The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has ordered the construction of thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories in what will be widely interpreted as retaliation for the United Nations vote to recognise a Palestinian state on Thursday.

Israeli officials said the construction would expand existing West Bank settlements and build more homes for Jews in occupied east Jerusalem, where the government is attempting to diminish the proportion of Arab residents. Netanyahu also ordered the speeding up of planning to link Jerusalem with a Jewish settlement, Ma’aleh Adumim, in a move that would cut deep into a future Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. The US and Europe have long asked the Israeli government not to build there.

The announcement is a reflection of Israel‘s anger at the vote, and the Palestinian leadership at pushing for it. The Israeli move drew strong criticism from Europe. “If Israel confirms these decisions officially, then it is an exercise in the most cynical, self-obsessed and self destructive policy-making imaginable,” said one European diplomat.

He also condemned the timing, just as the Jewish sabbath began and the government shut down so that it could not be reached, as “a breathtakingly brazen attempt to dodge the bullet of international condemnation … All in all, outrageous,” he said.

Israel condemned the UN’s recognition of a Palestinian state as damaging to peace while also, more privately, expressing concern about how many European countries backed the move.

Palestinian officials were mixed in their reactions, saying that if UN recognition is not used to renew the dormant peace process it will lead to more violence. Hamas described the vote in New York as a victory for armed resistance.

The Israeli government worked hard to portray the UN decision to recognise a Palestinian state as undermining peace. The prime minister’s spokesman, Mark Regev, described the move as “negative political theatre because it takes us out of a negotiating process”. Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, told the BBC that the Palestinian move was a “massive violation” of the Oslo peace accords.

He said that if the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, attempted to use the new status to declare an independent state then Israel would have to act and may go so far as “annexing territory”.

But other Israeli officials sought to downplay the vote, saying it was symbolic and did not require action unless the Palestinians also acceded to the international criminal court (ICC), among other possibilities.

The Palestinian leadership rejected pressure from the US and Britain to renounce its new right to go to the ICC, but has said it is not likely to accede immediately. Instead, Abbas sees the issue as a card that can be played in negotiations, particularly over the issue of Jewish settlements – which some international lawyers believe are a breach of the Geneva convention that prevents “belligerent nations” from moving their nationals to live on occupied territories.

Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, warned in Washington that if the UN vote is not used to renew the dormant peace process, it will strengthen armed groups such as Hamas. “What we can all do is to see how we can take advantage of what happened, to enhance the political process. I hope more will begin to see things this way. Let’s get together and have a serious discussion on whether things in the past few years proceeded the way they should have proceeded. We demonstrated [that] we Palestinians can govern ourselves in an effective way,” he said.

The Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, said that the UN vote was in parallel with what many Palestinians see as a victory over Israel in Gaza earlier this month. He told Reuters that armed struggle was necessary in conjunction with diplomacy.

“Negotiating without powerful cards on the ground has no meaning,” said Meshaal. “It will turn into begging. This enemy doesn’t give anything unless under pressure.”

But the fact that Israel won the support of just nine countries, including the US, at the UN has caused a degree of alarm inside the Jewish state.

Israeli officials were shocked at the scale of European support for the Palestinian resolution, with France switching sides and Germany abandoning a pledge to vote against. Among EU nations, only the Czech Republic supported Israel.

For months, Israeli diplomats worked to persuade EU governments to, at the least, abstain in the hope that the Jewish state would be able to deride a Palestinian victory as delivered by less than democratic regimes.

Israel’s position was supported by the EU’s foreign affairs representative, Catherine Ashton, and Tony Blair, envoy for the Quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN, which is attempting to kick-start peace talks.

But the fighting in Gaza, fears about strengthening Hamas by not supporting a high profile diplomatic move, and the extreme position taken by Israel, particularly its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who threatened to overthrow Abbas, pushed many countries toward the Palestinian position.

Israel regards France has having led the charge after President François Hollande abandoned his opposition to the Palestinian UN bid.

Britain abstained and was isolated enough to feel it had to justify its position by saying it would have supported the resolution if the Palestinians had renounced the right to accede to the ICC and had agreed to immediately renew peace negotiations.

The Israelis were particularly stung by the German decision to shift from opposition to abstention. Haaretz reported that Germany moved because of Israeli intransigence on Jewish settlement construction and because Israel had not met previous commitments to the German government. The paper said senior Israeli foreign ministry officials were “shocked” by Berlin’s decision.

In Washington, a state department spokesman criticised the move. “We reiterate our longstanding opposition to settlements and East Jerusalem construction,” he said. “We believe it is counterproductive and makes it harder to resume direct negotiations and achieve a two-state outcome.”

The annual United Nations climate summit has convened, this year in Doha, the capital of the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, on the Arabian Peninsula. Dubbed “COP 18”, an army of bureaucrats, business people and environmentalists are gathered – ostensibly, to limit global greenhouse-gas emissions to a level that scientists say will contain the global temperature rise to 2ºC (3.8ºF), and perhaps stave off global climate catastrophe.

If past meetings are any indication, national self-interest on the part of the world’s largest polluters, paramount among them the United States, will trump global consensus.

“We want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” President Barack Obama proclaimed in his victory speech on 6 November this year, just over a week after superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and much of New Jersey, killing more than 100 people. These are fine aspirations.

The problem is, action is needed now to avert the very scenario that President Obama has said he wants to avoid. The United States, which remains the greatest polluter in world history, stands as one of the biggest impediments to a rational global program to stem global warming.

Latest findings suggest that the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2ºC may now be beyond reach, and that we may now be locked into a 4-6ºC temperature increase.

“The only way to avoid the pessimistic scenarios will be radical transformations in the way the global economy currently functions: rapid uptake of renewable energy, sharp falls in fossil fuel use or massive deployment of CCS [carbon capture and storage], removal of industrial emissions and halting deforestation.”

These are not the words of some wild-eyed environmental activist, but from business advisers at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) in their November 2012 Low Carbon Economy Index. The PwC advisers concur in many regards with a consortium of environmentalists who issued an open letter as COP 18 convened.

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey and Ambassador Pablo Solon, who formerly led climate negotiations for Bolivia, said in their letter to the COP 18 negotiators:

“If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground … That’s not ‘environmentalist math’ or some radical interpretation – that’s from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. It means that – without dramatic global action to change our path – the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt – absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb, creating a chain reaction of climate-related natural disasters.”

The World Meteorological Organization released preliminary findings for 2012 (pdf), highlighting extremes of drought, heatwaves, floods, and snow and extreme cold, as well as above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin for the third consecutive year.

Also speaking at the COP 18’s opening was Dr RK Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprising more than 1,800 scientists from around the globe, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. In sober, scientific language (pdf), Dr Pachauri, pointed out potential catastrophes unless action is taken, among them:

“By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people [in Africa] are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change … As global average temperature increase exceeds 3.5ºC, model projections suggest significant extinctions ranging from 40% to 70% of species assessed around the globe.”

President Obama loudly advocates for doing away with subsidies to the oil and gas corporations, but, as pointed out by Oil Change International, Greenpeace and other groups, he is “supporting skyrocketing export subsidies for dirty fossil fuels through the United States Export-Import Bank”, with at least $10.2bn in public financing for fossil-fuel projects in 2012 alone, dwarfing the $2.3bn the State Department claims it has disbursed to developing countries to combat climate change.

Outside the air-conditioned plenary halls and corridors of the UN climate summit in Doha, in the emirate of Qatar – which, ironically, is the nation with the highest per capita carbon emissions of any nation on the planet – there will be protests. The newly-formed Arab Youth Climate Movement, hundreds of grassroots activists from across the region, including many involved in the Arab Spring, are marching, calling for their nations to take the lead in reducing emissions.

The Arab Spring activists toppled dictators, but can they move the fossil-fuel corporations? With a growing global movement intent on doing just that, prepare for a hot summer, in more ways than one.

• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column

© 2012 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate

Will our short attention span be the end of us? Just a month after the second “storm of a century” in two years, the media moves on to the latest scandal with barely a retrospective glance at the implications of the extreme climate anomalies we have seen.

Hurricane Sandy was not just a storm. It was a stark illustration of the power that climate change can deliver – today – to our doorsteps.

Ask the homeowners along the New Jersey and New York shores still homeless. Ask the local governments struggling weeks later to turn on power to their cold, darkened towns and cities. Ask the entire north-east coast, reeling from a catastrophe whose cost is estimated at $50bn and rising. (I am not brave enough to ask those who’ve lost husbands or wives, children or grandparents).

I bring up these facts sadly, as one who has urged us to heed the scientific evidence on climate change for the past 25 years. The science is clear: climate change is here, now.

Superstorm Sandy is not the first storm, and certainly won’t be the last. Still, it is hard for us as individual human beings to connect the dots. That’s where observation, data and scientific analysis help us see.

No credible scientist disputes that we have warmed our climate by almost 1.5C over land areas in the past century, most of that in the past 30 years.

As my colleagues and I demonstrated in a peer-reviewed study published this summer, climate extremes are already occurring much more frequently in the world we have warmed through our reliance on fossil fuels.

Our analysis showed that extreme summer heat anomalies used to be infrequent: covering only 0.1-0.2% of the globe in any given summer during the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. During the past decade, as the average global temperature rose, such extremes have covered 10% of the land.

Extreme temperatures deliver more than heat.

The water cycle is especially sensitive to rising temperatures. Increased heat speeds up evaporation, causing more extreme droughts, like the $5bn (and counting) drought in Texas and Oklahoma. It is linked to an expanding wildfire season and an increase by several fold in the frequency of large fires in the American west.

The heat also leads to more extreme sea surface temperatures – a key culprit behind Sandy’s devastating force. The latent heat in atmospheric water vapour is the fuel that powers tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. Stepping up evaporation with warmer temperatures is like stepping on the gas: More energy-rich vapour condenses into water drops, releasing more latent heat as it does so, causing more powerful storms, increased rainfall and more extreme flooding. This is not a matter of belief. This is high-school science class.

The chances of getting a late October hurricane in New York without the help of global warming are extremely small. In that sense, you can blame Sandy on global warming. Sandy was the strongest recorded storm, measured by barometric pressure, to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, eclipsing the hurricane of 1938.

But this fixation on determining the blame for a particular storm, or disputing the causal link between climate change and this or that storm, is misguided.

A better path forward means listening to the growing chorus – Sandy, extreme droughts and wildfires, intense rainstorms, record-breaking melting of Arctic sea ice – and taking action. Think of it like taking out an insurance policy for the planet.

We can fix this. The answer is a price on carbon. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest, reflecting their cost to society including the economic devastation wrought by storms like Sandy, the toll on farmland and ecosystems, as well as priceless human lives.

Whether that price takes the shape of a carbon tax, as some in Washington are now willing to discuss, or a carbon fee, as I have advocated, a price on carbon lets the market find the most effective ways to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. It also moves us to a sustainable energy future where energy choices are made by individuals and communities, not by Washington mandates and lobbyists.

A carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, will increase consumer costs. So the money that is collected should be distributed to the public. As people try to minimise their energy costs to keep money for other things, their actions will stimulate the economy, drive innovations and transition us away from fossil fuels.

If we make our demand for action clear enough, I am optimistic that our leaders in Washington can look beyond the short-term challenges of today to see the looming, long-term threats ahead, and the answer that is right in front of them. We can’t simply allow the next news cycle to distract us from the real task ahead.

Back in the 1980s, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to make clear the difference between natural variability and climate-change driven extremes. As I predicted, the climate dice in the 21st century are now “loaded”. It’s not just bad luck Sandy pummelled America’s coasts, extreme drought devastated its midlands and wildfires scorched its mountains.

We loaded the dice. We changed our climate.

• James E Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

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