There’s a song by the short-lived and under appreciated British rock band The Jeevas, fronted by Kula Shaker singer Crispian Mills, called How Much do You Suck and it goes a little bit like this:

How much do you have to suck
To lose a popularity contest to Saddam Hussein
You’d have to be a sleaze
An oil-drilling fiend
How much do you suck?

Simple, effective, gets its point across, no prizes for guessing which ex President of America that one’s about. Sadly not all propaganda is quite as successful in communicating a clear message. Take the recent No Pressure video from the 10:10 campaign which has been causing quite a stirthis weekend for all the wrong reasons, for example.

It’s hard not to wonder how any right minded eco activist in the 10:10 campaign could have thought a film by Richard Curtis was a good idea in the first place, let alone a film about blowing kids up for expressing apathy over the issue of climate change. I suppose it could have been worse. It could have starred Hugh Grant.

There is a degree to which I think the anti-science loonies in the climate change deniers camp need to develop a bit of a sense of humour. South Park makes socio-political points in much more controversial ways every week. This video was clearly designed to tap into that kind of humour to make the point that softy-softly approaches to getting people to bring down their carbon emissions just won’t work anymore, that there has to be pressure because the millions of people who are having their lives destroyed by the effects of climate change are already feeling the pressure themselves.

But was that message successful? Clearly not if all the headlines that have followed have been about teachers blowing up kids, the most charitable finding fault with the judgement and humour of the campaign, the least holding it up as an example of the extreme and dangerous misanthropy of the ‘eco fascists’ and ‘climate tyrants’. Those holding the latter opinion, much like those who believe in fairies, Father Christmas or intelligent design, are not likely to be swayed by a more reasonable argument, or a more nuanced piece of propaganda. But if the wider public watching this video come away without knowing quite what the environmentalists were trying to say beyond ‘agree with us or we’ll blow you up’, then clearly this video is a bit of an own goal.

In other news, which has caused much less of a stir, Osama bin Laden has come out calling for action against climate change. Going by some of his past stunts, not least the demolition of a couple of rather famous buildings in downtown Manhettan nearly a decade ago, bin Laden is not exactly known for his overwhelming popularity, the subtlety of his attempts to get his point across, or the effectiveness of his public relations exercises. Which makes one wonder. How much do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Osama bin Laden?

Well, you’d be wrong of course. A few years ago, RBS launched a self-branding scheme as ‘The Oil and Gas Bank’. Some bright spark in marketing pointed out that this was probably a social faux-pas among the millions of people concerned about climate change, resource wars and the middle eastern situation, so it got moved to the side. But that phrase does reflect the reality of the bank. In the first 6 months after the bail out, RBS was still the biggest financier of fossil fuel industries in the UK.

When it comes to climate change, there’s been a lot of bullshit from both sides. In the run up to Copenhagen, there was the awful UEA affair (for which the Press Complaints Commission is finally getting some grovelling apologies), and the rise of the somewhat senseless idea that ‘now the recession’s here, no one cares about climate change’, which would make sense if it weren’t for the shared causes of both crises.

But from the other side, those purporting to be concerned about climate change, there’s also been a wave of crap. Tck Tck Tck, the online campaign spearheaded by internet-savvy videos and texts, failed to move people into action, but also failed to say anything interesting.

The UN Summit was a trade agreement, just like WTO or G20, and so was filled with the usual imperialist bullying from the ‘big powers’, all under the auspices of benefitting the little guy. Instead of ‘trickle down economics’ however, the white-wash (or green-wash, as it’s come to be known) was ‘Solving Climate Change’. But all three mechanisms (CDM, REDD & Carbon trading) that the UN has in its solution-bag do the same thing: transfer capital from poor states to rich states, and increase the control of the Global North by covering up their carbon emissions.

So it’s not really surprising that RBS continues to finance fossil fuels, or that the UN agreements will fail to do anything about emission levels, or that the petitions of NGOs have been pretty much ignored. And the crimes of RBS’s capital just keep going. This week Cairn Energy is seeking money from Vedanta, using profits gained from the exploitation of aluminium on India in order to finance exploration in offshore arctic greenland. Oh look: both Vedanta and Cairn Energy are already majorly financed by? RBS. In fact, the most destructive, fastest expanding and quite simply most gigantic fossil fuel project in the world – the Canadian Tar Sands - is financed by? RBS.

So it turns out, this is what gets people turned on. Despite all the spleen vented about the banks (and the bankers), there’ve been no poll-tax style protests. The G20 protest was precisely that: a G20 protest. An RBS branch window was smashed in (and a 2 year sentence handed out for it) but the protest itself was at a symbolic centre of finance, and not even directly against the Bank of England. While I like the idea of going to ‘the belly of the beast’, there wasn’t exactly a demand to lower interest rates.

The Climate Camp in Edinburgh isn’t going to change the world – in fact, on its own it won’t change RBS for more than a few days, though it might disrupt it a fair bit. But in 2007, when the Climate Camp at Heathrow set up, people didn’t really think the 3rd runway would be scrapped. In 2008, when we set up near Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, we were planning for a rolling blockade: we didn’t actually think the whole project would be shelved under pressure about the needlessness of new coal.

And in 2010, how many people think we’ll actually change RBS, the banking sector, or the system as a whole? Very few. But we should start to think about what it would mean to win. I doubt that many Bolivian protesters thought that when they started demonstrating against the privatisation of their water by Bechtel, that they would actually throw the company out of the country and elect a new government on that basis. Not exactly my hopes and dreams, but it would be a start.

The Camp is from Thursday August 19th, over the weekend, and the big day of action against RBS (starting with the global HQ) is on Monday 23rd. The exact location of the site itself is still a secret (really, I don’t know where it is), but it’ll be in or very near to Edinburgh. If you can spare the time and train fare, I’ll see you there. And for those who can’t make it, I’ll try and post some stuff up here, but otherwise check out the constantly updated climate camp website, where there’ll be videos and photos posted as the camp progresses.

This week, the Science Museum announced a new exhibition on climate change, set to open in November.* Nothing unusual about that, except that the Museum’s last Climate Change exhibition (“Prove It! All the evidence you need to believe in climate change”) only closed in February. It seems a bit odd to open another one so soon afterwards. How is this one different? Well,

Prof. Chris Rapley CBE, Director of the Science Museum, said:

“The Science Museum aims to provide the answers to people’s questions about the science of climate change, becoming a trusted destination for public engagement with climate science. The scientific community has, with some exceptions, concluded that climate change is real, largely driven by humans and requires a response. Our exhibition will deliver an immersive, enjoyable and memorable experience that explains their work and results and shows how science and technology can contribute to a low-carbon future. Our objective is to minimise the shrill tone and emotion that bedevils discussion of this subject, satisfying the interests and needs of those who accept that human-induced climate change is real, those who are unsure, and those who do not.”

Yep, that’s right. The Science Museum thinks that part of its remit is to accommodate the ‘interests and needs’ of climate change deniers (and while we’re on the subject, yes, it is legitimate to call them deniers, and no, neither the climategate emails from UEA nor a couple of errors about glaciers in an IPCC report undermine the science of climate change. Just so we’re clear.) Oh, and in what I’m sure is nothing but a massive coincidence, the exhibition is co-sponsored by Shell.

Acknowledging the existence of climate change deniers isn’t harmful in itself. The problem is how it’s presented. I’m pretty sure the Science Museum wouldn’t have an exhibition about evolution that aimed to ‘satisfy the interests and needs’ of creationists, or one about medicine that tried to make space for faith healers. In both cases the beliefs in question might get a mention, perhaps as part of a wider explanation of hypothesis-testing and the scientific method, but no more than that. So why is this issue being treated differently? At a guess, because of the current popularity of climate change denial in influential (albeit conservative wingnut) circles. But it’s not the job of a science museum to pander to anti-science points of view just because they happen to be given a lot of column inches in the Daily Telegraph.

If you’d like to let the Science Museum know your views on this, They have a contact page here.

*Original source: Reuters, via the ever-awesome Ben Goldacre.

As we speak, a blanket of darkness is rolling around the Earth. No, the orcs aren’t invading from Mordor, it’s Earth Hour! That time of year when governments, businesses and hundreds of millions of people around the world make a visual protest against climate change by turning off their lights for sixty minutes. Following the wet flannel that was Copenhagen, this year’s Earth Hour is more important than ever to show the world’s leaders that though they have failed us, and the millions of people in the developing world who are already losing their lives and livlihoods to climate change, we are still watching.

Earth hour begins at 8.30pm today. Turn off, tune in, drop out…

www.earthhour.org

Climate change, responsible for the melting of the Andean glaciers, threatens the lives of millions in Latin America’s poorest country.

Sitting atop a barren mountain in Bolivia is a chunk of ice. It might be hard to imagine, on first inspection, that there is anything special about it. Ice is ice, after all; cold, hard and white. But this is all that remains of the 18,000 year old Chacaltaya glacier that disappeared last year. Once the world’s highest ski run, 5,300m (17,400 ft) above sea level, Chacaltaya is now a bare peak. Edson Ramirez, a hydrologist at San Andres University in La Paz, mourns the glacier like a dead friend. “It really hurts,” he tells the BBC’s James Painter. “We have had the privilege of seeing their [the glaciers’] beauty. The next generations will not.” Chacaltaya was around before the first humans crossed the Bering land bridge to the Americas. It has seen civilisation emerge and gods die; empires rose and fell around it; the conquistadors came, independence was won and wars were lost. But as 18,000 years of history finally come to a close, a much more serious problem is only just being realised.

It is from glaciers that, according to the World Bank, as many as 80 million people in Bolivia and its neighbouring countries, draw their water. Whilst Chacaltaya’s untimely demise is a tragedy for Club Andino who, in days of past glory, would organise skiing competitions on the slopes of this tourist magnet, it is only a symbol of a much greater tragedy in the making. Common to the major urban hubs of developing countries, El Alto, a vast suburb of La Paz, is experiencing the population boom of rural-urban migration. Last year marked an alarming turning point for Bolivia. With annual growth estimated by a Family Health International report to be at 9%, and with the glaciers of the great white-tipped mountain Illimani that supply the burgeoning population with fresh water fast melting, Ramirez gloomily predicts that from now on “demand for water will be progressively greater than supply.”

Elena, a resident of El Alto, sings hip hop to raise awareness about climate change and the right to water. Never having performed before, she admits that she was always too frightened to stand up in public. In the end it was fear that made her join Fundación Solón’s campaign to highlight Bolivia’s endangered water resources. The Andean glaciers – from which over two million people in La Paz and El Alto draw a third of their water – have shrunk by more than 30% since the 1960s, a 2007 Christian Aid report found, and the rate of retreat is accelerating. Until recently, scientists tracing Chacaltaya’s rapid decline gave it six more years of life. Its surprise disappearance last year signals the urgency of the growing crisis.

Fundación Solón – uniting performers like Elena with musicians, artists and campaigners – was instrumental in convincing the government of Evo Morales, brought to power on the aspirations of a people weary of decades of neoliberalism, to renationalise Bolivia’s water supplies. The move made affordable water available to the population of Latin America’s poorest country. “We have played our part in this process of change,” says Elysabeth Peredo, director of Fundación Solón, “just like all the people in the country.” Bolivia’s impending ecological and humanitarian crisis, however, goes far beyond Fundación Solón’s, or even its government’s, ability to influence.

“We are not culpable for climate change,” argues Oscar Paz, director of Bolivia’s National Climate Change Program, in an interview with Carolyn Kormann for Yale Environment 360. Bolivia accounts for just 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And where the United States, according to data collected in 2007 for the United Nations, is responsible for 22.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than four times the emissions of all the countries of Latin America combined, it is easy to see why Bolivians, first in the firing line of the devastating effects of climate change, are angry.

For Paz, it is a grave injustice that the world’s poorest countries, disproportionately affected by global warming, should foot the bill adapting to a crisis not of their making. “The grand question here is, who compensates,” he says. “It’s not fair that a country like Bolivia already has annual economic losses from the impacts of climate change equivalent to four percent of our GDP.” Bolivia’s current expenditure, almost $0.5bn, has been channelled into handling the aftermath of two years of devastating Amazon floods, worsened by rapid glacial melt, that have left hundreds of thousands homeless. But with Ramirez predicting the complete disappearance of the glaciers as early as 2025, the costs will soar as the government struggles to build the dams and reservoirs needed to supply safe water whilst adapting to the loss of ten hydroelectric plants that provide a quarter of the country’s electricity.

The argument has been won, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Last July, the G8, meeting at the site of another disaster, pledged twelve years too late to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C. If kept, the agreement to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is an historic one. The dismal performance and lukewarm commitments coming out of Copenhagen, however, make that seem increasingly unlikely. And whilst a general consensus has emerged amongst scientists and world leaders that human activity – primarily the burning of fossil fuels for power and transportation – is responsible for climate change, it may already be too late to save the Andean glaciers from going the way of Chacaltaya. “This is a process that now unfortunately is irreversible,” says Ramirez.

Fundación Solón has campaigned tirelessly for safe water access to be recognised as a human right. But it is no longer rights that are at issue, it is responsibilities. The 10:10 campaign, launched by the director of The Age of Stupid, urging everyone to cut their carbon footprints by 10% this year, is a vital first step for Britain. But if the people of the developed world, and those of rapidly developing countries such as China and India, cannot achieve the significant lowering of lifestyle expectations and the implementation of green technologies necessary to reduce carbon emissions to sustainable levels, then it is the responsibility of these countries to pay their ecological debt. “The huge amounts of money generated by putting a price on carbon emissions, probably somewhere between $1-3 trillion per year, could be used to sponsor alternative energy in poorer nations and to help them adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change,” environmental activist George Monbiot told me.

To the Aymara – who settled the region long before the rise of the Inca Empire and the coming of the Spanish conquistadors – the life-giving glacial peaks are mountain gods. “God is dead,” Nietzsche famously wrote. Urgent foreign assistance can help the Bolivian government prevent whole communities from dying too. But “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

Massachusetts was not won by the Republicans, it was lost by Obama

Yesterday’s big news from the far side of the Atlantic was the loss of one of the safest Democratic seats to Scott Brown, a man who represents possibly everything that should make us very worried about the Republicans. In Ted Kennedy’s former seat, which has been blue since 1952, it was the Democrats’ to lose. And they lost it.

They didn’t lose because their opponent drives a truck, because his daughters were available or because it was, after all, the people’s seat and not Ted Kennedy’s as was far too confidently assumed. By all accounts, it was not the number of Republicans voting which swung it, but the number of independents backing Brown and the number of Democrats staying at home. It might be tempting for observers this side of the pond to blame the unerring potential for American political stupidity in falling behind a resurgent GOP just one year after the worst president in living memory retired to Crawford. Obama’s ratings are now lower than any president since Eisenhower at the same stage. But for all the fire and spittle and mad dog hysteria thrown at him by the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, the largest part of the blame has to lie with himself.

He is perhaps a victim of the power of his own voice. Obama could probably recount what he had on his toast this morning and turn it into a dazzling charismatic performance that lifts the spirits of the world. But the problem with hot rhetoric is that it does not sit too well with cold pragmatism. Only a fool would have thought Obama’s election meant a fundamental change in the nature of American politics. But he has played too close to the centre to truly capitalise on the yearning for ‘yes we can’. He was never going to appeal to the right in America. But with his lukewarm proposals for reform failing to match up to his lofty words, as speechcraft gets bogged down in statecraft, he is increasingly alienating his left-wing base.

It’s a tragedy for the poor in America that Scott Brown will likely derail even the tiniest table scraps of health care reform that are being thrown to them from Washington. It is a greater tragedy for the poor across the rest of the planet that Obama’s meagre proposals for emissions cuts will fall flat. But it’s a tragedy that Obama has brought on himself. There’s no guarantee that a left-ward swing will prevent him from becoming a one-term president. But at least he could say he tried. At least he could say ‘yes I did’. Because one thing’s for sure. If you sit on the fence, you get splinters.

Guest post by Left Outside

At some point in the late 1950s someone coined the term “Global Warming” when referring to Climate Change, and it has gained tractions since. Global Warming is catchy and easy to visualise, but it is infuriatingly easy for morons – and it is apt to call them morons – to use  any cold snap to pooh pooh the scientific consensus on global warming climate change.

I’ve already pointed out the nonsense of Douglas Carswell. Kindly, AngryMob directs me to the ignorant effluence spouting from Richard Littlejohn:

Ah, say the ‘experts’, there’s a difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’. They are forced to resort to semantics to sustain their insistence that the science is settled, even though they are all sitting there shivering like brass monkeys. They’d still cling to their belief in man-made warming if Hell froze over.

The idea that the difference between climate and weather is semantic would be laughable if it weren’t so depressing (Incidentally, if you want a “how to model climate in three easy steps” then please do look at Unity’s post here).

In response AngryMob treats us to the usual combination of ennui and anger that fills all those that have Littlejohn’s column for as long as he has:

So there you have it: the only difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ according to Littlejohn is semantic. I wish everything in life was as simple as Littlejohn makes out, but sadly things are a little more complex than that and the cold weather outside today says nothing about climate change or the climate in general.

However, rather than take issue with Littlejohn I thought I would try something a little more intellectually stimulating and draw attention to something else.

When AngryMob says “the cold weather outside today says nothing about climate change or the climate in general” he is wrong. Now I know this is out of shear frustration with Littlejohn, rather than his considered opinon, but it gives me a little chance to discuss the weather.

And as an Englishman, who wouldn’t leap at that chance?

The below graphic and paragraph are taken from Fish Out of Water on The Daily Kos (H/T Brad DeLong):

Daily Kos: Freak Current Takes Gulf Stream to Greenland: An unprecedented extreme in the northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation has driven a strong direct connecting current between the Gulf Stream and the West Greenland current. The unprecedented negativity of the “Arctic Oscillation” and the strong connection of the Gulf Stream with the Greenland current are exceptional events. More exceptional weather events are predicted with anthropogenic climate change, but this could be a natural variation of weather and currents.

Now all of that doesn’t really make much sense to anyone. The above graphic especially won’t make much sense unless you know how the Gulf Stream is meant to act. For that reason I have included the below graphic.

As you can see, something has gone quite drastically wrong with the North Atlantic.

In recent weeks the low pressure area which normally sits over Iceland has been replaced with a high pressure area. [1]

This means that the warm air we normally get from the Atlantic can’t get here to warm us, and has instead been replaced with altogether more cold air from the Arctic. This causes us to be bitterly cold; -22.3C cold.

But what is interesting is that this atmospheric disturbance has been sat there long enough to begin to shift the Gulf Stream.

This is a big deal as a lot of the reason that London (latitude 51°32′ N) has such a different climate to Moscow (latitude 55°45′ N), is that the Gulf Stream brings us so much warmth.

We really don’t want to fuck with it. The terror on our roads has illustrated exactly how well we cope with weather which is actually adverse rather than just inconvenient.

The high pressure area sitting over Iceland has caused both the change in the Gulf Stream and the change in our normally mild winters. This sort of exceptional weather event is predicted to happen ever more frequently as our climate changes.

So climate change and a general increase in global temperature, leading to a more chaotic weather system, will probably lead to these cold winters happening more and more often. So there you have it, the whole world gets warmer and Britain is destined for cold, frost and rain.

Is it just me or does this seem bloody typical?

[1] The high blood pressure caused by Iceland seems to be entirely coincidental.

In a recent email to the rest of this blog’s editors, Jacob requested, in his usual forthright fashion, that we refrain from writing ‘pseudo-insightful piece[s] based around new years’ resolutions’, so I’m not going to do that. However, because it’s Boxing Day (at the time of writing), because I’m full of too much wine and unhealthy food, and most of all because I’m frankly a lazy fucker, I’m going to do the next worst thing: my predictions for the world of politics in 2010. If you think I’m wrong about any of the following, by all means say so. I freely admit most of this is sheer guesswork, with occasional instances of stating the bleeding obvious. (But if any of it turns out to be right I’m still going to crow about it for weeks).

In the months leading up to the election, Labour will start sounding a lot more leftwing in an effort to shore up their core vote. They’ll bring out a raft of populist policies aimed at boosting their share of the vote, but it won’t be enough, and the Tories will win the general election. And yes, I realise that isn’t exactly the boldest of forecasts, so let’s be a bit more specific: the Tories will get a majority of between 50 and 100, the Lib Dems will lose seats but not so catastrophically that they get rid of Clegg, and Labour will be badly hurt but not wiped out like the Conservatives were in 1997; Brown and the rest of the government are obviously pretty unpopular, but at the same time my hunch is that there isn’t enough love for Cameron and friends for them to get a landslide. Caroline Lucas won’t become the Greens’ first MP in Brighton Pavilion, though she’ll probably come close. Galloway will be unlucky too: Bethnal Green and Bow will revert to Labour once he leaves, and he’ll split the traditional Labour vote in Poplar and Limehouse just enough to let the Tories in.

In the election aftermath, Brown will resign (yes, I know, big surprise again), and he’ll give a resignation speech which sets an all-time record for mentions of the words ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, with ‘values’ and ‘duty’ following close behind. Now that they’re sure he’s on his way out, the mainstream media will be really nice about both the speech and the man himself. A mob of pundits will gather to wax lyrical in print and on air about all his good points that were so often overlooked and downplayed by…well, those same pundits, as it happens, but never mind. David Miliband, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman and one or both of Jon Cruddas and John McDonnell will stand for party leader. Ed Miliband will look like standing but will stand aside at the last minute and back his brother. Harriet Harman will be unable to come up with any substantial reason why anyone should vote for her other than her lack of a Y chromosome, and the rightwing press will once again paint this as evidence of her radical man-hating feminist nature, rather than simply evidence that she’s a technocratic New Labour drone whose sex is the only thing that distinguishes her from the majority of senior figures in her party, and who – unfortunately – long ago lost touch with anything remotely resembling radical feminism. David Miliband will win the leadership race, and be instantly immortalised as Harry Potter by every unimaginative editorial cartoonist in the land. Jack Straw will come in second despite having less charisma than the common cold (or Harriet Harman). Rising Labour star Chuka ‘definitely not the British Obama’ Umunna will win his seat in Streatham pretty comfortably, and probably get a shadow ministerial brief.

Once in power, the Tories will make lots of noise about eliminating waste in government and cutting public sector fatcats’ pay, then slash and burn everything they can get away with. Budgets for the NHS and schools will probably get off pretty lightly (too easy to mount photogenic anti-cuts campaigns that make the government look bad), but welfare, higher education and anything to do with rehabilitation in the penal system will get hit hard. Immigration policy won’t change much, but the Daily Mail’s hysteria about it will die down a bit. Spurious and unpleasant stories about benefit-cheating single mothers will increase in volume to make up for it, helped along the way by the Tories’ ‘pro-family’ policies (tax subsidies to convince unhappy married couples to stay together – the case for ‘family’ legitimately meaning anything other than Mum, Dad and a couple of apple-cheeked kids will be set back by decades). The recession will deepen and unemployment will rise, thanks to the Tories’ spending cuts, with all the consequences you’d expect – rising crime, increasing urban decay, and so on.

In the wider world, nothing much will continue to happen in the fight against climate change. The pool of deniers will get smaller and people – even Telegraph readers – will slowly pay them less and less attention, but no meaningful action will be taken by any government, as they’ll all be waiting for the others to do something, and the prospects for concerted multilateral action look pretty damn bleak after Copenhagen. There’ll probably be at least one big jump in oil prices for some reason, though it’s hard to guess exactly what. A storm that wrecks some big refineries? Industrial action by hauliers or oil rig workers? Terrorism? Take your pick. Whichever it is, once it happens any worries about climate change in the higher echelons of government will be sidelined as the rush to exploit new sources of fossil fuels (in the Canadian tar sands, in the Arctic and so on) will intensify. The environmental protests will be stepped up in response, but they probably won’t do enough. The old standbys of war, disease and famine will continue to kill millions before their time, and civilisation will continue to lurch towards collapse. Happy New Year.

Photograph: Yves Herman/Pool/EPA

The world may be getting warmer, but, for one day at least, it looks as if hell is getting colder. What’s that? A piece of good news from Copenhagen? No, my friend, not one piece, but two! Not only is Europe pledging €2.4bn a year to help developing nations cope with the cost of climate change, but Britain and France have called for the introduction of the Tobin tax to fund it.

“To ensure predictable and additional finance in the medium term to 2020 and beyond, we should make use of innovative financing mechanisms, such as the use of revenues from a global financial transactions tax and the reduction of aviation and maritime emissions and the auctioning of national emissions permits,” Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarcozy said in a joint statement.

It’s a handy way to tie up the twin crises of ecology and economy, compensating the poorest nations on Earth – often first in the firing line when it comes to climate change – for our occidental excesses, whilst reigning in the global financial system. The deniers and conspiracy nuts – including those not-quite-so-lefty-lefties at Harry’s Place (is there any low to which they will not sink?) -  are still wringing their hands with glee at climategate, telling us all to stop worrying, but this is, at its heart, a true redistributive measure that any genuine socialist, no matter where they stand on anthropogenic climate change, should welcome.

America, as usual, is dragging her heels. FOX News’ horsemanure of the apocalypse, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity may delude themselves into thinking Obama is a socialist, but on this side of the pond he’s way behind a conservative Frenchman and a cardboard box.

It goes without saying that a leader’s first judge will invariably be his or her own people. Presidents and prime ministers live or die, come election time, by their policies, by how well they have adapted to events beyond their control and by how effectively they have handled the three most rudimentary tasks of government: protecting the population from external threats, maintaining law and order and handling the economy. But there are times when certain momentous decisions have much further reaching consequences, when a leader must look beyond the short-term popularity and practicality of a policy, because it is not just their people who will judge them, but history itself.

In seven days, the leaders of the world’s nations will meet in Copenhagen to agree a framework for tackling climate change. As George Monbiot told me in an interview with The Third Estate in September, “The chances of preventing a two degrees rise in global temperatures are now pretty slight and diminishing rapidly.” Quite simply, he argued, the damage has already been done. To understand the gravity of the situation, a two degree rise in global temperatures is all that is needed to destroy half the rainforest and with it one of the largest carbon sinks on Earth.

Even at present, 13,000 sq km of sea ice in the Antarctic Peninsula have been lost over the last 50 years, Bangladesh is suffering floods that make Cockermouth look like a dry day in the Sahara and entire glaciers in the Andes, upon which millions depend for clean drinking water, have vanished. There are some who would bury their heads in the sand, pointing to the ill-chosen words of a few scientists discussing methodology, arguing that the tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere is having no effect on our climate, whilst ignoring the dramatic changes that are happening here and now all around us. History will judge the inane outpourings of Melanie Phillips too. But if we are to prevent the catastrophe of runaway climate change, resulting from growing emissions and shrinking carbon sinks no longer able to offset them, then we have to act now. Copenhagen may well be our last chance to make a difference. That can only happen with America on board.

It is abundantly clear that Barack Obama paints himself as a transformative figure. His rhetoric, his sloganeering, his grand speeches all look to history and his place in it. Unfortunately, his policies point no further than the next election. At present he is doing little more than papering over the cracks of the worst injustices of the Bush administration. Necessary steps to be sure, but still just tinkering around the edges. His pledges to close Guantanamo, pull soldiers from Iraq and his piddling lukewarm proposals to reform America’s barbaric healthcare system will, in the long run, prove fairly irrelevant. When history looks back at his place in it, what will it see? A leader who was better than George Bush? Not exactly hard to find. The slightly more humane face of American Empire? We’ve seen it all before. America’s first black president? Not enough.

Obama will travel to Copenhagen on December 10th, the day before he collects his Nobel Peace Prize (awarded, unlike most prizes, for potential effort rather than attainment) in Oslo. Whether he deserves that honour will depend on what he brings to the table. At present he is offering a 17% cut to the carbon emissions of history’s greatest polluter by 2020. Far too little, far too late – not least because, whilst the rest of the world is pledging cuts to 1990 levels, Obama’s are only to 2005 levels. Since US emissions have risen by around 15% since 1990, what Obama is effectively offering is little more than a 2% cut over the next ten years. Hardly the stuff of which history is made.

As Monbiot, a keen supporter of the 10:10 campaign, said: “We need a 10% cut in the coming year. And then a 10% cut in the following year. Otherwise the cumulative emissions will push us above two degrees and more without any question.”

Obama will struggle to get these radical, but necessary proposals through Congress. He will take a beating from American business leaders; he’ll face an onslaught from the attack dogs of FOX News and a backlash from Middle America’s families whose gas guzzling SUVs will be prised only from their cold dead fingers. But it is time for the man who once told the world ‘yes we can’ to make a stand. If he truly sees himself as a transformative figure, he cannot afford to look no further than the next election. Because, in the long game, when all is said and done, it will not be the electorate that judges him. History is already watching.