Another update from our "Post-Copenhagen" climate campaigner - Paul Horsman:

It is 21 years since the first scientific assessment of climate change was published; 18 years since the Rio Earth Summit at which the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was agreed. Twelve years have passed since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed and two years since the Bali Action plan. Each of these passing milestones has been variously described as ‘first steps’ and ‘ways forward’, demonstrating commitments to protect the climate. And with each passing milestone we have moved further up the curve of growing greenhouse gas emissions heading inexorably towards catastrophic climate change.

Six weeks have gone since the December climate summit where the Copenhagen Accord proposed a deadline of January 31 by which governments were to pledge how much they were going to take action to protect the climate. And as this latest milestone passed on Sunday, we see again the size of the gap between the action needed to protect the climate and the willingness of politicians to take this action. Politicians clearly are still listening more to the false honeyed whispers of industrial lobbyists and bankers than they are to the clamour of the millions of people calling for leadership and action.

Some would have us believe that because countries are making pledges it means that the governments are taking action. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that all they have done is to dust-off previously stated commitments, dress them up in letters to the UN and make believe they are doing something to protect the climate.

Not long after the end of last December’s botched Copenhagen Climate summit, in his first major duty the new President of the European Union, Herman van Rompouy, invited European leaders to an informal meeting. This is happening today.

When the invitation was issued, climate change and the Copenhagen summit were high on the agenda - how quickly events change things? Now we see action to tackle climate change slipping down the agenda as the short term economic problems take a front seat.

Copenhagen was the moment when climate leaders were needed partly because ‘events’ do rapidly shift political focus. There were some leaders at the summit – mostly governments from those countries most vulnerable to climate change speaking out for their future. Their calls fell on the deaf ears of the rich industrialised countries.

Image by xkcd under creative commons licence.
You'll be hard pressed to get better climate scientists than at Real Climate. By "climate scientists," I mean actual experts, who read the full IPCC reports (all 3000 pages of them); not random people who after reading two hacked emails and a blog entry by a climate sceptic think they spotted the one reason for climate change that climatologists missed all these years.
Real Climate scientists, therefore, went on the offensive a couple days ago, and again today, against the disinformation campaign orchestrated against science.

The party in Northern Alberta is over - (it wasn't much of a party to begin with - unless you like the smell of steaming bitumen and the sound of cannons) - and there must be some long, sad faces in the boardrooms of the tar sands industry and their investors.

2010 has not been kind to the tar sands so far and things are not looking up. Companies are slowing their developments, shareholders are getting restless, oil pipeline fights are erupting, US retailers are distancing themselves from being associated with dirty oil - and the bad news just keeps rolling on.

I'd like to imagine that each time one of these unfortunate headlines appeared over the last few weeks somewhere in Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach was slowly crushing whatever happened to be in his hand at the time and knashing his teeth.

Here is the year so far condensed into the 'good' and the 'bad'.

Bad news first:

This is beautifully made. A filmmaker asks 20 random people in Copenhagen what they would do if they could solve the climate crisis.

Shirley Atatagi, one of our political advisors, is currently in Tuvalu for the King Tides Festival, and sent us this blog.

As we were landing in Tuvalu today, I couldn’t help thinking about the tsunami that struck my country of Samoa a few months ago. I wasn’t in Samoa at the time but I’ve done my fair bit of crying over the stories about the destruction and the lives lost.

The many survivors were spared because they managed to get to higher ground – which is exactly the reason I was obsessing about this on the plane. You see, I have come to Tuvalu to witness the king tides and be part of the Tuvalu King Tides Festival. The tide is not expected to be as high as the waves that struck Samoa (weather forecast predicts approx 3.3 metres high tides this weekend) but Funafuti atoll is less than 3 metres (elevation) above mean sea level rise which means there is no higher ground should a tsunami like wave hit. I make a mental note as I wait in the Immigration line to survey the island and find highest point in case of tsunami-like conditions. In case you’re curious, I’ve now discovered that this is the Government building. Distance from my accommodation: approx 20 metres.

Andrea Zlatnanska is a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Slovakia. In this blog entry she recounts the story of a recent success of the climate campaign there.
Three years ago, talks about a new coal power plant begun in a small town of Trebišov, eastern Slovakia. This facility with performance of 885 MW would stand only a few meters from a residence zone, and only a few hundred meters away from the city centre. With yearly CO2 emission of about 4 million tones, this single plant would increase national carbon emissions by 10 %. After three long years of assessment, objections of civil associations and the public, regional Building authority has made a decision. There will be no black coal burning climate killer in Trebišov!

Protest before the building commission hearing. As Andrea put it "we were hard to miss!"

Shirley Atatagi, one our political advisors, is currently in Tuvalu for the King Tides Festival sends us another update from the Pacific. Read her previous blog post here

Today marks the first day of the Tuvalu King Tides festival. The festival slogan is a call to arms: “Tuvalu e! The tide is rising” King tides are a lunar phenomena that occurs once a year and leads to the highest tides in this part of the world. By ‘highest’ I mean higher-than-normal and that never used to be a big deal, except that ‘normal’ is evolving.

My Tuvaluan friends often talk to me about how high tides combined with strong winds at any time of the year are a big deal because the highest elevation point on Funafuti is less than 3 metres above mean sea level. Funafuti is both the capital of Tuvalu, and the name of the Atoll it stands on. According to Rev. Tafue Lusama, my friend and mentor who lives at one end of Funafuti, high tides combined with strong winds often means that they can’t travel anywhere because the waves will be breaking on the road. I could see evidence of this as we drove along the road today – to the side are pieces of coral, palm fronds and debris that’s been swept to the side to clear the road.