WDC Blog - From the Front Line

As is traditional at this time of year, the air is stirred by a gentle ringing of bells. But it is not the bells on a sleigh.

The Year, now ancient, her mind increasingly filled with holes, is ringing the bells by her bed summoning the Nurse. She doesn’t want anything except some company in her final days, and perhaps some reassurance.

She asks the question that she has forgotten that she has already asked many times before.

‘Was I kind?’

‘You were neither kind nor unkind’ says the Nurse gently, stroking her hand.

‘Will the people remember me? I would like to be remembered.’

‘Oh yes’, says the nurse, ‘You will certainly be remembered. You were the year when a great global recession lingered; you were the year when nations recognised that they were cooking the planet but failed to agree how to turn the heat down. You were the year when war, famine, weird weather and ignorance dominated global business. You marked the end of the first decade of the twenty first century. You were indeed an important and most memorable year.’

‘But I do not sound kind’, says the Year weakly turning her face away from the nurse, silent tears falling.

‘It’s not your fault dear old Year. It’s the people.’

‘What about the animals? Was I kind to the animals? I like the animals.’

‘Well’, the nurse pauses, and takes a deep breath, ‘Your passage saw a growing awareness by the people of animals as unique, valued, often sentient beings… as intelligences unlike their own, but still to be respected and cherished.’

The Nurse gently combs the grey tresses of the rapidly aging Year and smiles sweetly into her old rheumy eyes. He does not vocalise his own thoughts that, despite this awareness in some parts, cruelty continued to abound and people were more distracted than ever by their own immediate concerns. Nor does he mention that as conditions on the planet get more difficult, so he anticipates that the people will focus more and more on themselves and the animals will be increasingly forgotten.

But the Year has been reassured. ‘That’s good’, she gently sighs and then suddenly dozes. The Nurse tiptoes away until he will be summoned again to answer similar questions.

Soon it will be time to gently apply the medical sickle and the Year will pass.

Soon the jingling bells will be silent.

Soon, the Nurse will attend the urgent cries of the Baby, when little Twenty Ten arrives; a new year, even a new decade, full of promise and full of hope for all the denizens of the stressed planet.

The nurse knows that 2010 will keep him busy. There will be more people alive than at any previous time. Where the systems break down; the resources prove inadequate; or the planet rages in fever, then the merciful sickle will fall and the Nurse will take the fallen away. Where habitats and ecosystems fail he will do the same for the animals. So it is that some people, some populations, and even some whole species and will end before their potential span. But there is yet hope. A whole new year and a new decade to come that could mark a new beginning as novel rays of understanding and appreciation start to shine into the dark recesses of human minds. If humankind works together and applies its ingenious minds, things can still be resolved for the better.

The nurse stares into the void ‘Think people!’ he calls. ‘Think hard; understand and apply yourselves to your urgent responsibilities.’  Otherwise, in twelve short months, the Nurse will again find himself embellishing the truth for another dying year, and for all his kindness, he does not like to lie.  

Of all the post Copenhagen wraps up, George Monbiot pretty much sums up my feelings about the outcomes of the Copenhagen meeting, but others also remind me that there is still some hope.

Unlike many, I am not so worried not to have achieved the much sought ‘legally binding agreement’ at this meeting. It’s a lot to secure from so many Governments in such a short space of time.

I am a fan of global process. I am believer in the power and purpose of civil society. I am confident that the UN holds an important role in our future (when it overcomes the bureaucratic problems of the present). And, I know that when Governments want to, and the right negotiators are in the room, they can fundamentally change the way the world is structured.

“It is not fiction it is science… the question… is no longer the nature of the challenge the question is our capacity to meet it….[but] our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now.”

With these words, US President Barack Obama, today called for urgent action at the Copenhagen climate summit to agree a deal on its last day.

However it appears that what is now being discussed has been stripped of any targets. Because countries simply cannot agree, simply cannot find that middle ground and we may well be left with just a wish list.

Two years ago they committed to making a new and binding agreement, now commentators suggest that the battle is on just to have some sort of paper agreement to take home.

It seems unlikely that there can now be a legally-binding treaty complete with verifiable emission and temperature targets or even a deadline to agree such a thing.

It seems that our species is just not us to this job any more than the dinosaurs were able to adapt to the global changes that ultimately wiped them out.

More information: BBC News/BBC Blog

Why do species go extinct? Many have gone extinct because they could not adapt quickly enough to changes in their environment. (Recently, we have helped many on their way.)

The big question for our species – the most adaptable species planet Earth has ever seen - is can we adapt quickly enough to address the global-scale damage we have done to our atmosphere. The latest reports from the Copenhagen conference on climate change now indicate that we probably cannot because no deal is going to be sealed there!

Many state leaders are now present. Many celebrities are also in town (Gordon Brown, Boris Johnson, Arnold Swartzeneger and many others and tomorrow Mr Obama arrives for the final day). Many non-governmental bodies are also there. Many are there without a hope of getting into the conference but they obviously feel they should be represented.

Outside the conference center there are reports that protestors are being treated very robustly by the security forces and delegates are even having problems getting into the conference itself.

Inside there is also conflict and an impasse, and people are starting to talk about another year of negotiations being needed.

Ed Miliband, the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary who is leading the negotiations for the UK, said last night that the current position was very dangerous and if the talks failed that ‘people all over the world will be furious and they will be right to be furious’.

There is a lot of confusion about where the problems are. Many commentators are saying that they simply do not know what is going on. This may be one of the perils of having such a large conference with so many people involved.

One particular sticking point, however, is reported to be an objection from the developing countries based on the notion that the existing treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, will be done away with.

Britain had apparently agreed last night at the talks with Australia, France, Japan, Norway and the US to start a major new fund for the purpose of stopping and eventually reversing deforestation in developing countries, as long as there is "an ambitious and comprehensive" outcome in Copenhagen.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said "Unless action is taken, these forests could be lost forever, impacting not only the global climate but on the livelihoods of 90 per cent of the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty who rely on forest resources for their survival.”

Sources: The Independent  and BBC Environment Blog

Many websites are bringing blow-by-blow news from the climate conference in Copenhagen. For example the regular updates by the BBC's respected enviornmental correspondant Richard Black's can be found here

We can only stand back and wait as the clock ticks down on an issue that many believe relates directly to the survival of our own species as well as so many others.

Meanwhile we can see unusual alligencies forming as various actors try to make a positive impact on the negotiations. Perhaps the most dramatic of these is the one common editorial published by 56 newspapers in 45 countries in 20 different languages. This is unprecedented. The article starts likes this:

"Unless we combine to take decisive action, climte change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted."

And it end with these words:

"The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice."

You can find the full article here.

Just before Ebenezer Scrooge is left by the jovial Ghost of Christmas Present, he notices that the spirit had something hidden in the skirts of his festive robe. Perhaps unwisely he asks what it is and the ghost moves his robe to reveal two child-like but nonetheless fiendish figures. He names the girl as ‘Want’ and the boy ‘Ignorance’.

‘Are they yours?’ says Scrooge but the ghost replies ‘They are man’s!’

‘A Christmas Carole’ is Charles Dicken’s fantasy morality tale and Scrooge is given a chance to redeem himself. He becomes a better man and Tiny Tim, the crippled son of his long suffering clerk, Bob Crachit, is also given a reprieve. He will live, thanks to the new generosity of the reformed miser.

'Man', as Dicken’s called us (or humankind as we might prefer now), is at a cross roads. We can let Ignorance and Want continue to guide us (and perhaps ‘Greed’ would be a better modern word for Want), or we can wake-up to the seriousness and stupidity of our current situation and act. The time-line is brief. In fact, the wake-up and the action need to come this very next week and Copenhagen – the United Nations 15^th Climate Change Conference – is the place.

As the media goes into frenzy over this crucial meeting of the world’s nations, there will be many confusing and conflicting reports of both the issue and the meeting. As I write, the news in the UK is already dominated by a story that some scientists have allegedly misrepresented some of the key evidence about climate change. This will add wind to the argument preferred by many that human-driven climate change is neither true nor dangerous (despite all the evidence to the contrary).

To be frank I much prefer this argument too. It makes me feel a lot happier. It let’s me hope that all I hold dear, my family and friends, the whales, the dolphins, and much more besides, is going to be fine.

Sadly it is not true. And this story of misuse of evidence may even obscure what will happen in Copehagen.

I have followed the climate change issue for many years. I first wrote about the threat of climate change to cetaceans when we were still dealing in broad theories. However, I felt then that the risk for them (and us) then was too great to continue in our 'kamikaze mission’ to over-exploit the world’s resources, irrationally expand our populations, and pump climate-changing gases into the atmosphere. But I also thought at that time (some twenty years ago) that this was a slow process. I thought it was going to be more a threat to future generations. The news, however, is that things are happening fast; more than swiftly enough to threaten the current human generations as well as those yet to come.

I have no doubt that climate is changing. No doubt that we are to blame and no doubt that this is the most serious threat to all living things. Not everything is perfectly worked out yet, no one is saying this (although predictive powers are improving) and please don’t be confused with descriptions of previous periods of global warming and cooling. That’s all true, but what we are now facing is unprecedented. (This is rather like the argument that species have always gone extinct in the past and it is a perfectly natural process; also true but again the current rate of extinctions is outside any natural range and it too is human-driven.)

Dickens was a kind man. He gave the eponymous miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, a second chance and, in this fine fiction, the old man understood and acted. We are in that same position but this is no fiction. Some suggest we need to stabilize climate gases by 2015 – only five years away - and this will clearly require a major re-think in the way that we all live. The emissions of climate changing gases have to be reduced not just by a few percent, they have to be radically curtailed and this is going to cause real pain in the developed nations.

The signs for the Copehagen meeting are not good. It seems unlikely that the major polluters will agree to something that significantly handicaps their economies. However the US is now taking part at the highest level and that’s an enormous change of approach from their position in recent years.

WDCS will not be at the meeting in Copenhagen, but we will be watching closely like many others. We know how big meetings works and we will be willing the negotiators to make real progress; and willing our species to renounce the Ignorance and Greed that we have been shackled to for too long. If you want to read more about the issue click here. The Copenhagen conference also has its own website here.

Mark Simmonds, WDCS International Director of Science

What an amazing week it has been in Australian politics. Poised as we were for pre-Copenhagen Emissions Trading legislation to be passed, a leadership spill in the opposition Liberal Party (centre-right) and their subsequent radical and swift retreat from climate change policy caused the second defeat of the legislation in the Senate, and a trigger for the Government to call a double dissolution election. Mere hours ago, the Government announced that it will bring the legislation back for a third attempt in February, but this will be after the Copenhagen meeting.