The overnight flooding in Cornwall, which police have called a “major incident”, was raised at Prime Minister’s Questions today. Mr Cameron described it as “a very difficult night” (though thankfully there are no reports of any casualties), praised the police and coastal services for doing a “fantastic job” and said the government “stand ready to help in any way that we can”.
NASA has announced that this year is the hottest year so far, just as climate scientists predicted it would be. This has been accompanied by the fastest decline in Arctic sea ice in satellite records, and other extreme weather events around the world, many of which were also predicted by climate scientists. It is against this backdrop that one of Britain’s most prominent climate change ‘sceptics’ has admitted he’s driven by “ideological war”.
The National Climate March takes place on the 4th of December – it’s the one time in the year we put as many people together as we can to say we need radical action to address the climate emergency, one simple thing we can do. This event doesn’t just happen – people work like crazy to make it happen – all you have to do is turn up, to make their work worthwhile.
At an International Policy Network seminar this week, Lord Giddens and Lord Lawson, chairman of the climate change-sceptics Global Warming Policy Foundation, once more rolled out the familiar climate change sceptic argument that there has been no global warming so far this century.
Last week Channel 4 set out to discredit and undermine the environmental movement with their documentary, ‘What the Green movement got wrong’, featuring a handful of individuals that most people have never heard of blaming environmentalists for everything from mass starvation to the spread of malaria to fuel poverty.
Of course critical documentaries have an important place in a democracy, but all the indications are that tonight’s broadcast will be just the latest example of C4 peddling a distorted view of the environment movement and the issues it cares about – nothing more than a cheap hatchet job aimed at generating controversy for controversy’s sake.
If Ed Miliband were to set out a radical programme for climate change that urged the EU to join forces with China to create a joint carbon market establishing an international price for carbon around the globe it could be a game changer. More than that: it could be a game changer that market makers in the US suddenly find threatening. America can resist any opposition to its policies. What it cannot take is being sidelined.
With less than one month to go until the return of the UNFCCC Climate negotiations, many are beginning to ask the question: Will the UN climate talks help save the planet or is it time to look elsewhere? Guppi Bola looks ahead to the Cancun conference.
On Thursday, the UN’s High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing is due to report back after eight months of deliberations on this thorniest of issues within the international negotiations.
Green issues just aren’t as central to the [Tories’] political offer as they once were; green issues are not needed to ‘de-toxify’, because Lib Dems do this.
