Their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

My exceedingly lazy analysis of the document (it is the third report to exonerate them, after all), the phrase ‘no evidence’ appears no less than 17 times. For die hards, Hot Topic does a good overview of the report.

More interesting to me was the gossip from George Monbiot, who himself had called for Phil Jones’ scalp:

Overall it shows, in most cases persuasively, that there is no evidence of fraud, manipulation or a lack of rigour and honesty on the part of the CRU scientists. The science is sound; the IPCC has not been compromised.

So was I wrong to call, soon after this story broke, for Jones’s resignation? I think, on balance, that I was. He said some very stupid things. At times he squelched the scientific principles of transparency and openness. He might have broken the law. But he was also provoked beyond endurance. I think, in the light of everything I’ve now seen and read, that if I were to write that article again I’d conclude that Phil Jones should hang on – but only just. I hope the last review gives him some peace.

Some peace indeed. All the scientists deserve it. And what about those New Zealand scientists who have been dragged through the mud by politicians hiding behind parliamentary privilege? Russel asked the other week if they would apologise and withdraw. I doubt it. At least Rupert Murdoch did.

I also doubt whether the frothing climate denial blogosphere here in NZ will apologise either. No doubt this is just more proof of the ever widening global conspiracy. These things tend to become a self fulfilling prophecy. We few who know the truth must stand against the whole world!  (and the scientific evidence)

Frankly, I’m over it. Unfortunately, man made climate change is far from over. It’s just beginning.

Even before the farce in Copenhagen began it was looking like it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent considerations than either the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.

Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.

Enough said really, but you can read the rest here.

George Monbiot continues to speak bluntly of the reality humanity faces in this article on the Copenhagen climate summit. I was sorely tempted to post the whole thing as I did recently with another here, but instead a few excerpts and I encourage you to read the rest:

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.   …

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.  …

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.  …

Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.  …

But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth – must begin. If governments don’t show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers’ weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest – the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world’s ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.

It really is time to wake up.

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.  …

It certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the science, which has hardened dramatically over the past two years. If you don’t believe me, open any recent edition of Science or Nature or any peer-reviewed journal specialising in atmospheric or environmental science. Go on, try it. The debate about global warming that’s raging on the internet and in the rightwing press does not reflect any such debate in the scientific journals.

Turning to well-known deniers and in particular, Clive James (yes, the other side has its celebs too), George further presses the case for the science.

Had he bothered to take a look at the quality of the evidence on either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing armies – climate scientists on one side, rightwing bloggers on the other – he too might have realised that the science is in. In, at any rate, to the extent that science can ever be, which is to say that the evidence for manmade global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer. I am constantly struck by the way in which people like James, who proclaim themselves sceptics, will believe any old claptrap that suits their views.  …

And then gets to the point.

Such beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, that it’s caused by humans or that it’s a serious problem. This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?

George refers to a 1973 idea by cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with “vital lies” or “the armour of character”, leading us to defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects.

One of the most arresting findings is that immortality projects can bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self that we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the physical self to greater danger.

He ends on an equally pessimistic note as that which he began.

And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?

Indeed, George.  And it seems to me we’re also not short of challenges dealing with those young enough not to be so concerned with their mortality as well.

Last week, George Bush agreed to lend $25bn to US car manufacturers. It’s a soft loan, which will cost the government $7.5bn (1). Few people noticed; fewer fought it. The House of Representatives approved the measure by 370 votes to 58. The great corporate bail-out is spreading like the plague.

It has already crossed the Atlantic. Yesterday European car makers demanded that the EU hand them E40bn ($54bn) in cheap loans to match the US subsidy(2). Where will the public spending spree end?

Monbiot then has a fairly detailed look at car makers’ failure to get to grips over the last decade with simple environmental measures such as reducing the average emissions (grams of CO2 per kilometre) produced by their cars.

 What makes this dithering so frustrating is that to be talking, in 2008, about targets of 130 or 120g/km is a bit like discussing whether modern computers should have ten rows of sliding beads or 100. In 1974 a stripped-down 1959 Opel T-1 managed 377 miles to the US gallon (160km/l)(17), which equates to 15 grams of CO2 per kilometre(18). There is no technical reason why the maximum limit for mass-produced cars shouldn’t be 50g/km.

Meanwhile, one company that doesn’t need bailing out by governments, and whose products get a lot less than 120 g of CO2 emissions per kilometre is Giant Manufacturing, “the world’s largest bicycle-maker which sold a record 460,000 units last month and is heading for its best year ever.”

Sadly we don’t have a strong local Kiwi-made bike industry here in New Zealand to compete with Giant (or a car manufacturing industry either for that matter). Which is a shame, because it is the sort of high-skilled, future focused industry that should have a place on our shores if we could only give it the support it needed to get established.  Giant shares are slightly down about 5 percent on their value from this time last year, whereas the Dow Jones industrial is down about 40 percent. Ford and General Motors are down 75 percent and 85 percent respectively. I know which one I think looks the best bet for  future investment as peak oil arrives.

The two players in the story are firstly Senegal, one of the poorest countries on the planet, where the people mostly eat fish. They get 70 percent of their protein from fish:

Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population that ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; about two-thirds of these workers are women.

and the European Union, whose people’s also like to eat fish:

The EU has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won’t confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to west Africa.

As a result, Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country’s waters fell from 95,000 tonnes to 45,000 tonnes. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.

That’s a lot of unnecessary hunger. So Senegal has responded by trying to refuse to allow European fishers to fish its waters. It isn’t getting a sympathetic hearing.

[European Trade Commissioner] Mandelson’s office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people.

These sorts of ‘national treatment’ clauses are the bedrock foundations of most all ‘free’ trade agreements, and probably the reason why local communities never seem to have much of a say in whether treaties should be signed or not.

Monbiot concludes:

None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but – in the short term, at any rate – we will hardly notice. The rich world’s governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.

Europe, like New Zealand, has plenty of waters in which it can grow and catch fish.   Both need either to change the amount and way we consume fish, and to invest in rebuilding fish stocks so that they can be sustainably caught. Despite our massive territorial waters New Zealand still buys a lot of ‘foreign’ fish. It’s absolutely wrong that countries that misuse their own food baskets should be able to use their comparative wealth to shelter themselves from their unsustainable mistakes at the expense of other, poorer peoples.

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession which is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch.

You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices. But I bet you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records. It beat the previous year’s by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people.

Monbiot passes by the obvious issues around the impact of unsustainable biofuels on food supply, and goes on instead to discuss the implications of meat consumption and the ethical response needed from omnivores. (His answer isn’t vegetarianism.)

Having waxed lyrical about Stiglitz’ support for Green policy last night, I simply fell off my lilly pad this morning when George came right out and endorsed voting for the Green Party in any country, even under the undemocratic First Past the Post (FPP) system like they have in the UK. He said that a vote for Labour was ambiguous because you may be voting against the conservatives, for a particular policy that rewards you or for no particular reason at all other than you always vote Labour. A Green vote, however, is completely unambiguous because it tells the politicians exactly where you stand on climate change, peak oil, social welfare, safe food, etc.

George had an interesting criticism of the global Green movement and it’s persistent call for localisation. He said that this was fine in almost all policy areas, (yeah!), but not in energy. He stated that humanity lives too far away from our natural ambient energy sources, (renewables like wind wave and sun), precisely because these are uncomfortable places for humans to live. (Deserts, mountain tops and oceans) Therefore we need energy infrastructure on a grand scale out there where our daily solar/wind energy budget is and the ability to transmit it back to where we live. This implies large scale projects that governments are particularly suited to pursuing. Only then can we get past the fossil age and still have significant energy for humanity. Food for thought!

He also stated that we are missing the point about the climate change debate. In human terms, it is about food and water for feeding humans, not about how high the seas will rise or how warm it will be in any particular place. Most of the effects of climate change are irrelevant in the face of large scale starvation and/or economic collapse.

With only a few minor technical glitches, the satellite feed was a huge success and clearly a glimpse of things to come.

If we accept the UN’s projection, the global population will grow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stop runaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent the overuse of resources. But compare this rate of increase to the rate of economic growth. Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by roughly 1600%.

The best solutions to population growth are generally thought to be access to education, food and housing and contraception for women and girls.  If women have control over their lives then the wellbeing of their communities as a whole improves.

But, as Monbiot notes, population is not the issue that we in countries like New Zealand face.  Our unsustainable growth which is threatening the planet is economic growth – wanting to consume more each year than we did the year before.

So, who’s to blame?  Well for a start Monbiot says you can’t lie this all at George W. Bush’s feet.  After all his team just copied the negotiating strategy adopted by Al Gore in 1997. But more importantly, and in a pleasing segue for New Zealand readers, Monbiot says the real solution is campaign finance reform:

“Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies which stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things… Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m.”

Which is healthy reminder that limiting and revealing campaign donations to politicians is as much about preventing big business from being able to buy policy outcomes as it is about ensuring a level playing field during elections.  Even if all parties were to receive the same amount of large hidden corporate donations the system would still be corrupt.

“Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.”