Our activists in Australia shut down Abbot Point coal export terminal in Queensland yesterday - as the Pacific Islands Forum began in Cairns. They are demanding that Kevin Rudd stops expanding Australia’s coal industry and risking the future of Pacific Islands.

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LATEST UPDATE 7.10PM
Small Islands States have produced a communiqué at the Pacific Islands Forum that includes the AOSIS call for developed countries to cut C02 emissions by 45% by 2020. This is a great milestone, and ensures that the pressure will be on both the larger Pacific countries as well as Australia and New Zealand to do something significant at the forum.

UPDATE 6PM:
All activists have been taken down from the Abbot Point coal facility and are being detained by the police.

UPDATE 3.15PM:
Activists have unfurled a banner reading "Coal or climate, Kevin?". Latest images on Facebook

UPDATE 2.30PM:
Three activists remain locked onto a jety that is part of the expanded coal port. They plan to stay until Kevin Rudd gets the message.

We've ramped up our action on export coal as leaders meet for the Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns.

At 6.30am this morning, Greenpeace activists shut down coal loading at Hay Point Coal Terminal in Mackay, Queensland – one of the largest coal export terminals in the world.

The 10 activists have scaled a 50-metre high coal loader and locked onto the structure to stop its operation.

LATEST UPDATE 3.30PM
The four climbers are still locked on and have stopped operations for 10 hours, saving 54,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

UPDATE 11AM
Four climbers remain on the coal terminal, where operations have now been shut down for over four hours. See images

UPDATE 9.50AM
Two activists have been cut off and eight remain locked to the coal terminal.

One of the activists from Fiji is locked onto the top of the coal loader, where he can see more than 12 coal ships waiting to load. Here is his unique view from the top as a Pacific Islander who lives with climate change impacts:

"There are mountains of coal. It is a bit overwhelming - tonnes and tonnes of it. Everything I see here means to me that there's one more family that will be affected, one more child that won't have the future they deserve."

It’s five minutes past midnight on board the Arctic Sunrise. The sun never sets at this time of year; instead it casts long late shadows on the ice, and turns the sea water and icebergs buttery yellows and infinite blues.

 Some of us should be asleep, but few of us are – we’re pulled up beside a stunning iceberg, which has become known as ‘The Donut’, thanks to the circular hole formed by an exquisite archway of glacier ice.

 I’m on the starboard bridge wing, looking at the Sunrise’s shadow play on the ‘berg, then reflection of that shadow in the water. Out of the corner of my eye I catch something yellow galloping along the pockmarked sea ice that stretches from the iceberg to the nearby coastal cliffs.

 “POLAR BEAR, POLAR BEAR” I shout into the bridge.

The Arctic Sunrise is slowly moving away from the Petermann glacier. It's the perfect time to look back on all the great work that has been done so far up North:

 After spending more than five weeks waiting for Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland to calve a 100km2 ice island into the sea, at around midnight Wednesday night the Arctic Sunrise began its transit down the west coast of Greenland. Our primary goal at Petermann Glacier was to document the calving of the ice island with remote time-lapse cameras perched on 1000m cliffs overlooking the glacier. Even though the ice island has not yet calved, our time-lapse cameras remain in place, ready to document the glacier's disintegration, should it happen this summer.

Following on from the news that the coal industry supplied letters from fake grassroots groups to influence the debate about US energy legislation in congress we've got our hands on a document showing big oil plans to do something similar.

The memo makes clear what the oil companies are planning for the energy debate in the senate. They want to set up a fake grassroots group to help them fear-monger about the terrible consequences of cutting their profits in order to save the planet.

Some choice extracts from the memo include "To be clear, API will provide the up-front resources to ensure logistical issues do not become a problem. This includes contracting with a highly experienced events management company that has produced successful rallies for presidential campaigns, corporations and interest groups."

"Please indicate to your company leadership your strong support for employee participation in the rallies."

and

"Please treat this information as sensitive and ask those in your company to do so as well, as some of these places may be subject to change, and we don’t want critics to know our game plan."

More at Greenpeace USA

Read the full memo and our response here

From one of our colleagues in the UK today came a link to a very simple video - a photo essay really - that went right to my heart. It depicts the very normal lives of people living in the village of Sipson, near Heathrow in the UK. Sipson will be wiped off the map if and when the plans for a third runway come into place.


These are not stories of climate change, they are stories of home and what it means to lose it. What it means to find out the cemetery where your parents and wife are buried will be replaced by a long strip of concrete.





Take action now to stop this senseless destruction.

Humboldt Glacier. © Nick Cobbing/Greenpeace

Crunch, crunch, crunch, leap crevasse… “oomph”. Crunch, crunch, crunch, run, “hup!”, jump, CRUNCH, “oooof”.

It’s one o’clock on a windless morning. I’m walking on Humboldt Glacier in the high Arctic of northwest Greenland, my ears filled with the clumping of my own boots on the ice. The sky above is bright blue, and the sun is low, flirting with the horizon. It will be another few weeks before it sets.

Ahead, the sun is beating down on my fellow hikers, Dr Alun Hubbard from Wales, and Dr Jason Box from the United States, as they stride across the glacier with GPS antennae protruding from their backpacks. I’m a little behind them; my backpack containing some pretty intense espresso and a pie baked by Babu, the Arctic Sunrise’s cook. Although it's ‘night’, I’m so warm that I’m down to my base layer t-shirt, and the sunblock is starting to run under my sunglasses and sting my eyes.

All around us is ice. Ice as far as the eye can see, to the north, south, and most definitely to the east, a lot more than I can conceive. Whenever we reach the top of a rise, I can see the massive icebergs calving from Humboldt Glacier into Kane Basin, the large body of water to the west. This is Humboldt’s main calving embayment, the most active part of the glacier, which we have nicknamed ‘Baby Cow Bay’. It’s the relatively fast flowing stream of ice that spits out the hundreds of tabular icebergs that we’ve seen from the Arctic Sunrise. We’re a couple of hundred metres above the water in Kane Basin, but below our feet is another kilometre or so of ice, squeezing the actual bedrock of Greenland down below sea level.

The Arctic Sunrise in Sermilik Fjord. © Greenpeace/Nick Cobbing

From Melanie, expedition leader on board the Arctic Sunrise

The Arctic Sunrise is currently on the east coast of Greenland. We said goodbye to the on-board science team in Nugatsiaq on August 9, and to two Chinese journalists and a campaigner from Greenpeace China in Sisimiut on August 11. Our next port-of-call was Tasiilaq , and the ship is now in nearby Sermilik Fjord.

An independent science team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachussetts joined the ship in Tasiilaq. The team, led by Dr. Fiamma Stranneo, is undertaking a variety of oceanographic measurements in, from August 19-25. Their goal is determine if warm, sub-tropical waters are coming into contact with glaciers in the fjord, and to determine the processes that control the variability of ocean conditions where the glaciers meet the sea.

CTD device hanging alongside the Arctic Sunrise © Greenpeace/Nick Cobbing

From Melanie, expedition leader on board the Arctic Sunrise

Today is August 22. We are mid-way through leg 2 of this Arctic Climate Impacts Expedition in Sermilik Fjord. We have been wildly busy since arriving in Tasiilaq on August 17, but things are going really, really well. We’ve been incredibly lucky: none of the problems that could have thrown a wrench in to our well laid plans - fog grounding the helicopter, heavy ice impeding the ship’s transit, scientific equipment breaking down – have happened. I chalk this up to “the luck of the Irish” since four of our crew are Irish - the chief engineer, media officer, heli pilot and videographer.

Since things are going so smoothly, I’m taking a few moments out of my busy day and have taken my laptop up to the bridge to churn out a blog. Here’s a bit of a running description of what’s going on from my vantage point.

India seems (and is) quite far away from Greenland and the Arctic. Yet, with the world's second population and with major cities like Mumbai (parts of which lie just a few meters above sea level), the country cannot ignore what is happening.
India is now a major player in international politics. If its population and leaders start making climate change the political priority, the world will listen. Gaurav Sawant, a journalist from Aajtak and Headlines Today, is on board the Arctic Sunrise and he has been blogging his experience so far. He's a good writer and if you have a break this afternoon, I recommend you use it to read his last blog entries on his own Arctic expedition blog.

Large chunks of ice are falling into the water....the water level in the oceans and seas is rising and eating into the land from New York to Sydney and from Mumbai to the Sundarbans on India's east coast.

So what is happening and will happen in the years to come is that the sea will eat more and more into the land. And scientists say land under cultivation and land we live on will be devoured by the sea resulting in large scale migration of people from these areas to safer areas - from Bangladesh to India - and this will led to violence and tension.

The latest effort by big coal industry to masquerade as a much loved part of American life has hit a snag. Not only are their supporters all iStock images

But the public relations firm behind this fake grassroots movement forgot to disguise the fact that they were running the website.

Of course that's not really embarrasing. What's embarrassing is that politicians fall for this. Just to remind us and them, read up on the true cost of coal.

To mark the 100 days before the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen - our activists camped on a glacier for a week and sent a message out to the world.

Eric Philips, polar explorer on board the Arctic Sunrise, has already done three video blogs, but the latest is my favorite so far. It opened the Australian premiere of the film Age of Stupid.
It is simply beautiful. Watch and enjoy - then take action.