were criticised in the emails were actually discussed in detail in chapter six of the Working Group I report of the AR4. Furthermore, articles from the journal Climate Research, which was also decried in the emails, have been cited 47 times in the Working Group I report. It is also a well-established fact that the IPCC relies on datasets – not from any single source – but from a number of institutions in different parts of the world. Significantly, the datasets from East Anglia were totally consistent with those from other institutions, on the basis of which far-reaching and meaningful conclusions were reached in the AR4.

The same group of climate deniers who have been active across the Atlantic have now joined hands to attack me personally, alleging business interests on my part which are supposedly benefiting me as well as the Indian Tata group of companies. My institute, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), has no links with the Tata group, other than having been established through seed funding from that group as a non-profit registered society in 1974, much like several other non-profit institutions of excellence set up by the Tatas for the larger public good. As for pecuniary benefits from advice that I may be rendering to profit making organisations, these payments are all made directly to my institute, without a single penny being received by me.

I am providing this background only to highlight the fact that powerful vested interests are perhaps likely to get overactive in the coming months, and would perhaps do everything in their power to impede progress towards a binding agreement that is hoped for by the end of 2010 in the next major climate negotiations in Mexico City. In the end, knowledge and science will undoubtedly triumph, but delay in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases would only lead to worse impacts of climate change and growing hardship for the most vulnerable regions in the world, which are also unfortunately some of the poorest communities on earth.

A multilateral agreement to tackle climate change is absolutely essential, but given the slow pace of progress and the power that vested interests exercise over legislative and policy initiatives in democratic societies, something more may be essential. Firstly, given the critical role of the United States in forging an effective agreement to meet the challenge, the passage of legislation in that country will have to be supplemented with several initiatives to be put in place by the executive branch of the government.

But importantly, it seems to me that civil society and grassroots action would have to come into their own, not only to ensure that human society takes responsibility for action at the most basic level, but also to create upward pressure on governments to act decisively. If such grassroots efforts do not spread and intensify, nation states may not be able to resolve the differences that exist between them.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the spread of knowledge and awareness would be a critical driver of the transformation that is required to move human society towards a pattern of sustainable development. This would also be the most effective means of thwarting the efforts of skeptics and vested interests, who will do everything possible to maintain the status quo. As the science in the IPCC Fourth Assessment report clearly demonstrates, there is no leeway for delay or denial any longer.

Via Guardian

WWF CAMPAIGNS TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE – BECOME A MEMBER TODAY

It takes great vision to envisage a renewable energy grid linking North Sea wind turbines to planned solar farms in North Africa, but the first tentative steps towards Europe’s first renewable power grid, will become a reality this month as partner nations launch their formal plans.

The network, made up of thousands of kilometres of highly efficient undersea cables that could cost up to €30bn (£26.5bn), would solve one of the biggest criticisms faced by renewable power – that unpredictable weather means it is unreliable.

With a renewables supergrid, electricity can be supplied across the continent from wherever the wind is blowing, the sun is shining or the waves are crashing.

Connected to Norway’s many hydro-electric power stations, it could act as a giant 30GW battery for Europe’s clean energy, storing electricity when demand is low and be a major step towards a continent-wide supergrid that could link into the vast potential of solar power farms in North Africa.

By autumn, the nine governments involved – Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland and the UK – hope to have a plan to begin building a high-voltage direct current network within the next decade. It will be an important step in achieving the European Union’s pledge that, by 2020, 20% of its energy will come from renewable sources.

“We recognise that the North Sea has huge resources, we are exploiting those in the UK quite intensively at the moment,” said the UK’s energy and climate change minister, Lord Hunt. “But there are projects where it might make sense to join up with other countries, so this comes at a very good time for us.”

More than 100GW of offshore wind projects are under development in Europe, around 10% of the EU’s electricity demand, and equivalent to about 100 large coal-fired plants. The surge in wind power means the continent’s grid needs to be adapted, according to Justin Wilkes of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). An EWEA study last year outlined where these cables might be built and this is likely to be a starting point for the discussions by the nine countries.

Renewable energy is much more decentralised and is often built in inhospitable places, far from cities. A supergrid in the North Sea would enable a secure and reliable energy supply from renewables by balancing power across the continent.

Norway’s hydro plants – equivalent to about 30 large coal-fired power stations – could use excess power to pump water uphill, ready to let it rush down again, generating electricity, when demand is high. “The benefits of an offshore supergrid are not simply to allow offshore wind farms to connect; if you have additional capacity, which you will do within these lines, it will allow power trading between countries and that improves EU competitiveness,” said Wilkes.

The European Commission has also been studying proposals for a renewable-electricity grid in the North Sea. A working group in the EC’s energy department, led by Georg Wilhelm Adamowitsch, will produce a plan by the end of 2010. He has warned that without additional transmission infrastructure, the EU will not be able to meet its ambitious targets. Hunt said the EC working group’s findings would be fed into the nine-country grid plan.

The cost of a North Sea grid has not yet been calculated, but a study by Greenpeace in 2008 put the price of building a similar grid by 2025 at €15bn-€20bn. This would provide more than 6,000km of cable around the region. The EWEA’s 2009 study suggested the costs of connecting the proposed 100GW wind farms and building interconnectors, into which further wind and wave power farms could be plugged in future, would probably push the bill closer to €30bn. The technical, planning, legal and environmental issues will be discussed at the meeting of the nine this month.

“The first thing we’re aiming for is a common vision,” said Hunt. “We will hopefully sign a memorandum of understanding in the autumn with ministers setting out what we’re trying to do and how we plan to do it.”

All those involved also have an eye on the future, said Wilkes. “The North Sea grid would be the backbone of the future European electricity supergrid,” he said.

This supergrid, which has support from scientists at the commission’s Institute for Energy (IE), and political backing from both the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, would link huge solar farms in southern Europe – producing electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the sun’s heat to boil water and drive turbines – with marine, geothermal and wind projects elsewhere on the continent.

Scientists at the IE have estimated it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and the deserts of the Middle East to meet all Europe’s energy needs.

In this grid, electricity would be transmitted along high voltage direct current cables. These are more expensive than traditional alternating-current cables, but they lose less energy over long distances.

Hunt agreed that the European supergrid was a long-term dream, but one worth making a reality. The UK, like other countries, faced “huge challenges with our renewables targets,” he said. “The 2020 target is just the beginning and then we’ve got to aim for 2050 with a decarbonised electricity supply – so we need all the renewables we can get.”

A North Sea grid could link into grids proposed for a much larger German-led plan for renewables called the Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII). This aims to provide 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050 or earlier via power lines stretching across desert and the Mediterranean.

The plan was launched last November with partners including Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, and some of Germany’s biggest engineering and power companies, including Siemens, E.ON, ABB and Deutsche Bank.

DII is a $400bn (£240bn) plan to use concentrated solar power (CSP) in southern Europe and northern Africa. This technology uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a fluid container, the super-heated liquid then drives turbines to generate electricity.

The technology itself is nothing new – CSP plants have been running in the United States for decades and Spain is building many – but the scale of the DII project would be its biggest deployment ever.

Via Guardian

WWF CAMPAIGNS TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE – BECOME A MEMBER TODAY

The UK government is expected to launch this week a £100bn programme to massively expand the UK’s wind power capacity.

Nine offshore zones have been identified with sufficient space for up to 3,500 turbines which at full capacity could generate power for all homes in the UK.

The Crown Estate will announce which consortia have been successful in bidding to develop the nine zones, mostly in the North Sea, in the project, which is the most ambitious of its kind in the world.

Bidders, which include the UK’s big six energy suppliers, are being judged on their financial resources, expertise and safety record.

Many developers are privately sceptical about whether all the projects will be built by 2020 as planned because of the huge logistical and financial challenges involved.

Dozens of smaller projects – including the London Array – have been delayed because of funding problems in recent years.

The projects will be bigger than anything which exists today in the UK or elsewhere. They will be further away from the coast and in deeper waters than existing offshore projects, making them more difficult and expensive to build and operate.

The biggest zone is at Dogger Bank, about 100km off the north east coast, where wind farms with a capacity of 10gw – enough to power 10m homes – are planned, at an estimated cost of more than £30bn.

Successful applicants will carry out further scoping work to decide where exactly to build the farms before submitting planning applications. Construction is not expected to start until 2014 at the earliest.

But the Crown Estate will not require developers to source a proportion of the turbines and other components from domestic manufacturers unlike other countries, including Spain and China.

The paucity of Britain’s low carbon industry was exposed last year, when Dutch firm Vestas closed England’s only turbine manufacturing plant.

A spokeswoman for the Crown Estate said the government body, which owns the UK’s seabed, was holding a supply chain roadshow for British manufacturers around the country, starting later this month.

Working with regional development authorities, companies will be informed what components will be needed by the energy companies to help British industry benefit from the construction programme.

Via Guardian

WWF CAMPAIGNS TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE – BECOME A MEMBER TODAY

China has marked the new Year of the Tiger by ordering greater enforcement of laws aimed at preventing the trade in illegal tiger parts and products.

The announcement has been well received by the Indian government which has been putting pressure on the Chinese government to enforce the laws and so help prevent the extinction of the tiger, most of which still reside in Indian National Parks and Tiger Reserves.

The Chinese order is aimed at protecting tigers in the wild, enforcing laws against illegal trading of tiger parts & products and better management and monitoring of tiger farms.

The order has called for improved protection of tigers and their prey in the wild. This will have to be done through efforts in “research, monitoring, anti-poaching and alleviating human-tiger conflict”. China has some 20-odd tigers in the wild.

It has also mandated a crackdown on illegal smuggling and trade of tiger parts and products. The order has specifically asked local forestry bureaus to collaborate with other law enforcement agencies to increase monitoring and undertake enforcement measures against tiger trade.

Officially, domestic trade in tiger parts is illegal in China. However, the ever-growing demand for tiger parts, which are used to make Chinese traditional medicine, has contributed to a flourishing black market, which fuels increased poaching and smuggling of tigers out of India through the Nepal and Myanmar borders.

The latest directive from the Chinese authorities seeks to address the issue by trying to curb this demand. It calls for promoting public awareness to reduce consumption of tiger parts and a public rejection of illegal trade.

It suggests encouraging and motivating the public to report wildlife crime to authorities. At the same time, those officials who repeatedly ignore public complaints about illegal trade will be held responsible.

The Chinese order has also called for increased monitoring and management of tiger captive breeding facilities. This will require creating a database that would track all tigers bred on these facilities, with special attention to tiger deaths in these farms. To prevent trade, stockpile of tiger bodies and parts should be sealed to prevent use.

Those facilities that do not have storage capabilities would be required to destroy stockpile, under the supervision of local authorities. Each tiger farm will be required to have permits and meet conditions before opening up for public viewing.

Nearly 4,000 tigers are bred in scores of these controversial tiger farms in China. While the government maintains that these farms have been developed to attract tourists, experts maintain that these farms are used to harvest tiger body parts, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

The Indian government has pushed for the phasing out of tiger farms and destruction of stockpiles of tiger parts. The minister had sought an assurance from China’s minister for environment protection Zhou Shengian that China would sensitise people to the problem and take steps to discourage trade in tiger parts.

Via The Economic Times

ADOPT A TIGER WITH WWF

It’s a big year for wildlife conservation with the United Nations designating 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity.

In particular, it’s a big one for the tiger, critically endangered and with numbers falling fast, the species has special status in 2010, the Chinese Year of the Tiger.

“This year has been designated the International Year of Biodiversity by the United Nations and so we have created a list of 10 critically important endangered animals that we believe will need special monitoring over the next 12 months,” said Diane Walkington, head of species programme for the WWF in the UK.

Animals on the WWF list include the polar bear and the giant panda.

“This year will also be the Chinese Year of the Tiger, and so we have put it at the top of our list,” added Walkington. “It will have special iconic importance.”

Over the past century, the world’s population of tigers has been reduced by 95% as a result of hunting and poaching for their body parts, which are used in traditional Asian medicine. There are only around 3,200 tigers left on the planet.

Of its nine main sub-species, three – the Bali, Caspian and Java tigers – are now extinct, while there has been no reliable siting of a fourth, the South China tiger, for 25 years.

This leaves the Bengal, Amur, Indochinese, Sumatran and Malayan tigers, the numbers of which, with the exception of the Bengal and Indochinese, have been reduced to a few hundred per species.

In recent years conservationists have achieved some noticeable success in halting the decline in tiger numbers. For example, they helped to halt hunting of the Amur tiger, which lives in eastern Russia. Its numbers had dropped to a few dozen.

Today there are around 500 Amur tigers, thanks to conservation measures introduced by the Russian government.

“It showed we could help the tiger,” said Walkington.

However, over the past two or three years, levels of poaching have risen again while habitat problems have added to the stress on tiger numbers.

For example, sea level rises – caused by climate change – are now threatening the mangrove homes of tigers in the Sunderbans regions of Bangladesh and India.

Hence the international decision to redouble efforts to save the tiger this year. “Of course, there are thousands of other species on the endangered list,” added Walkington. “However, there is particular importance in selecting a creature such as the tiger for special attention.

“To save the tiger, we have to save its habitat – which is also home to many other threatened species.

“So if we get things right and save the tiger, we will also save many other species at the same time.”

Via Guardian

ADOPT A TIGER WITH WWF

It’s possible that human beings will simply never be able to figure out how to bring global warming under control — that having been warned about the greatest danger we ever faced, we simply won’t take significant action to prevent it. That’s the unavoidable conclusion of the conference that staggered to a close in the early hours of Saturday morning in Copenhagen. It was a train wreck, but a fascinating one, revealing an enormous amount about the structure of the globe.

Let’s concede first just how difficult the problem is to solve — far more difficult than any issue the United Nations has ever faced. Reaching agreement means overcoming the most entrenched and powerful economic interests on Earth — the fossil fuel industry — and changing some of the daily habits of that portion of humanity that uses substantial amounts of oil and coal, or hopes to someday soon. Compared to that, issues like the war in Iraq, or nuclear proliferation, or the Law of the Sea are simple. No one really liked Saddam Hussein, not to mention nuclear war, and the Law of the Sea meant nothing to anyone in their daily lives unless they were a tuna.

Faced with that challenge, the world’s governments could have had a powerful and honest conversation about what should be done. Civil society did its best to help instigate that conversation. In late October, for instance, 350.org — the organization of which I am a founder — held what CNN called the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history,” with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries all focused on an obscure scientific data point: 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, which NASA scientists have described as the maximum amount of carbon we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed, and to which life on Earth is adapted.”

In fact, that kind of scientific reality informed the negotiations in Copenhagen much more thoroughly than past conclaves — by midweek diplomats from much of the world were sporting neckties with a big 350 logo, and 116 nations had signed on to a resolution making that the dividing line. A radical position? In one sense, yes — it would take the quick transition away from fossil fuels to make it happen. But in another sense? The most conservative of ideas, that you might want to preserve a planet like the one you were born onto.

From the beginning, the most important nations chose not to go the route of truth-telling. The Obama administration decided not long after taking office that they would barely mention “global warming,” instead confining themselves to talking about “green jobs” and “energy security.” Perhaps they had no choice, and it was the only way to reach the U.S. Senate — we’ll never know, because they clung to their strategy tightly. On Oct. 24, when there were world leaders from around the globe joining demonstrations, they refused to send even minor officials to take part. Instead, they continued to insist on something that scientists kept saying was untrue: The safe level of carbon in the atmosphere was 450 ppm, and their plans would keep temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) and thus avoid “catastrophic consequences.” (Though since 0.8 degrees C had melted the Arctic, it wasn’t clear how they defined catastrophe).

In any event, even this unambitious claim was a sham. That’s strong language, so here’s what I mean. Thirty-six hours before the conference drew to a close, a leaked document from the UN Secretariat began circulating around the halls. It had my name scrawled across the front, not because I’d leaked it but apparently because it confirmed something I’d been writing for weeks here at Yale Environment 360 and elsewhere: Even if you bought into the idea that all we needed to do was keep warming to 2 degrees C and 450 ppm, the plans the UN was debating didn’t even come close. In fact, said the six-page report, the plans on offer from countries rich and poor, if you added them all up, would produce a world where the temperature rose at least 3 degrees C, and carbon soared to at least 550 ppm. (Hades, technically described). It ended with a classic piece of bureaucratic prose: Raising the temperature three degrees, said the anonymous authors, would “reduce the probability” of hitting the two degree target. You think?

The document helped make already-suspicious vulnerable nations even more suspicious. Remember: The reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have made it clear that a two-degree temperature rise globally might make Africa 3.5 degrees C hotter. Almost everyone thinks that even 450 ppm will raise sea level enough to drown small island nations. There wasn’t much solace in the money on offer: $10 billion in “fast start” money for poor nations (about $2.50 a head — I’d like to buy the world a Coke) and an eventual $100 billion in annual financial aid that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised when she arrived on Thursday morning. Even if that money ever materialized (Clinton couldn’t say where it would come from, except “special alternative financial means”) it wouldn’t do much good for countries that weren’t actually going to exist once sea levels rose. They were backed to the wall.

And so, they squawked. They didn’t knuckle under quite as easily as usual, despite the usual round of threats and bribes. (One island nation left a meeting with the U.S. fearing for its International Monetary Fund loans; one African nation left a meeting with the Chinese hoping for two new hospitals if only it would toe the line.)

This annoyed the powerful. When President Obama finally appeared on Friday, his speech to the plenary had none of the grace and sense of history that often mark his words — it was an exasperated and tight-lipped little dressing-down about the need for countries to take “responsibility.” (Which might have gone over better if he’d even acknowledged that the United States had some special historical responsibility for the fix we’re in, but the U.S. negotiation position all along has been that we owe nothing for our past. As always, Americans are eager for a fresh new morning). In any event, it didn’t suffice — other nations were still grumbling, and not just the cartoonish Hugo Chavez.

In fact, the biggest stumbling block to the kind of semi-dignified face-saving agreement most people envisioned was China. According to accounts I’ve heard from a number of sources, Obama met with 25 other world leaders after his press conference for a negotiating session. It was a disaster — China turned down one reasonable idea after another, unwilling to constrain its ability to burn coal in any meaningful way (and not needing to, since power, especially in any non-military negotiation, has swung definitively in its direction).

In the end, things were clearly coming apart, so a non-face-saving pact was quickly agreed between China, India, and the U.S., with South Africa added for reasons you can guess at. In any event, this cartel of serious coal-burners laid out the most minimal of frameworks, and then Obama set off for the airport.

Eventually, sometime around dawn, some of the poorest nations signed on to “save a place at the table,” though clearly it will be at the children’s table. (And the Sudan did its best to remind everyone why the UN process can be so trying, comparing the agreement to the Holocaust). The Guardian quickly declared the whole thing a Failure, in large point type, followed by most of the world’s other newspapers, though the American press was a little kinder. Kumi Naidoo, the wonderful head of Greenpeace International, said Copenhagen was a “crime scene.” The leaders of the global youth movement gathered under the Metro station outside the Bella Center to chant: “You’re wrecking our future.”

James Hansen, the great climate scientist who started the global warming era with his 1988 testimony before the U.S. Congress, and whose team provided the crucial 350 number that now defines the planet’s habitability, refused to come to Copenhagen, predicting it would be a charade. He was correct. On Sunday he predicted a greater than 50 percent chance that 2010 would be the warmest year ever recorded. If you want to bet against him, you can. If you want to argue that this non-agreement will help Obama get something through Congress, it’s possible you’re right. If you want to despair, that’s certainly a plausible option.

I’d like to go home and sleep for a while. The new world order is going to take a little while to figure out.

Via Yale Environment 360

Johann Hari says that it’s time to drop the naive assumption that our political leaders, like our parents, will ultimately act to guarantee our safety. Instead it’s now up to us to take action…

Buried deep in our subconscious, there still lays the belief that our political leaders are collective Daddies and Mummies who will – in the last instance – guarantee our safety. Sure, they might screw us over when it comes to hospital waiting lists, or public transport, or taxing the rich, but when it comes to resisting a raw existential threat, they will keep us from harm. Last week in Copenhagen, the conviction was disproved. Every leader there had been told by their scientists – plainly, bluntly, and for years – that there is a bare minimum we must all do now if we are going to prevent a catastrophe. And they all refused to do it.

To understand the gravity of what just happened, you need to know a few facts about global warming that, at first, sound odd. The world’s climate scientists have shown that man-made global warming must not exceed 2C. When you hear this, a natural reaction is – that’s not much; how bad can it be if we overshoot? If I go out for a picnic and the temperature rises or falls by 2C, I don’t much notice. But this is the wrong analogy. If your body temperature rises by 2C, you become feverish and feeble. If it doesn’t go back down again, you die. The climate isn’t like a picnic; it’s more like your body.

Two degrees is bad: 2C means we lose much of the world’s low-lying land, from the island-states of the South Pacific to much of Bangladesh to swathes of Florida. But at every step up to and including 2C, if we reduce our emissions, we can stabilise the climate at this new higher level. If we go beyond 2C, though, the situation changes. The earth’s natural processes begin to break down – and cause more warming. There are massive amounts of warming gases stored in the Siberian permafrost; at 2C, they melt and are released into the atmosphere. The world’s humid rainforests store huge amounts of warming gases in their trees. Beyond C, they lose their humidity and begin to burn down – releasing them too into the atmosphere.

These are called “tipping points”. Because of them, the world gets warmer and warmer beyond 2C. They stand at the climate’s Point of No Return, beyond which there lies only warming. We are only 6C away from the last ice age; we are setting ourselves on course to go that far in the opposite direction.

So what do we need to do to stay this side of 2C? There is a very broad, rock-solid scientific consensus that we need a cut of 40 per cent in the most polluting countries’ emissions by 2020 if we are going to have even a 50-50 chance of doing so. Then, by 2050 we need an 80 per cent cut from everyone. The fact we are only aiming for a 50 per cent goal of avoiding calamity is a sign of how far we have already made a terrible compromise with fossil fuels – but our leaders are refusing to aim even for those odds.

There was plenty of disgrace to go around in Copenhagen. The world’s worst per capita warmer is the US, yet its President turned up offering a pathetic 4 per cent cut by 2020 – and once you factor in all the loopholes his negotiators demanded, he was actually demanding the right to a significant increase in US emissions. He caved to the oil and gas lobbies who virtually own the Senate. It was – apart from anything else – a terrible betrayal of his own country’s national security. In 2004, a leaked Pentagon report warned that unchecked global warming would ensure “disruption and conflict will be endemic … [and] once again, warfare would define human life.”

Similarly, the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao behaved appallingly. His country is the single largest overall emitter of gases, albeit with a far larger population, and much more need for development. Yet he vetoed the 80 per cent target by 2050, and refused to allow other countries to carry out basic checks to ensure China was carrying out the smaller cuts they were committed to. Again, he is betraying his own people: most of China’s population depend on rivers that flow down from the Himalayan glaciers, yet they are rapidly disappearing. His name will be cursed in the Chinese history books.

The European Union was hardly better. They sat inert, refusing to make any larger offer to get the ball rolling. Only President Lula da Silva of Brazil came out boldly with an ahead-of-the-curve offer – but his heroism was met with awkward silence and avoided glances from the other leaders.

So here’s the situation. There is no deal. The world’s leaders refused to agree to limit our emissions of warming gases. The most they could agree was to officially “note” the scientific evidence about 2C – with no roadmap to keep us this side of it. You get a sense of how valuable this “noting” is when you look at the things the conference also “noted”: the hard work of the airport security staff, and the quality of the catering in the Bella Centre. It seems impossible, but our leaders really did give the stability of our climate the same status as their praise for Danish sandwiches.

I am normally somebody who supports incremental change. Most progress happens by inches. But with this problem, we can’t wait patiently knowing we’ll prevail in the next generation. The tipping points will make that too late. You can’t defuse a ticking bomb slowly year after year. You either defuse it fast, or it blows up in your face.

Our leaders were given the scientific facts, and they have responded by trying to haggle with the facts about the atmosphere. Imagine a 50-a-day smoker who goes to his doctor and is told he must stop immediately or he will develop lung cancer. He says: “I’ll tell you what, doc – I’ll cut down to 40-a-day, I’ll eat a salad every lunchtime, and I’ll slap on a few nicotine patches. How does that sound?” That’s the official response to global warming.

Where does this leave us all? At least we know now: scientific evidence and rationality are not going to be enough to persuade our leaders. The Good Daddy isn’t in charge. Nobody is going to sort this out – unless we, the populations of the warming-gas countries, make them. Politicians respond to the pressure put on them, and every single politician at Copenhagen knew they would get more flak at home – from their corporate paymasters and their petrol-hungry populations – for signing a deal than for walking away.

There is only one way to change that dynamic: a mass movement of ordinary democratic citizens. They have made the impossible happen before. Our economies used to be built on slave labour, just as surely as they are built on fossil fuels today. It seemed permanent and unchangeable, and its critics were regarded as deranged – until ordinary citizens refused to tolerate it any more, and they organised to demand its abolition.

The time for changing your light-bulbs and hoping for the best is over. It is time to take collective action. For some people, that will mean joining Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or the Campaign Against Climate Change and helping them pile on the pressure. But those who can go further – by taking non-violent direct action – should do so. Every coal train should be ringed with people refusing to let it pass. Every new runway should be blockaded. The cost of trashing the climate needs to be raised.

It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.

There need to be parallel movements to this in every country on earth (and a much bigger one in Britain). Copenhagen had one value, and one value alone. It has shown us that if we don’t act in our own self-defence now, nobody else will.

Via Independent

Despite US and British attempts to blame Chinese intransigence for the failure of the Copenhagen climate change conference, George Mombiot lays the blame ultimately with Barack Obama and the fear of the Democratic Party of driving carbon emissions reducing legislation through the US Senate…

The last time global negotiations collapsed like this was in Doha, in 2001. After the trade talks fell apart, the World Trade Organisation assured delegates that there was nothing to fear: they would move to Mexico, where a deal would be done. The negotiations ran into the sand of the Mexican resort of Cancún, never to re-emerge. After eight years of dithering, nothing has been agreed.

When the climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last week, Yvo de Boer, the man in charge of the process, urged us not to worry: everything will be sorted out “in Mexico one year from now”. Is Mexico the diplomatic equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch: the place where failed negotiations go to die?

De Boer might pretend that this is just a temporary hitch, but he knows what happens when talks lose momentum. A year ago I asked him what he feared most. This is what he said. “The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second WTO … Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet, and I am afraid that if we don’t then the process will begin to slip, and like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic.”

We can live without a new trade agreement; we can’t live without a new climate agreement. One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated. So here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.

Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.

A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places which can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was 4C. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.

Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the body that summarises the findings of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production “is very likely to decrease above about 3C”. The panel uses the phrase “very likely” to mean a probability of above 90%. Unless a strong climate deal is struck very soon, the probable outcome is a rise of 3C or more by the end of the century.

Even in higher latitudes the habitable land area will decrease as the sea level rises. The likely rise this century – probably less than a metre – is threatening only to some populations, but the process does not stop in 2100. During the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, the average global temperature was about 1.3C higher than it is today, as a result of changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun.

A new paper in the scientific journal Nature shows that sea levels during that period were between 6.6 and 9.4 metres higher than today’s. Once the temperature had risen, the expansion of sea water and the melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica was unstoppable. I wonder whether the government of Denmark, whose atrocious management of the conference contributed to its failure, would have tried harder if its people knew that in a few hundred years they won’t have a country any more.

As people are displaced from their homes by drought and rising sea levels, and as food production declines, the planet will be unable to support the current population. The collapse in human numbers is unlikely to be either smooth or painless: while the average global temperature will rise gradually, the events associated with it will come in fits and starts – in the form of sudden droughts and storm surges.

This is why the least developed countries, which will be hit hardest, made the strongest demands in Copenhagen. One hundred and two poor nations called for the maximum global temperature rise to be limited not to 2C but to 1.5C. The chief negotiator for the G77 bloc complained that Africa was being asked “to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”.

The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama.

The man elected to put aside childish things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal that outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation: either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.

The British and US governments have blamed the Chinese government for the failure of the talks. It’s true that the Chinese worked hard to mess them up, but Obama also put Beijing in an impossible position. He demanded concessions while offering nothing. He must have known the importance of not losing face in Chinese politics: his unilateral diplomacy amounted to a demand for self-abasement. My guess is that this was a calculated manoeuvre guaranteed to produce instransigence, whereupon China could be blamed for the outcome the US wanted.

Why would he do this? You have only to see the relief in Democratic circles to get your answer. Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible.

So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you.

Is this music not to your taste, sir, or madam? Perhaps you would like our little orchestra to play something louder, to drown out that horrible grinding noise.

Via Guardian