Apologies for blog-silence. For one reason and another I wasn’t able to blog for the last couple of weeks.
The question is – did you miss it? Or have you been reading, watching, listening to so much about climate change you are getting tired of the subject?
I am very concerned that the international community is accepting that there will be no legally binding agreement in Copenhagen. I am even more concerned that a lot of people are getting tired of the climate change topic and simply don’t care. Is there a danger of “overkill” in our media coverage? I was giving a training session to some young journalists yesterday and some of them told me about a project they were planning dealing with that very subject. They have the feeling that there is so much attention to the topic that global warming is starting to leave people cold. (Sorry!) People like me were pleased that climate change came onto the “mainstream” political and public agenda. But unless there is a big disaster – and a clear link to climatic factors – people are tending to “switch off”.
I’ve been speaking to friends in the UK about the latest floods in northern England. People are happy to blame politicians, local authorities or private companies for inadequate drainage or flood protection. Some say “it’s just nature”. But few are willing to even consider a possible link to scientists’s predictions of an increasing number of extreme weather events because of climate change.
Yvo de Boer from the UNFCCC is giving a major press conference today about the Copenhagen meeting. I don’t envy him his job. Trying to keep interest alive in view of the apparent concensus that Copenhagen will not “seal the deal” has something of the Sisyphean about it.

Well, the “last round” of official pre-talks to the Copenhagen extravaganza have also come to an end.
“Copenhagen can and must be the turning point in the international fight against climate change – nothing has changed my confidence in that,” says UN climate chief Yvo de Boer. Although there’s still no major progress on mid-term emissions targets and financing measures in the developing world, environmentalists like WWF are also trying to stay optimistic, saying a deal in Copenhagen could still be possible.
I talked to German climate expert Prof. Mojib Latif on his view of the current situation recently.
He says it would be “disastrous” if we didn’t get a good binding agreement at the December conference. In spite of all the negative stuff we’re hearing, he still hopes the industrialised countries will get their act together. He’s particularly critical of the USA. He’s one of this country’s leading experts on the subject – and one of the few who say things in a way the average person on the street can understand.You can read the rest here.
Interview with Mojib Latif