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Category: General news

Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • Copenhagen : the sound of silence

     

    For months the Danish government has been preparing to silence the critics – even approving new police powers to clamp down on protest. Last month we wrote to express our concern that these powers could easily be used to prevent those without a voice at the summit expressing themselves. The Danish government responded that “the new [police powers] will in no way affect peaceful demonstrators”.

    The sight of 1,000 activists being held in freezing temperatures without basic rights for many hours clearly exposes the Danish authorities’ argument. So do reports of pepper spray being used on protesters held in cages, the constant raids on meetings and sleeping quarters, the arrest of a civil society spokesperson on the eve of yesterday’s demonstration and the many more stories of serious infringements of civil liberties.

    Time and again, we have seen that those incarcerated in unacceptable conditions were actually peaceful protesters – or even bystanders, in some cases. A member of our own staff taking pictures of a demonstration inquired what law he was being challenged under and was told: “It doesn’t matter, you have no rights, you must do what I say or you will be arrested.” The purpose, it seems is not directed at the threat of vandalism or violence but at protest per se.

    This reflects exactly what is happening inside the conference centre, where criticism or alternative voices have been ignored and are now being silenced. Developing countries have felt so marginalised by a process clearly under the control of rich countries that they staged a walk-out on Tuesday. The same day the Danish prime minister Rasmussen sought to impose an agreement from above, killing off the legitimate negotiations and the binding Kyoto agreements. Rich countries have been trying to wriggle out of their emission reduction commitments throughout Copenhagen, and developing countries are right to resist.

    Today, many developing countries are leaving the centre again to join protesters outside. Also today, civil society organisations including Friends of the Earth, Avaaz and Tck Tck Tck have been thrown out of the conference. Incredibly, delegates and media have been told they will lose their accreditation if they talk to these banned NGOs. No credible justification has been given for this behaviour.

    But the real reason is simple – civil society groups ensure that the interests of ordinary people and the planet are not trampled on; at least not in silence. They have few resources to offer in comparison with the power of the corporate lobbyists inside the summit, many of whom will make a fortune if the free market “solutions” to climate change that they are advocating are to go ahead. Together with developing governments and protesters on the streets, civil society organisations are standing up against such deals, and making clear that only a radical, just solution will get us out of this mess.

    Attempts to stop the voices of the protesters do not only ride roughshod over Denmark’s reputation for upholding civil liberties, they also threaten to foist an unjust and ineffective climate deal on the world. The lives and livelihoods of millions of people across the world are at stake. They have a right to be heard. Silencing them is a crime of unimaginable proportions.

  • Friends of the earth among acivists barred from Copenhagen conference centre .

     

     

    The Bella Centre is the focal point for climate activists who are aiming to invade the summit today. Around the city, some 150 arrests have been made this morning as part of an intensification of security to keep the lid on actions in the conference centre as the first of 115 world leaders arrives in Copenhagen amid the major protests.

     

    In a separate development, hundreds of non-government groups are to be individually banned from the centre or have their numbers slashed from tomorrow to make way for world leaders. Only 1,000 people from civil society will be allowed in to the conference hall tomorrow, and 90 on Friday.

     

    This has provoked dismay with many delegates seeing it as a deliberate attempt to muzzle public voices and criticism of world leaders.

     

    Andy Atkins, director of Friends of the Earth said, “We understand there has been unhappiness at some of the actions inside, but no formal explanation has been given. It is completely out of order. People are outraged at what is going on. Big mainstream organisations are being muzzled. This is madness”.

     

    Around 50 members of the group staged a sit-in at the inner lobby of the Bella centre. Friends of the Earth international is the largest international environmental federation in the world with groups in more than 70 countries.

     

    Tck Tck Tck is a global alliance of environment, development, church and human rights groups , Avaaz is a web based pressure group which has organised thousands of climate meetings around the world. Together they cliam to represent more than 10m people.

     

    “So many people are being excluded. The process is farcical. Civil society is being shut up, developing countries are being shut up, critical voices are being shut up,” said Nicola Bullard, working with Focus on The Global South, a member of the climate justice movement.

     

    “There’s a lot of frustration among civil society that we are not moving quickly enough. There are obstructionist tactics. There are debates and arguments. As civil society we feel that they don’t care,” said Tom Goldtooth, a Bolivian with the Indigeous Environmental Network. “We feel they are negotiating for the sake of corporations instead of for the betterment of the people of the world.”

     

     

  • How climate change sceptic Ian Plimer dodges valid criticism

     

    The new Australian opposition leader, Tony Abbott, was converted to the sceptic cause by reading the book, or so Plimer says. And the backbench Tory MP Douglas Carswell said it overturned his belief that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon.

    But it has also come in for stinging criticism from scientists and others. Bob Ward, director of public relations and policy at Lord Nicholas Stern’s Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics said the book is “full of inaccurate statements and misrepresentations of global temperature data”.

    Plimer has refused to answer a series of questions put by George Monbiot about specific claims he makes in the book, but our interview gave me the opportunity to put some of those – and others’ questions – to him.

    I found him to be one of the most difficult and evasive interviewees I have spoken to in my career, frequently veering off on tangents rather than answering the question I had put.

    Strangely, Plimer was only vaguely aware of the criticisms that have been levelled at Heaven and Earth and appeared to have little interest in dealing with them. He gave me the impression that engaging with his critics was beneath him. That seemed to me an odd attitude for a scientist to take. He did say though that when he returned home from promoting the book he planned to write a less technical follow-up to Heaven and Earth that would address some of the criticisms.

    The first figure in Heaven and Earth makes a bold claim:

     

    This diagram shows that the hypothesis that human emissions of CO2 create global warming is invalid.

     

    It is a graph running from 1990 to 2025 and shows five different plots of global temperature. One of these plots is the so-called HadCRUT temperature series produced by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

    Plimer’s first mistake is to refer to this plot as a “computer prediction” of temperature when this is in fact the measured global average temperature. But more significantly, the final point on his graph is a long way from where it should be. The figure for 2008 is placed much lower than the correct figure (at 0.1C above the 1961-1990 average instead of 0.437). That might not sound like much, but it wrongly gives the impression there has been a massive recent cooling – something Plimer says the climate modellers have not predicted.

    His broader point appears to be that if climate models cannot predict warming over the course of a decade, what hope do they have of getting the forecast right for 2050 and beyond? Leaving aside the misplaced data point, Plimer appears to have misunderstood what climate models can and can’t do. It may seem paradoxical, but predicting the year-by-year fluctuations in global temperature is actually a lot harder than predicting the general trend. No one who understands climate modelling would expect a perfect fit on such a short timescale.

    “His premise that the models do not represent the [real data] is flawed,” said a spokesperson for the Met Office. “The models never claim to predict the individual variability from year to year. However, they do clearly show the trend over longer periods of time.”

    Elsewhere in the book, Plimer appears to have conflated a US temperature record and the global average temperature. On page 99 he writes “Nasa now states that […] the warmest year was 1934.” The Nasa dataset he is referring to covers the US only but he seems to be referring to the world average.

    Again, Plimer does not appear to accept that the world is warming. But in fact, the hottest year on record is 1998 and eight of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have occurred this century.

    When I put the mistake to him he responded: “The 1930s in North America and probably the rest of the world were a hot period of time.” But what about increased global average temperature since then? “That has been disputed by many of my colleagues who I have a great regard for because they’ve been the people involved in putting measurements together … I do dispute that as do many other people who are far more qualified in atmospheric sciences than I.”

    He appears to be taking the bizarre position that the world has not warmed since the 1930s. Even global warming critic Lord Nigel Lawson doesn’t say silly things like that.

    Now Plimer is not a climate scientist so you can perhaps forgive his glaring errors when writing about that field, but one thing he might hope to get right would be his own field of geology. Sadly not.

    On page 413 of the book he repeats the old canard that “Volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world’s cars and industries combined”. It was a claim that he famously made in a recent interview by Justin Webb on the BBC’s Today programme. Webb did not challenge him, but I put it to Plimer that the website of the US Geological Survey (USGS) states: “Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes.“

    Plimer’s response was that the USGS is only talking about terrestrial volcanoes and has not incorporated CO2 produced by undersea eruptions at mid-ocean ridges. “85% of the world’s volcanoes we neither see nor measure,” he said. “They leak out huge amounts of carbon dioxide… That does not come into the USGS figures nor does it come into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s figures.”

    If he is right, that is an astonishing omission and an oversight that would force a huge reassessment of climate science.

    But when I check with the USGS they are very explicit. According to volcanologist Dr Terrence Gerlach:

     

    I can confirm to you that the “130 times” figure on the USGS website is an estimate that includes all volcanoes – submarine as well as subaerial … Geoscientists have two methods for estimating the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges. There were estimates for the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges before there were estimates for the global output of subaerial volcanoes.

     

    These are just three of the many criticisms that have been made about Heaven and Earth. Plimer dismissed them as “pathetic nit-picking” but if his book is influencing politicians and public opinion around the world then I think his arguments deserve close scrutiny.

    He likes to argue that his position on global warming is dismissed by mainstream scientists because they are part of a “fundamentalist religion” and a “mafia”. In fact, his arguments are rejected because they are just plain wrong.

  • Our voice needs to be heard at Copenhagen

     

    If Copenhagen achieves nothing, the resulting delay to securing these vital agreements will be a terrible sentence for all human beings and the planet. The earth is a unique global ecosystem in which everything is interrelated. Today, misery afflicts many peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Tomorrow other countries will face extinction too.

    Innocent Hodzongi Programmes director, Environment Africa, Zimbabwe

    Lloyd Simwaka Progressio country director, Malawi

    José Ramon Avila Director of the National Association of NGOs, Honduras

     

    António Pacheco Director, Social and Economic Development Association of Santa Marta, El Salvador

    María Elena Salas Dias Director, Cajamarca Ideas Centre, Peru

    Dinorah Granadeiro Executive director, NGO Forum, Timor-Leste

    Victor Ochoa President, Campamento Environmental Movement, Honduras

    Dr Angel Ibarra Director, Salvadorian Ecological Union, El Salvador

    Ego Lemos Founding director, Permaculture Timor-Leste, East Timor

    María Elena Mendez Director, Centre for Women’s Studies, Honduras

    Anna Zucchetti Director, GEA Group, Peru

    Kevin Ndemera Progressio Country Director, Zimbabwe

    Antonio Gaybor Executive secretary, National Water Resources Forum, Ecuador

    Manuel Ernesto Cruz Director, Youth Development Foundation, El Salvador

    Deometrio do Amaral Executive director, Haburas Foundation, Timor-Leste

    Carmen Medina Progressio country ­ director, El Salvador

    Larry José Madrigal Rajo General co-ordinator, Bartolomé de las Casas Centre, El Salvador

    Dulce Marlen Contreras Co-ordinator of Rural Women’s Association of La Paz, Honduras

    Luís Camacho Progressio country director, Ecuador

    Lidia Castillo Director, Centre for the Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights, El Salvador

    Roque Rivera Executive director, Popol Nah Tun, Honduras

    Jesús Garza Co-ordinator of the Honduran Coalition for People’s Action, Honduras

    Marianela Gibaja Progressio country director, Peru

    Dr Juan Almendares Bonilla Founding director, Mother Earth Movement, Honduras

    Xiomara Ventura Progressio Country Director, Honduras

    Maximus Tahu Researcher, La’o Hamutuk, Timor-Leste

    Juvinal Dias Researcher, La’o Hamutuk, Timor-Leste

    Jesus Garza Coordinator, The Honduran Coalition for People’s Action, Honduras

    Tibor van Staveren Progressio country director, Timor-Leste

    Dr Jeannette Alvarado Director, Maquilishuat Foundation, El Salvador

    • As one who was at Seattle to see the WTO‘s open-market blitzkrieg temporarily halted, I wholeheartedly agree with Madeleine Bunting’s perceptive bookending of the noughties with Seattle and Copenhagen (Protesters in Seattle warned us what was coming, but we didn’t listen, 14 December). However, she is not correct to imply that the movement “differed dramatically” over alternatives to economic globalisation. There was a general consensus that to control finance and global corporations there needed to be a return to countries having the will and the ability to protect, nurture and rebuild their local economies. This would also entail the political control of such damaging corporate forces and a change in the end goal of trade and financial rules that have allowed big business and banks to prosper, while trashing local economies and the environment.

    The twin towers and the wars on terror diverted attention from these priorities. Tackling the global economic crisis presents new opportunities for this “protect the local, globally” approach to solve the triple credit, climate and oil-supply crunches. An example of this is the Green New Deal proposal. This emphasises a massive £50bn-a-year local jobs and business programme to decarbonise the UK economy. It involves comprehensive measures to gut the power of finance and details a fairer global taxation system to fund such programmes in poorer countries. It is the latest step along the path that first received global coverage in Seattle. Indeed to compensate for the disaster of the last 10 years, the Green New Deal needs to become a key blueprint for campaigns and government policies in the 2010s.

    Colin Hines

    Convener, Green New Deal Group

    • Reading George Monbiot’s article (This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity, 15 December), I felt a Freudian subconscious must have been at work. He managed to refer to “our crowded planet”, the human race being “hedged in” by the consequences of its own actions, that we are acting in “defiance of natural constraints”, that we are no longer able to “swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way”, and that “perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet”. As if to ram home the point, he even concludes with a reference to “another great unmentionable”. Was he, I thought, going to join other leading environmentalists like Jonathan Porritt and David Attenborough, and agree that we should all be treating population growth as a serious issue? Alas, no. The particular “unmentionable” turned out to be the folly of searching for more oil at a time when we should be phasing out its use. The real unmentionable remains, in his world, just that.

    Chris Padley

    Market Rasen, Lincolnshire

     

    • George Monbiot again attempts to make the subliminal link between those who disagree with the consensus view on climate change and Holocaust deniers (Comment, 8 December). However, he fails to admit the real scandal of the leaked emails. As Karl Popper taught us, scepticism is a cardinal virtue, and this is particularly true in sciences that rely upon the interpretation of historical data and the output of theoretical models. In this respect climate science is similar to my own subject, financial economics, and there are important lessons to learn from the way that discipline has developed. In the 1970s the Chicago School dominated finance, and leading journals would not accept articles contradicting the rational expectations/market efficiency paradigm. Over the subsequent decades, counter-evidence and alternative theoretical explanations of market behaviour began the emerge at the margins of the discipline. Now, the contrary view has become so persuasive that the certainties of 40 years ago appear naive. However, the academic lockout put back the development of the subject for a generation.

    My reading of this affair is that climate science, like finance in the 1970s, is at an immature stage of development. There are heavy consequences when scientists forget Popper’s dictum that good science seeks to refute, not confirm. With climate science the stakes are high, and so we need the very best of science. That is why I am on the side of the sceptics.

    Emeritus Professor Bob Ryan

    Nettleton Shrub, Wiltshire

  • Copenhagen: Only the numbers count- and they add up to hell on earth

     

     

    First number to know: 350. It’s what scientists have been saying for two years is the maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can safely have in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. Those scientists have been joined by an unprecedented outpouring from civil society: in late October, activists put on what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history,” with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, all rallying around that number. Three thousand vigils last weekend across the planet spelled out the number in candles. Thousands of churches rang their bells 350 times on Sunday, and yesterday the World Parliament of Religions, meeting in Melbourne and representing the “largest interreligious gathering on earth” sent an emergency 350 declaration here to Copenhagen.

     

    The second number: 100. That’s (roughly) how many countries are backing a 350 target here at Copenhagen. That’s more than half the nations in attendance – unfortunately, they’re the small, poor ones. But it’s amazing to see them, in the face of enormous pressure, keeping the idea of real action alive. Yesterday Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, spoke to a roaring crowd of thousands: “We know what the laws of physics say: the most important number in the world is 350.”

     

    The third number: 4%. That’s how much the US is offering to cut its emissions from their 1990 levels by 2020. Scientists tell us that the developed world would need to reduce by at least 40% to get us back on a 350 track, so the American offer is exactly an order or magnitude off. And they’re not alone. All the rich countries, not to mention China, are looking to do as little as possible and still escape here with some kind of agreement they can hide behind.

     

    The fourth number – and the most important one. When the folks at Climate Interactive plug in every promise made at these talks (the American offer on the table, the Chinese promise to reduce “energy intensity”, the EU pledges, and so on) their software tells them almost instantly how much carbon they would eventually produce. When they hit the button last night, the program showed that by 2100 the world’s CO2 concentrations (currently 390) would be – drumroll please – 770. That is, we would live in hell, or at least a place with a similar temperature.

     

    So that’s the scorecard. You may hear a lot of happy talk from world leaders over the next few days as they “reach a historic agreement”. But that’s how it all adds up.

     

    • Bill McKibben is the coordinator of 350.org

  • India lashes out at climate stance

     

    The Indian Environment Minister had just pulled out of a crucial meeting with Australia’s Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, aimed at breaking the deadlock in the climate talks.

    Senator Wong said she did not know why Mr Ramesh pulled out of the crucial meeting. “You will have to ask him,” she said.

    Mr Ramesh told the Herald he had not “pulled out” but said he was unfortunately “too busy” to hold the meeting with Senator Wong and spend three hours co-chairing a meeting with her.

    “Penny Wong remains a good friend of mine, a very valued colleague,” he said, but he made it clear he would not be co-operating in a session with her to try to break the deadlock even after a request from the Danish head of the United Nations conference, Connie Hedegaard.

    Australia is heavily backing efforts by its allies, the United States, Japan and Europe, to force China, India and the developing nations to sign an agreement to curb their emissions that will lead to a legal treaty on climate change.

    At the same time, the wealthy nations have stalled talks on ambitious cuts in emissions by them under the Kyoto Protocol until there is progress from China and India on the new agreement.

    In an effort to bring both sides together Ms Hedegaard asked Senator Wong and Mr Ramesh to find a way for the big developing countries – China, India and Brazil – to reduce their emissions and lock those efforts into a new treaty.

    With that effort under question, it is unclear how the fraught negotiations will proceed.

    As 120 world leaders arrive in Copenhagen to sign a deal on climate change, concerns are growing that only a weak outcome is likely.

    On Monday the G77 group of developing nations backed by China, India and Brazil walked out of a side set of talks to show their anger at a decision by rich countries to stall discussion of their emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol, the legal treaty that binds them at present.

    In what Oxfam labelled a tit-for-tat exercise, Australia’s negotiators then shut down the talks on emission cuts for rich countries.

    In the rancour that followed, Ms Hedegaard worked out a compromise, allotting a pairing of developed and developing nations to discuss the key issues.

    But after Senator Wong and Mr Ramesh were slotted to discuss the most thorny issue of the developing country emissions reductions, the pairing broke down. Senator Wong said it was “regrettable that there are some who are willing to fight about process rather than negotiate about substance when what is asked of us requires so much more”.

    With Australia and its allies coming under intense attack over claims they want to “kill” the Kyoto Protocol, Senator Wong attempted to offer lukewarm support for it.

    “I wanted to make very clear there is a lot in the Kyoto Protocol which is good; there is a lot that we need to build on.

    “But if we are going to tackle climate change we need to do much more. We need to do what is in the Kyoto Protocol and we need to go further.”

    The UN’s senior climate official, Yvo de Boer, and Ms Hedegaard repeated that the Kyoto Protocol and the new agreement had to be discussed and included in any agreement from Copenhagen on Friday.

    The chief negotiator of the G77, Lumumba Di-Aping, from Sudan, said the developing countries had “won” the debate on keeping the Kyoto Protocol alive.

    But members of environment groups now believe the prospects are shrinking that rich nations will come up with an ambitious set of targets to cut their emissions by between 25 per cent and 40 per cent by 2020, leaving political leaders to pull off a compromise by signing a weak agreement at the end of this week.

    Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace said: “What we have here is a crime scene set up for leaders to solve.”