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.”

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.

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.

Guest post by Jon Small

The myth of Climategate can be destroyed with a rudimentary understanding of scientific method

Anti global warming conspiracy theorists all over the internet have been having a field day this week with the “climategate” email scandal, the release of thousands of private emails covering a thirteen year period, downloaded by a hacker from the servers of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Internet conspiracy guru Alex Jones has claimed with characteristic wild-eyed hyperbole that this information is the single most important piece of evidence of the global conspiracy over manmade climate change. Climate change sceptic Patrick J. Michaels has claimed that “this is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.” But beyond reams of frenzied blogging, vlogging, tweeting and general bandwagon jumping among those keen to deny that human activity is affecting climate change, what has the released information actually told us?

The emails contain many shorthand, sometimes hastily-worded (and in hindsight, unfortunately worded) discussions between colleagues very familiar with their specialism. These discussions strip away the niceties of detailed explanation for the layman, frequently getting to the heart of practical, hands-on statistical analysis and presentational issues related to academic research papers later published in scientific journals. But do these discussions contain the smoking gun, clear cut evidence of fabrication of statistical data, proof that the whole idea of anthropogenic climate change is fiction? Absolutely not, and the frenzied “deniers” who claim otherwise tend simply to misunderstand or overlook the basic technical issues under discussion, in favour of an attempt to pick up on any poorly, candidly worded phrase which can be presented as apparent evidence of the global warming ‘conspiracy’. If this genuinely is Alex Jones’ most important evidence that global warming is a hoax, then he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

One of the headline quotes is from Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director, who says in an email: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” On the face of it, admitting that he is using a statistical “trick” to “hide” a decline in temperature, when, as everyone surely knows, these conspirators are trying to convince us that global temperature is rising, not falling. Prima facie evidence, case closed? Well yes, if you listen to the conspiracy bloggers. But with a little understanding of the conflicting methodologies being used for the academic paper Prof. Jones was discussing, this damning confession of evil-doing actually dissolves into nothing.

Climate scientists use various measures to create a global picture of long term temperature trends throughout history; these consist of proxies, such as readings taken from ice cores, tree rings, boreholes and sediments, and instrumental temperature readings since such records began. The “decline” in question refers to a known problem with the proxy temperature reconstruction from tree-ring data, which diverge from instrumental records and other proxy data after 1960, for reasons which are not yet clear. If tree ring data were the only way we had of measuring temperature, this would be a problem, but this is one proxy measure among many, all of which can be calibrated, using the period of overlap, with the “real”, or direct instrumental measurements. For this reason the post-1960 tree ring data need to be put in the context of other reconstructed and direct temperature readings. The data are still there for everyone to see; the anomaly is openly discussed in the scientific literature, and it may be possible in future to work out which factors are responsible for this particular anomaly in the tree ring measurements. The “trick” Prof. Jones mentions (the word used in the sense of a “clever technique” rather than a “cheat”), is plotting the “real” instrumental data measurements alongside the anomalous tree-ring proxy data from the same period in order to provide a context for the divergence of the tree-ring data set from other sources of temperature measurement. Thus, “hiding” the mistake – without actually hiding it, since the data is still in plain view and the statistical methodology is open and transparent.

An unfortunate choice of wording in the circumstances, undoubtedly, but the spin that has been placed on this phrase by the global warming deniers tells us much about both their willingness to jump to a predetermined conclusion, and about their general lack of understanding of and engagement with the technical debate itself. To read the phrase “hide the decline” as evidence that climate scientists are telling us global temperature is going up when in fact it’s going down, is quite plainly a simplistic misunderstanding of this (admittedly complex) technical debate. Should we, as many climate scientists have done, conclude that there is a problem with this anomalous data, that some extraneous factor is affecting this particular data set, causing it in the latter half of the 20th century to diverge from other proxy data sets and the direct instrumental measurement of temperature? Or should we decide that the tree ring data in question is in fact giving us the real picture of global temperature, while all the other proxies and indeed the instrumental record are not? The latter absurdity is what the conspiracy theorists would appear to suggest in interpreting the phrase in the way they have.

The conspiracy theorist’s interpretation of this particular email leads to this absurdity, but in truth the likes of Alex Jones are not really engaging with the technical debate at all, they are simply taking easy headline quotes and putting their own spin on them, based on what they already assume to be the case: that the scientists are all in on selling us a big con. And this indicates a fairly serious problem in the general level of public (mis)understanding of science. For those who fail to engage with the technicalities of the topic, or who simply do not understand the principles of the scientific method, such as Alex Jones and his cheerleaders, the decrees of scientists appear as just another source of unfounded assertion, just another empty statement of politically motivated rhetoric. But science doesn’t work like that. The scientific method contains its own safeguards. Research findings such as these, including problematic and conflicting ones, are published in peer-reviewed academic journals precisely in order for people to pull them apart if they don’t hold up, or to verify them if they do.

The academic science community is fiercely combative and competitive, and it would gain a working scientist considerable kudos, and possibly even make an academic career, if she were to find – and correct – a mistake that has been presented as fact. This is the way science works. It doesn’t and can’t give us an absolute version of the truth, but it can give us as close an approximation of the truth as is possible, given our current knowledge. This is what these climate scientists are doing – trying to hammer out the best estimates of what is going on with the world’s climate and why, through the comparison of various sources of data. This adheres to the scientific principle of repeatability: there is not one single source of evidence backing up current theories of anthropogenic climate change, but hundreds of matching ones. The fact that there are many hundreds of lines of evidence which have gone through this process of robust analysis and peer scrutiny, all of which point in the same direction, gives us the overwhelming consensus that, with our current state of knowledge, the world appears to be experiencing climate change which is being forced beyond natural variability by manmade factors.

The process we see going on in these exchanges is the sometimes difficult, and not always perfect, attempt to compare, match, refine, and exclude sometimes conflicting and anomalous data in order to come up with ever more accurate versions of what’s really going on. And these attempts, designed to be published in academic journals alongside other research findings, build up, over time, into an increasingly detailed and coherent picture of climate change and its causes. Not every research finding is perfect, and some are plain wrong, but it is through the process of making mistakes and comparing results that we gradually get closer to the truth. It would be unusual – in fact it would be irresponsible – if these scientists did not believe their own methodologies to be robust and to stand up for themselves in strong terms. It would also be unexpected if these individuals did not point out what they regard as mistakes, and bad science, in the work of others. We see emails suggesting that certain articles are so flawed that they should not be published in academic journals. It would be strange not to encounter such robust debates among experts in the field. But in science, if an idea is true, and you can prove robustly that it is to your peers in the field, then that idea wins out. It is not possible, ultimately, to hide empirical facts because of these in-built safeguards and the institutional openness of the scientific community as a whole. Individual scientists or teams of researchers can be and often are wrong, but their mistakes will be pointed out, and a better version of the truth always wins, if it is strongly supported by evidence.

The range of discussions we encounter in these emails is exactly what we should expect and hope to see within a lively research community. It proves that there is no conspiracy; the individuals who appear in this correspondence trail represent part of a wider global community, all of whom are having similar debates within their areas of specialisation.

The aggregate sum of all of these discussions, the published research findings which result, and the further discussions and refinements which follow, is what amounts to the overwhelming consensus we have among the world’s leading climate experts about anthropogenic climate change.

The release of the emails is certainly embarrassing and potentially damaging, particularly for the UEA, and more broadly for the public perception of these issues. It’s embarrassing primarily for the reason that working scientists are humans, working in an environment of other people, with all of the allegiances, rivalries, petty grievances and disagreements that entails. And all of their hastily and candidly written, sometimes unprofessional criticism of rivals, and attempts to discredit what they see as “junk” science, have now been exposed to hostile scrutiny, making the researchers in question look, to the unskilled or conspiracy-minded reader, like scheming Machiavellian villains. That’s certainly how the issue has been presented, with the selective use of a few emails among thousands. I struggle to think of a workplace environment which would not include most of the personality factors on show here, and whose aggregate private email correspondence, if openly published, would not reveal unguarded moments which might appear similarly damning. Anyone who has ever worked with colleagues to produce any kind of report, statement or research paper, or faced stringent criticism from rivals, will be familiar with precisely the kind of discussions we see in this trail of confidential emails, written by colleagues working closely together and believing they could speak openly and in private.

George Monbiot is wrong to call for the resignation of Prof. Jones. Yes he looks unprofessional, and certainly the apparent attempts to circumvent the mountainous volume of orchestrated Freedom of Information Act requests from climate sceptics may well have been a mistake, made by a beleaguered individual feeling the pressure of an orchestrated and hostile campaign against his department. But the contents of years of private correspondence has now been released, and the fact is, it does not contain evidence of fabrication of data, concealment of information, or any kind of conspiracy to distort the truth. It does contain unguarded and unprofessional moments, among a mountain of correspondence demonstrating an active community of scientists doing their job with dedication and commitment. A resignation would be taken as an admission that anthropogenic climate change is a fabrication, a conspiracy, when there is simply no evidence of that. Jones’ apparent wish to avoid repeated FOI requests, however spurious, should be the subject of an investigation at UEA, in order to publicly determine whether what was done on this issue was in line with legislation. Certainly though, the leak itself and the smear campaign which has followed has already done its job, which is to undermine public support for the issue of global warming, ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit in December. And unfortunately, Monbiot’s breathless and apologetic response does little to calm this storm in a teacup.

Image: suburbanbloke/flickr

…hate to say I told you so:

Climate change sceptics and fossil fuel companies that have lobbied against action on greenhouse gas emissions have squandered the world’s chance to avoid dangerous global warming, a key adviser to the government has said.

Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the department for environment and rural affairs, said a decade of inaction on climate change meant it was now virtually impossible to limit global temperature rise to 2C. He said the delay meant the world would now do well to stabilise warming between 3C and 4C.

[...]

The British government last month published a map that laid out the stark details of a world warmer by 4C. It showed that the rise would not be evenly spread across the globe, with temperature rises much larger than 4C in high latitudes such as the Arctic. Because the sea warms more slowly, average land temperature will increase by 5.5C, which scientists said would shrink yields for all major cereal crops on all regions of production. A 4C rise would also have a major impact on water availability, with supplies limited to an extra billion people by 2080.

There are times when despair seems totally appropriate, sadly.

I realise that’s not the most cheery of post titles, and I also realise that a lot of what follows won’t be news to most readers of this blog, but given the content of a few news stories this week, I thought it was worth setting out briefly  quite how fucked it looks like we’re going to be very soon.

It was the peak oil stuff earlier this week that sparked this off. That in itself was pretty bad, since it appears a) that we’ve been systematically lied to about how much oil is left, and b) that oil production’s set to begin its long decline in about…well, any time now. Unless it’s already happened. This, as Duncan’s Economic Blog explained a while back, might well screw over the global economy even worse than the banking crisis. Basically, oil prices will rise, so food prices will rise, (because farmers start selling their crops for bio-fuels instead of food – this is what happened when oil prices rose earlier this year). But people will still need food and fuel, so they’ll have less money to spend on everything else, so demand for non-essential consumer goods and services will drop, which means the economy will slow down, leading to job cuts. So that’s the inflationary pressure of energy and food prices, combined with the deflationary pressure of demand dropping for everything else. Of course, since the poorest members of any society are both the most vulnerable to losing their jobs and the ones who always spend the highest proportion of their income on food and energy, they’re going to get the worst of this. And this is the global poor, of course – the poor living in rich nations will probably get at least some assistance; others won’t be so lucky.

But that’s just the economic impact. It’s also pretty likely that wars will break out over what remains of the world’s oil (wars over oil are already kind of an established phenomenon, as you might possibly have noticed). Oh, and of course it’s going to become increasingly difficult to find enough fossil fuels to burn to keep the lights on (along with the life-support machines, the electronic communication systems, the fertiliser factories which make it possible to grow enough food for everyone, and all those other little luxuries). We could switch to renewables and nuclear, of course, but so far we’re not doing so well with that – in a staggering example of joined-up thinking at its finest, the government announced this week that as part of its plan to build new nuclear plants and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, it would be closing and dismantling one of the UK’s oldest windfarms.

Then there’s the small matter of the carbon emissions. As you’ve probably noticed, most people who actually have some expertise on the subject have been saying for some time that it’s pretty important we drastically reduce CO₂ emissions to mitigate the effects of manmade global warming. Yet the graphs of oil production in this article (also linked above) show either a drop in output of about 6% or, if you believe the IEA, an increase of over 30%. So presumably neither the IEA or Professor Aleklett think that its realistic to expect that world oil production will reduce for any reason other than scarcity – that climate change agreements aren’t going to have any impact. And the reduction that Professor Aleklett forecasts still includes a significant proportion of what’s euphemistically referred to as ‘non-conventional oil’ – oil extracted from tar sands or coal, both of which, as George Monbiot pointed out in an interview with Salman on this site, are far more polluting than normal oil production, meaning that carbon emissions could still rise even if overall oil production fell. (I’m not certain that they would, since I don’t know the relative emissions figures for ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ oil production, but it at least seems plausible.) The effects of this, needless to say, won’t be pretty. And they’re being felt already.

What all this information should do, in an ideal world, is make people all the more committed to pressurising our governments to reach a sensible agreement at the Climate talks in Copenhagen, an agreement that’s looking increasingly unlikely. However, a poll in today’s Times shows that only 41% of people in the UK actually believe that manmade climate change is a reality (full details of the poll here). Since most prominent politicians do believe this (though not UKIP or any of the ten biggest Tory bloggers, surprise surprise), it looks like our political elites are actually ahead of the general populace on this one. Which, needless to say, makes the prospect of bringing popular pressure to bear on politicians on this issue pretty bleak. Enjoy your weekend…

Those of you who aren’t feeling quite as pessimistic are strongly recommended to join The Wave anti-climate change demo in London on the 5^th December.

Last month, Guardian journalist and tireless eco activist, George Monbiot, was kind enough to give me half an hour of his time to discuss his dire predictions for the world on the eve of Copenhagen. Understandably, one of the greatest barriers to preventing catestrophic global warming that he identified, was China, which Monbiot described as both the greenest and the dirtiest country on Earth. “Greenest because of its vast investment in alternative energy, but the dirtiest because of its vast investment in coal.” I was very interested, then, to be sent this interview today by Dinah Ruth Gardner from Greenpeace, in which Monbiot elaborates on the China question. Still no sign of that elusive happy news, but he points to a number of potential solutions, including carbon capture and storage, which won’t always sit well with hardened eco warriors. Well worth a read.

I’m a Guardian reader. Middle-class, well educated, long-haired and liberal, I don’t exactly dispel the stereotypes associated with the paper whose readers think they ought to run the country. Nor, as one of those lefty, anti-war, environmentalist types who grew up worrying about the state of the world, should it come as any surprise that the Guardian columnist I’ve always had the most time for is George Monbiot. And with the state of the world looking more worrying than ever, in the midst of an economic crisis and on the verge of an environmental one, it’s only natural that the fifth in my series of interviews for The Third Estate should be with the man who made print journalism and saving the world seem an attractive career path to me. So, on the eve of the most crucial climate change conference the planet has ever seen, as world leaders struggle to implement a strategy to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C, I caught up with the author-activist to ask him for some happy news.

“The chances of preventing a two degrees rise in global temperatures are now pretty slight and diminishing rapidly,” Monbiot says in the way a schoolteacher might tell a naughty child who has just failed all his GCSEs that he has no one to blame but himself. I realise, at this point, that happy news isn’t looking very likely. “It’s partly because of a long period of inaction and denial and delay and obfuscation on the part of the world’s governments,” he tells me. The G8 finally pulled their heads out of the sand earlier this year to agree an 80% emissions cut by 2050. Is this not enough, I ask? “Not only is it not enough, it’s an irrelevant measure,” he says. “What counts is the cumulative emissions in the atmosphere. Simply because it’s so long-lived. We’ve produced so much greenhouse gas, that when you strip away the aerosols, like for instance sulphate pollution, which are shielding us from the full impact of the greenhouse effect, then it looks as if we’re already committed to two degrees of warming.”

So what’s the solution? “We need to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, never mind by 2050. 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. The idea that the G8 nations can carry on producing an absurd amount of carbon and then bring down emissions later and bring down global temperatures later as a result, it simply does not work like that.”

Naturally enough, Monbiot is a supporter of the 10:10 campaign to bring about exactly the kind of cuts he is talking about. But is there a danger that, although the campaign will be grabbing headlines in 2010, it could go the way of Make Poverty History by 2011? “Yes,” he laughs. “Maybe we’ll need an 11:11 campaign the following year. The purpose of it is to shame governments into acting, ideally at Copenhagen, by saying so many people have pledged to make this cut, the only people holding things up are governments.” I can see a glimmer of hope emerging at this point, but Monbiot is quick to dash it. “Ideally we’d see such a good result at Copenhagen that all the following years would be taken care of. As we know, in reality, that’s not what’s going to happen.”

The Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference in December will bring together 183 nations to tackle arguably the most serious issue of our time. But with China and America together producing over 40% of global CO2 emissions, only two countries at the table will really matter. Are they on course to make the necessary commitments? “Of course not,” Monbiot says without a second’s hesitation. “Those countries are holding out against the kind of cuts that are necessary. If you look closely at the Waxman-Markey Bill, which the US hopes to found their cuts on, and which hasn’t even been gutted by the Senate yet, effectively it means that there will be no substantial cuts until 2050. By which time it’s all over. As for China, it’s both the greenest and the dirtiest country on Earth. Greenest because of its vast investment in alternative energy, but the dirtiest because of its vast investment in coal.”

China’s reluctance to implement a radical reduction in carbon emissions stems largely from the belief that it is Western nations that are responsible for the current climate crisis, and that they should not be denied the opportunities Europe and America have long enjoyed. Convincing the developed world to slash their emissions would seem, then, to be only the tip of a very rapidly melting iceberg as the rest of the developing world looks towards growth. I ask Monbiot how one can possibly convince some of the poorest nations on Earth that they cannot afford to follow the model of rapid industrialisation that lifted so many millions in the West out of extreme poverty. “I fully accept that the poorest nations need industrialisation,” Monbiot says. “We have to make it easy for them to do it without the mass pollution which accompanied our industrialisation. That means major investment in alternative energy, which has to be supported by the rich nations.” The best approach to this, Monbiot believes, is outlined by Oliver Tickell in the book Kyoto2. “It’s a sophisticated cap and trade system. 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.”

George Monbiot’s concerns go much further than climate change, however. In his debate with Paul Kingsnorth, who seems to embrace the coming apocalypse of resource depletion and environmental devastation with fatalistic satisfaction, Monbiot says: “for the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so.” But, I ask, does he in all honesty think that there’s still a chance to prevent the societal crisis that many Peak Oil theorists believe will result from the collapse of the resource that almost single-handedly drives the global economy? The answer to that is probably not. “As Robert L. Hirsch noted, you need a run up time of between ten and twenty years to substitute other forms of propulsive energy for the oil that’s running out. And if, as the IEA suggest, we’re looking at oil peaking between 2020 and 2030, we are already almost out of time to address this issue. If we leave it any longer, and no politician seems to be taking it seriously, then we are going to see total economic collapse.”

Monbiot’s hitherto professional optimism has been replaced by a brutal kind of candour. But surely there must be some positives in all of this? Could Peak Oil actually be a crucial driving force in convincing governments to replace fossil fuels with environmentally sustainable sources of energy? In the words of the nodding dog from the Churchill adverts, oh no, no, no! “Some of the measures that Hirsch proposed are even worse than using petroleum,” Monbiot says. “For example, he talks about using oil shale and tar sand and turning coal into liquid fuel, all of which are extremely polluting activities. Instead of addressing Peak Oil in a long-term, measured and environmentally friendly way, we could see governments panic and start exploiting every type of liquid fuel, no matter how destructive and damaging it might be.”

There are few, now, who would disagree that something urgent needs to be done. But worrying about the world is the easy part. It’s much harder to agree on a common solution. Chief amongst the thorny disagreements for even the most ardent of environmentalists, is the issue of nuclear power. In an interview with The Third Estate last week, Caroline Lucas made her opposition quite clear when she told me “nuclear power is hugely costly, and carries major safety and security risks.” I ask George Monbiot, who was once awarded a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement by Nelson Mandela, what his position is now. “I don’t care anymore,” he says with all the blunt urgency the situation warrants. “I just want solutions. And as long as they can be delivered in the right timeframe, and as long as they’re not going to be particularly damaging to other aspects of the ecosystem, or to social justice and human rights, I don’t care what those solutions are. If nuclear power can be used safely, and if waste is disposed of safely, then I no longer have any major objection to it.”

Unsurprisingly, Monbiot has come under fire from leading members of the Green Party for these views, not least from former London mayoral candidate Siân Berry, whose quite bizarre and surprisingly sexist blog post attacked his gender, his age and even his hairstyle, but offered very little explanation as to why she felt he was wrong, aside from the fact he looks like a WW2 fighter pilot. The headline on Monbiot’s damning response in The Guardian read ‘Berry’s nuclear fallout has lost her my vote’. I ask him if that’s really the case. “I was being flippant about that,” he says. “I did think it was a ridiculous post.” I laugh and can’t help agreeing with my interviewee. It was actually incredibly silly. “I don’t think I actually said that I wouldn’t vote Green anymore,” he points out. “The headline suggested that, but it’s not actually my position.” That said, Monbiot tells me that he has finally found his spiritual home. “It’s Plaid Cymru,” he says. “I went to their conference this month and I was absolutely delighted by the positions they were taking on just about every issue and I felt that these were extremely sensible, switched on kinds of people who were trying to put into place many of the issues that I feel most concerned about.” Monbiot briefly supported Respect in 2004 in the hope that they could “forge a genuine red-green alliance.” When that turned out not to be possible, he pulled out. Now he says, “I have finally found the party that I feel very comfortable with. That’s not to say I feel uncomfortable with the Green Party, on the whole I support it, but I feel even more comfortable with Plaid.”

If there’s one person Monbiot definitely won’t be voting for, however, it’s Gordon Brown. In an article earlier this month, Monbiot argued that Brown’s failure to regulate the banks at the G20 meant that no one this side of the Atlantic now bears as much responsibility for ensuring that the economic crisis can be repeated than the Prime Minister. But surely crises are inherent to capitalism anyway, and the idea of boom without bust was a delusion from the start? “Yes,” Monbiot agrees, “I believe that’s true. And I believe it’s the job of government to defend us from the predations of capitalism. And the government has singularly failed to do that. Government exists to defend its citizens from all sorts of threats, including the greed and ruthlessness of capitalists. Instead of doing that, it has encouraged the risk-taking that has thrown so many people out of work.” Monbiot believes that government has a choice. If they’re going to sustain the capitalist system, rather than any other kind of economy, then they have to regulate it in the interests of their citizens. “They’ve consistently failed to do this. In fact they have argued again and again for deregulation, even as the impact of this is plain for everyone to see.”

"Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body"

Monbiot ends his article with the question: ‘why was Brown permitted to remain in power?’ But does he believe there’s anyone in the Labour Party who could successfully replace him before the next general election? “I think the problem is that all the feisty people in the Labour Party have been purged,” he says. “Through the selection of MPs, preventing any interesting and independent minded people from entering Parliament, and through the gradual freezing out of the older MPs, Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body.” Monbiot’s voice never once betrays a hint of anger, but listening to him deconstruct the failings of a party that once called itself progressive, it’s not hard to picture the moment last year when he attempted a citizen’s arrest on the arch neo-con John Bolton. “There are no more Robin Hoods in the Labour Party,” he says. “Or rather those that are left, like Alan Simpson, are about to leave Parliament. The party has been so comprehensively purged that there are no means by which it can be renewed.”

Labour will be due another purge in next year’s general election. And with a Conservative government looking pretty close to a certainty, I ask Monbiot if things are likely to be markedly different. “A Tory government is going to be a disaster for Britain,” he replies. “It’s going to be disastrous for the poor, for the environment, for foreign policy, and it’s going to be just the same, in almost all respects, as a Labour government. In other words, the current disaster continued.” Monbiot’s distaste for the Conservatives could not be clearer. But could he ever see himself voting Labour to stop them getting in? “No,” he says. “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Naturally, that begs the question, what is the alternative? With so much public hostility directed towards the bankers and the financial institutions that brought about the current crisis in capitalism, and following one of the greatest mass movements in history taking to the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq, why, I ask Monbiot, is the left weaker than ever before? “I don’t know,” he says quite honestly. Then he laughs. “It’s interesting that you ask this, because it’s exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it at the moment. I think part of the problem is that we have nowhere to turn. The Labour Party was the focus of left-wing opposition when the Tories were in power, but it is as unconcerned about the issues as the Tories are now. I think also, we have been lulled and lulled in a constant void of television and celebrity and events that are peripheral to our lives, which seem to take centre place. And I think we have forgotten the lessons of history. But beyond that, I’m not sure what’s going on and I intend to try and find out.”

It is, perhaps, symptomatic of our confusing post-modern condition that even George Monbiot – Guardian columnist, bestselling author, hardened activist and forty something alpha male with a WW2 fighter pilot’s haircut – has no answer.

I ask him for some happy news.

But he just smiles and turns away.

www.monbiot.com