Early morning moron

Hello campers. I'm looking forward to 12 hours in the office today. Why have I been here since 8 a.m.? Because this idiot took home the marked essays rather than the unmarked ones… so have to finish 16 rather involved scripts as well as teach. Aarrrghhhh.

Still, the day started with amusement: there's a fuss (in the stupid rightwing press) about a toy hamster which is meant to sing Jingle Bells, but apparently sings 'Paedophile'. Radio 4's flagship news show, Today, was so amused by this that it tracked down a recording. It doesn't sing 'paedophile', more like mmmmmmphile. Close enough for the kneejerkers.

What a very surreal start to the day.

In the world of proper journalism, the Guardian and 56 other newspapers have marked the start of the Copenhagen conference with a joint editorial setting out the case for serious and urgent action. I know we shouldn't need to rehearse it again, but the deliberate, irresponsible, selfish, short-sighted, greedy and cynical machinations of fossil-fuel pushers, Tories, repressive oil-dictatorships and other capitalists (shame on you, Canada and Australia amongst others, including us, but especially the USA) have muddied the waters so much that people are either disillusioned with, cynical about or bored by, the subject.

Let's be clear. In the short term, food prices are going to go up. Poor, black people are going to starve. Then the already destabilised weather systems will deteriorate further. More, poor, black people are going to die - drowned, displaced, starved, killed in wars over productive land and water. After that, amidst the mass extinctions, freak weather, heatwaves and rising tides, Western nations will spend their money on keeping poor, black people out of the temperate zones. It won't (and shouldn't) work.

After that, life will get immeasurably worse but I, mercifully, will be very much dead.

Copenhagen is already dubious - horsetrading for countries to justify keeping their emissions up as high as possible rather than taking a lead, but it's a start. We might manage to keep temperature rises to 2 degrees C - leading only to awful consequences rather than catastrophic.