Climate change, hot air and God

I rather enjoyed President Obama's inaugural speech yesterday - a masterpiece of liberal rhetoric designed to tickle the political G-spots of American bourgeois lefties from start to finish. I can confidently predict that it will all be downhill from here, of course. Yes, Barack wants to be nice to women, gays, ethnic minorities etc – and I'm all in favour. But being a proper lefty, I was listening out for what we Marxists call the 'structure'. Culture wars are part of the 'superstructure': the social characteristics that stem from a society's economic structure. Did we hear anything about replacing the failed capitalist system? Absolutely not. The point of all this identity politics stuff is that however welcome it is, it distracts from economic inequality and destruction, and it doesn't challenge capitalism iin the slightest. You only have to look at the Stonewall guide to 'good' employers, or take a walk down Canal Street to realise that capitalism loves liberation: whole new markets are opened up, appropriated, co-opted and tamed.

We also didn't hear anything about the United States's ongoing and illegal war against Afghan wedding parties, Pakistani teenagers and anyone else hit by a drone strike authorised personally by the President and executed by some gum-chewing schmuck operating a PS3 controller in Rat's Ass, Arizona. In case you missed it, the US has decided that any male of combat age in a strike zone can be assumed to be an enemy combatant – which means that you don't have to declare any civilian casualties whenever you drop a drone. If your village is a 'strike zone' (don't expect a postcard letting you know), then you're automatically a militant.  Which strikes me as utterly immoral as well as illegal. But then the US is bombing Pakistan, with which it isn't at war, so we shouldn't expect too much.

Supposed liberal Presidents (and Prime Ministers) like nothing more than to drop high explosives on distant brown people. It reassures wavering voters that they're Tough: Tough on Terror, Tough on National Defence, Tough on Complicated Arguments About Why We Might Want To Think Twice Before Bombing Another Poor Country. They want to belong, surrounded as they are by chaps in uniform and other persuasive chaps from Acronymic Agencies (MI5, CIA etc) who promise them induction into their Hermeneutic Secrets. You're nobody until (as the UK PM has to do on his/her first day) you've sat down and written out fresh instructions to nuclear submarine commanders.

But the bit that caught my attention was Obama's reference to climate change. Obviously he's contradicting a large section of his electorate and an even larger section of the political class by stating that climate change exists. Good for him. But the way he framed it was really interesting. He said this:

"We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations," "That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared," Obama said.

Interesting. It hints at a US equivalent of the Big Society, except with meaning because so many Americans are practising religious types that it's conceivable that an appeal to them on religious grounds - making an 'end run' around the vested interests of politicians and lobbyists - might work. Certainly here in the UK the mainstream churches accept climate science as accurate and at least don't oppose mitigation action. There are even some modest attempts to promote ecological health on C of E land, like the Caring for God's Acre network.

But I'm not convinced that Obama's call for faith-based environmentalism works. The religious debate about how to see the environment is split between those who think God gave the care of the planet into our hands ('wise stewardship'), and those who say he gave the use of it to us. 'Go forth and multiply', he allegedly said: not a warning against over-enthusiastic multiplying and the consequent draining of resources.

There are plenty of Godly types who see the bit about 'dominion' over the earth and endorsement of whatever foul things we do to the planet. You only have to look at Robinson Crusoe, a seminal book in the development of Protestant Capitalism to see how rape and pillage becomes a religious duty. In it, Robinson is marooned on a desert island (the earth) and carefully records in his diary (Protestants were encouraged to examine their spiritual development in diaries) what he's got and what he does with it. Everything on the island is at his disposal – including Man Friday who lacking the grace of Christianity, is fair game, just another resource. The theory is that if you don't use what's lying around – oil, mercury, coltan, blood diamonds – you're wasting the resources God put there for your use. If you get stressy about the damage done by use or overuse of these resources, you Lack Faith. God won't let us all perish: he'll turn up to save us from ourselves. Again. (This only works if you believe in the New Testament nice God: Old Testament Angry God seemed to quite enjoy a bit of nationwide Smiting).

And if that's not dumb enough, there are the Christians who accept that climate change is destroying the world, and think it's a sin to interfere. You'll find quite a lot of them in the United States's odder denominations. Rapture-ready churches aren't exactly new, there were plenty around in Medieval Europe and later, but they're only a major force in the US. They hold that the End Times are imminent. Destructive climate change is one of the ways in which this world will end, they say. It's God's plan. If you reduce CO2, or plant trees, or drive a Prius, you are Working For Satan by opposing God's plan (apparently Star Trek IV is particularly guilty for promoting 'environmental Pantheism').

Will Obama's sneaky attempt to get the god-botherers onside work? That depends on the strength and effort the God's Acre Christians put in, the opposition of the Rapturists and of course political will. My guess is that it won't. When the Americans stop thinking that the answer to climate change is to turn up the air conditioning, then something will happen. And that means basically never.

Scraping the bottom of the oil barrel?

I wonder if Newsnight will bother to reply…

Dear Newsnight,

after Peter Lilley's appearance on Newsnight to discuss the economics of climate change, could you answer a couple of questions so that I can decide whether to take this matter further?

1. Was anyone at Newsnight aware that Mr Lilley is non-executive chairman of Tethys Petroleum Ltd?

2. Does Newsnight have a policy of asking guests about potential conflicts of interest before booking them?

3. If Newsnight was aware of Mr Lilley's position, why was the discussion not foregrounded to inform the readers?

As it stands, Mr Lilley's violent attack on renewable energy appears to have been framed as an appearance simply by an expert who'd written 'a report' rather than as an individual with an economic interest in one particular energy industry.

Yours etc. 

Sorry about that, peasants

This fascinating map tells us about who's wrecked the environment, and who's going to suffer.
As you might expect, green is for the people (us, basically) who've caused utter devastation, and blue is for those who are going to sicken, starve and die. Predictably, countries who've contributed least to climate change are going to sink beneath the waves, while those who've poisoned the globe are going to be fine.

That's capitalism, folks! Bye Bye Bangladesh. Who needs the Solomon Islands anyway (except for Solomon Islanders, and I'm sure they can swim)?. In your face, India! That's the point of being rich. Western companies are already buying African farmland from corrupt governments. When the seas rise, we'll always be able to afford the higher land. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

More analysis here.

The Daily Express: an apology*

You may recall our front page last year: 'Snow Chaos: And They Still Claim It's Global Warming', suggesting that January snow definitively disproves the mass of scientific evidence for global warming:

Given our predilection for confusing weather with climate, readers may have been expecting Saturday's front page to read 'October Heatwave: 29.9C PROVES Global Warming'. We apologise to readers for our failure to produce this headline: unfortunately we only print claims which reflect our corporate ignorance and cynicism.

*This blog entry is fictional.

It's all just hot air

I'm off now, but I thought I'd settle an argument before I go.

I'm really bored with endless aggressive arguments between talking heads on TV about climate change. Proper scientists make the case for anthropogenic climate change (i.e. we did it). Then the presenter turns to some unqualified loon (e.g. Nigel Lawson, disastrous Tory Chancellor, degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, who has set up a skeptic thinktank) or a retired professor in a non-climate change subject) and treats them as though they know what they're talking about.

Usually, it's 'global warming is a huge leftwing conspiracy', though the purpose and practicalities are never spelled out. How do you get tens of thousands of socially-awkward nerds to agree to a massive plot?

Anyway, those days should now be over, thanks to the sterling work of Anderegg, Prall, Harold and Schneider of Stanford University, who have published a paper analysing the climate science debate.

Their findings:
1. There isn't a balanced debate to be had, which will be news to, well, news organisations. 97-98% of climate science researchers who actively publish peer-reviewed papers believe on scientific grounds that we've altered the climate through human activity.
2. These researchers have massively more academic credibility and experience than the tiny group who oppose the theory. They publish more, they publish more in peer-reviewed journals and they've been working in the field more.

So there we have it. There's no conspiracy, just a hugely overwhelming amount of data collected by serious scientists on one side, and some ideologically-motivated morons on the other: morons who don't have the courage to submit their ideas to scrutiny by their peers, but prefer to rush to the airwaves.

Let's just get on with mitigation and reduction. Perhaps while we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the media can wean itself of pointless confrontational arguments and learn a little bit about science.

I Can't Believe We Let These People Build Our Exploding Oil Platforms

I like Bill Maher. He's a polemical, funny satirist who's pretty sharp on religion, actually likes science and annoys religious people. This time, he's despairing of British people (who, like most English people, he calls English). Apparently, the endless stream of distorted, lying bullshit about climate change (I'm thinking particularly of the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express - oh dear, millions of readers each, and all Tory Scum)

People are always accusing me of hating America and calling it stupid, so tonight I'd like to take a few moments to hate England and call it stupid. Because now English people don't believe in global warming either. I thought the English were smarter than that. The home of Newton and Darwin. I can't believe we let these people build our exploding oil platforms.

Even scarier is why people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason pollsters say is we had a very cold, snowy winter. Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark. And my car's not real because I can't find my keys.

That's the problem with our obsession with always seeing two sides of every issue equally -- especially when one side has a lot of money. It means we have to pretend there are always two truths, and the side that doesn't know anything has something to say. On this side of the debate: Every scientist in the world. On the other: Mr. Potato Head.

There is no debate here -- just scientists vs. non-scientists, and since the topic is science, the non-scientists don't get a vote. We shouldn't decide everything by polling the masses. Just because most people believe something doesn't make it true. This is the fallacy called argumentum ad numeram: the idea that something is true because great numbers believe it.

…take this recent headline: "TV weathercasters divided on global warming." Who gives a shit? My TV weathercaster is a bimbo with big tits who used to be on a soap opera on Telemundo.

I seem to remember that during our cold winter, the Express had a front page reading 'Global Warming? It's the coldest winter in decades'.

I've got news for the Express (try this for a completely untrue story). It's hot today. The hottest day of the year. By that newspaper's scientific standards, it's irreproachable proof that global warming's real. But I don't think we'll see an apology in tomorrow's edition.

A couple of tips:
1. Weather isn't climate
2. The UK's kept warm by the Gulf Stream. We should have Canadian weather. If the Arctic icecaps melt, the Gulf Stream may move away. So global warming will cause local cooling.

It's not just Tory Scum newspapers - last week, the Observer's science correspondent wrote of miracle fish oil trials which improved child concentration and skills ('Fish Oil Helps Children To Concentrate'. As Ben Goldacre writes in today's Guardian (the Observer's sister paper), pretty much every detail was wrong. There was a study, but it wasn't of fish oils, it didn't show any improvement, it didn't measure children's concentration and the sample groups were of 12 kids each - basically no good at all. Still, you can't beat a good headline even if the article is a disgraceful travesty of journalism.

Tip for science journalists: please link to the papers you're distorting.
Tip for science readers: if the first sentence ends with '…scientists say', it means they probably don't. Science is complicated and doesn't lend itself well to headlines and short sentences. Unless, of course, that headline reads 'Massive Asteroid You Can Clearly See Getting Bigger Each Day Is Definitely Going To End All Life On Earth, Scientists Say'.

Glug glug glug

Here's an excellent way to present the fairly dry (no pun intended) statistics about sea level rise, by David McCandless of the Guardian's Datastore. As always, click on the image for a bigger version.

I'm pleased to note that before long, Hollywood will literally be populated by bottom-feeders, and not merely metaphorically.

Daily (and Sunday) Mail in climate change distortion shocker!

I know, it's hard to imagine such an upstanding publication behaving badly, but even the most virtuous amongst us have our weaknesses, and the Mail never lets the facts get in the way of its beliefs, particularly if those facts are complicated.

It said that Professor Mojib Latif's research into ocean temperatures showed that we're entering a period of global cooling rather than warming, that our current cold weather proves a move towards warming, and that the research undermined the 'most cherished beliefs' of climate change scientists.

What did Professor Latif say? He says that ocean temperatures may make more of a difference to temperatures than other researchers, but he's not out of line on the major challenges facing us. Well done, Mail.

 "What we are experiencing now is a weather phenomenon, while we talked about the mean temperature over the next 10 years. You can't compare the two."

It comes as a surprise to me that people would try to use my statements to try to dispute the nature of global warming. I believe in manmade global warming. I have said that if my name was not Mojib Latif it would be global warming."

He added: "There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."

 "There are numerous newspapers, radio stations and television channels all trying to get our attention. Some overstate and some want to downplay the problem as a way to get that attention," he said. "We are trying to discuss in the media a highly complex issue. Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein's theory of] relativity in the media. But because we all experience the weather, we all believe that we can assess the global warming problem."

What we're up against (first in an occasional series)

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a very well-funded organisation dedicated to the destruction of collective government, taxation, trades unions, regulation and the environmental movement (you can probably guess which industries fund them).

As I've mentioned before, 98% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide imbalances (i.e. since the industrial revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen inexorably, causing global warming).

The CEI has a very different take - one that draws on the discourses of American individualism, the family and all the other touchstones of the American right, rather than on… er… science. They're a prime example of what happens when ideology trumps reality.

How media work…

Hello all. I'm sort-of back. I'm not sick, and I haven't been sacked (they'll have to prize the whiteboard marker out of my cold, dead hands) but life happens even when you're trying to read.

This doesn't mean that I've ceased to consume cultural, political and sporting trivia to fill the gaping void where my soul should be. One of the things that enervated me this morning was the Daily Express, which rather modestly calls itself The World's Greatest Newspaper. I actually don't know why it exists. The Daily Mail has a niche: there are plenty of bitter, selfish people out there to be catered for, whereas the Express is a shrill mini-Mail (horribly, the Daily Telegraph's becoming the Maily Telegraph too).

By 'they', I presume the paper means the world's climate scientists - reducing them to a threatening, faceless pronoun is a desperate attempt to imply some sort of conspiracy, while 'claim' attempts to relegate hard science to some sort of saloon-bar nonsense.

As it happens, the weather we're experiencing is an effect of global warming. Some scientists prefer the term 'climate change' to hint that anything can happen, but the basic fact is that we've heated up the atmosphere. Weather systems are incredibly complex. Our normal winter is mild because of the sea and wind currents which warm the sea and air (look West: we're level with North American cities which habitually experience -20ºC), and our geographical position. That warm air is now over the Mediterranean, meaning that Western Europe is experiencing colder weather than usual, and the Med is warmer than usual.

If things get really extreme, we'll lose the warm sea currents which keep Britain mild, thanks to polar melting. Then, global warming will make Britain a much colder place.

If you don't believe me, try Southampton University, UEA, hell, if you're a proper nutter, try Fox News!

But then, paradoxes are probably a bit too complex for the Express.

Update: useful 'idiot's guide to snow and climate change' here.

A little good news for Americans

My last post wasn't very Christmassy, was it? Perhaps it's because the world's clearly utterly screwed - Copenhagen was a shameful, embarassing display of reactionary realpolitik, made worse by Obama's refusal to live up to his rhetoric. If you want an even more depressing reading of the summit, try Mark Lynas's eye-witness account: he's a serious thinker who knows his stuff, and he blames China.

However, he was limited by the strictures of his Senate and Congress, bodies packed with corporate shills more interested in the opinions of their paymasters than their constituents or scientists - it's no coincidence that the most vehement enemy of climate science is James Inhofe, recipient of more funding by oil, gas and coal corporations than any other Senator.

The same problem is facing Obama's attempt to pass even a weak version of a National Health Service: insurance companies, making billions from insuring only healthy rich people, have spun these plans as Stalinism, complete with 'death panels' and compulsory abortions for all. Yet, finally, a start has been made, a weak bill has got past the Senate, and that American hero, Senator Bernie Sanders (socialist! Go Vermont!) has sneaked in more cash for free clinics, mental health care and all the other Cinderella services usually ignored in the rush for profit. We salute you.

So what was the Pringles tube for?

I asked, and you provided many and varied responses. None of them were correct.

Neal utilised the tube to make me………………………… The Melanie Philips Newspaper Rack© (quotes below are from the hilarious interview linked to by her name). In case you don't know her, she's the shrillest, least informed, most opinionated, most often wrong, most reactionary and most unpleasant journalist in the country - more so even than Jan Moir, because Philips is more intelligent. She has turned her talent towards evil. For instance, she believes that climate change just isn't happening and is a big communist plot (qualifications - zero), putting her in the company of this charming fellow and this one, and she calls London Londonistan which apparently isn't racist, whereas having even the slightest scintilla of doubt about anything Israel does is anti-semitic and you may as well wear an SS uniform and burn Jews every weekend because you are a Holocaust denier. Obama, to her, is 'in the Islamists' camp' and became a Christian as an electoral tactic… And she thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism, which is a sure sign of an uninformed fruitcake.

Multiculturalism, she writes, "has become the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by a state-financed army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values". British nationhood is being disembowelled by "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values."

The key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews".

"The capture of all society's institutions, such as schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police and voluntary groups. This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive hymn sheet so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism."

She writes, of course, for the Daily Mail.

The newspaper rack is perfectly designed, as you can see, to shut her up by cramming her mouth with The Guardian, which is her nemesis. The speech bubble is wipe-clean, enabling me to replace her old lunacies with fresh ones.

Melanie Philips: proof that you can be intelligent and stupid, or cynical ranter for money? Whatever the case, she makes me angrier than anyone else on the planet. This includes Michael Portillo. He was the son of Spanish Republican refugees who betrayed them by becoming one of the most rightwing Conservative government ministers in recent history. He made me shout extremely rude words at the television this morning. It was a repeat of one of his post-politics travel shows, in which he extolled the beauty and efficiency of the Spanish hyper-fast railway network.

Why did this make me angry, you may ask. After all, you love trains and foreigners, Vole. (Yes, Melanie, I do.) Well children, it made me angry because Portillo was one of the Conservative minister who privatised Britain's railway network. They broke it up into stupid little parcels and sold the scraps at a knockdown price to their flaky, dodgy, asset-stripping financier friends, who turned a tired but functional service into a shiny, awful, unreliable service which is Europe's most expensive. So for him to spend licence-payers' money grinning smugly from the seat of a fast, luxurious train we'll never have because he stole the network from us is UTTERLY UNCONSCIONABLE. The total, total bastard. How DARE he?

And yet, Melanie Philips is worse. Portillo's a well-fed smug turncoat. Philips is actually, deliberately evil because she refuses to think past her prejudices, despite having the intelligence to do so.

The fix is in

My love for Scandinavians teeters on the brink: in collusion with the UK and the US, the Danes have circulated a secret document amongst the rich nations to work from during the Copenhagen conference.

• Kyoto (the only legal agreement on climate change) to be dumped
• Poor nations to have much lower emissions allowances than rich ones (so the rich, polluting ones can carry on polluting
• Climate change to be managed via the World Bank (the rich nations' loan shark) rather than the UN
• Poor nations' environmental strategies to be dictated by the rich ones

We expect the US to resist real change: even with a centrist President, it's a country controlled by a corporate élite. The UK, outside its own borders, is well-known as a manipulative and arrogant state: ministers say cuddly things and their civil servants operate ruthlessly to benefit the UK, even at the expense of the most vulnerable. Denmark, on the other hand, has a reputation as a calm, thoughtful nation. Sure, it's not as relaxed as Sweden, but it should be on the side of the angels. Now it definitely isn't. It's lined up with the usual suspects as yet another group of rich white guys bossing the poorer and darker around.

Business as usual.

Europe: brave new democracy.

I like Europe, as a geographical entity and as an ideal. I'd love to be part of a democratic USE. More than that, I'd love to be a citizen of the USSE. I think that economic cooperation, environmental solidarity and the free exchange of ideas, citizens and fairly-traded goods are brilliant.

I don't think that distorting subsidies, imperialist expansion, hostility to Muslims and the world's poor, corruption, decades of qualified accounts, Buggins' Turn and secret deals are the way to achieve the Europe of which I dream.

Take the European Parliament. I am a political junkie. I can reel off candidates, failed candidates, interesting by-elections results and a host of other things without a moment's thought. I can't name my MEPs though (except for Michael Cashman - what an ironic name. He should be in the House of Commons).

I do know that the European Parliament has two parliaments (Brussels and Strasbourg, leading to convoys of lorries full of documents shuttling between the two, and MEPs guzzling carbon like it's crack) and no power to pass laws. What an utter waste of time and money: the only people we actually directly elect - and fund magnificently - have no authority at all. Lovely.

The other thing I know about the European Parliament is that its environmental committe delegation to the Copenhagen Climate talks includes one Nicholas Griffin. Yes, the British National Party (Nazi) leader, who has this to say about climate change (his qualification is a 2.2 law degree):

In a speech in the parliament last week, Griffin denounced those who warn of the consequences of climate change as "cranks". He said they had reached "an Orwellian consensus" that was "based not on scientific agreement, but on bullying, censorship and fraudulent statistics".

"The anti-western intellectual cranks of the left suffered a collective breakdown when communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology… But the heretics will have a voice in Copenhagen and the truth will out. Climate change is being used to impose an anti-human utopia as deadly as anything conceived by Stalin or Mao."

I'd have thought he'd welcome climate change: an awful lot of poor black people are going to die horribly - which is the basis of his political creed. 

Doomed, we're all doomed!

I'm not joking. The only levity to be gained from this very credible report (abstract only) is that by the time we hit 6C above norm (in 2100), I will be dead. It's sad that the best I can hope for in my life is that it will be over by the time that mass human, animal and vegetable extinction occurs. Still, it'll make life interesting for our children and grandchildren.

The media coverage suggests that it's possible to avert this utter disaster - but the scientist points out that emissions have risen over the past decade, by 29%. Every opportunity we're given to take climate change seriously, we've avoided. Our politicians pay lip service and we chuck the occasional newspaper in the recycling bin, but as a race, we don't really believe that what's going to happen will happen. It's too far off or too complicated.

My students think it's hilarious (or embarrassing) that I don't drive and that I'm genuinely terrified of the consequences. They just don't care enough to change their lives - and to be fair, we need to change society far more radically than swapping to recycled loo paper or unplugging iPod chargers.

The current plan is to try to limit temperature change to 2C above the norm - leading to aberrant weather, migration, some extinctions: bad, but not awful. Can we do it? Can we bollocks:

"This is very different to the trend we need to be on to limit global climate change to 2C [the level required to avoid dangerous climate change]." That would require CO2 emissions from all sources to peak between 2015 and 2020 and that the global per capita emissions be decreased to 1 tonne of CO2 by 2050. Currently the average US citizen emits 19.9 tonnes per year and UK citizens emit 9.3 tonnes.

Now back to an Othello lecture - it fills in the time before I gratefully shuffle off this mortal coil.

Copenhagen - the coercion starts here

When the various anti-terrorism laws were set in place, the government promised everybody that these powers were to cope with a limited, awful problem. Some idiots believed it. Perhaps one of them (though I doubt it), was Chris Kitchen, an environmentalist activist.

Amongst those with other ideas were the police, who realised that the Terrorism Act 2000 could be used to harass and obstruct anyone with whom they have an ideological disagreement. They don't need to go about the hassle of charging, court appearances, juries and all the other checks and balances which attend the prosecution of justice in a democracy.

Mr. Kitchen was on the bus to Denmark when he was hauled off it under the Terrorism Act to see whether he was a terrorist. On protesting that environmentalism isn't terrorism, the officer informed him that 'terrorism means a lot of things' - which a) isn't true and b) demonstrates the inevitable creeping use of oppressive laws to stifle citizens' freedom of movement and expression.

Sure, it's an isolated case - so far. A fair few hundred people are heading to Copenhagen, and they're not terrorists, just people who want to remind those in the motorcades and fancy hotels that more than just votes are at stake. Time for the police to remember that their duty is to the public, not to those with whom they agree.

We should do the world a favour

…by embracing our own extinction for the sake of the planet. Today's Guardian polls climate change scientists. 85% don't believe we can restrict global warming to 2 degrees - though only 39% believe it's scientifically impossible. It's governments, politics and economics which make it impossible. 2 degrees will make things difficult. The expected 4-5 degrees will cause mass extinctions, human misery, economic disasters and huge political instability. As usual, it's the poor, darker, innocent people who'll suffer first. Sadly for me, I probably won't be dead before it starts impacting on us.

Abandon hope

Hopefully you all know that ours is the last generation to live a 'first-world' lifestyle, thanks to the destructive effects of… er … our first-world lifestyle (meanwhile everybody else is suffering now). Neal's sent me a link to this video, which graphically demonstrates the real, physical impact of our selfishness on the world. It details the ever-decreasing Arctic ice coverage - without it, we're entering a period of accelerating temperature rises with associated feedback. Soon it will be too late - feedback means that there's no going back and we'll end up like Venus.

We're definitely doomed

Monbiot says so, and I think he's right. It'll take a few generations, and the poor, hungry masses who haven't contributed to the disaster at all will perish first. There's always a higher piece of ground for those who can afford it. I intend to learn Norwegian and follow the snow line in my remaining years.

I've never been one of those people who moan about aging, but now I positively embrace it - life is going to get progressively more unpleasant but hopefully I'll be dead before we're all huddled together in refugee camps. What's really annoying is that I haven't even indulged in the kind of short-termist hedonism that's caused all this. I've flown fewer than 15 times in my 33 years, don't drive, snort imported (or local) coke, each much meat etc. etc. What's depressing is that most people don't care - presumably because the effects are exported to distant countries occupied by poor, brown people.