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

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre in Washington of 1,500 people shows the percentage of US-Americans who believe in global warming has dropped drastically from 77% to 57% in just two years.
Only 57% believe there is real scientific evidence that the atmosphere is getting hotter.Only 36% believe human activity is the cause.
The Guardian’s US correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg quotes Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew centre as saying the economic crisis and the health care debate in the USA have squeezed the environment and climange issues out of people’s focus. But others, including James Hoggan, the author of “Climate Cover-Up” say there’s a a clever lobbying campaign going on to mislead people about climate science.
One way or other, this is bad news at a time when the US Senate is debating climate change laws this week. With a lot of media attention being devoted to the 1st anniversary of President Obama’s election, it would be great to be able to say public awareness of the urgency of the climate issue in the USA has risen. The fact that the opposite seems to be the case does not bode well for Copenhagen.
The Guardian’s report on the Pew survey
Pew Centre homepage

Apologies for “blog-silence”, I’ve been on an autumn break, enjoying the “golden October” weather we’ve been having here in Germany. Not that you ever really have a break from the climate change issue these days. For one reason and another, it seems to have become an everyday issue, from people wondering whether the thick frost we’ve been having in our area is “normal” to the nature documentaries on tv and the media in general either stressing the importance of a climate deal or telling us Copenhagen won’t work anyway, given governments’s preoccupation with the financial situation.
Some of the conservation groups are suggesting the world’s politicians and influential lobby groups are actively preparing us for a failure in Copenhagen to soften the blow if no legally binding agreement is achieved.
The latest EU discussions on Copenhagen don’t exactly make me optimistic.Ultimately, it comes down to the political will to cut emissions drastically and fund adaptation programmes in the developing world. The lack of a firm commitment to figures bodes ill.
In my efforts to balance my natural optimism with observations of political reality, I find myself struggling to believe we can reduce emissions to the necessary extent. I wish somebody could give me reason to be more positive?
The UN climate secretariat has just published the official emissions figures for 2007. (There’s that frustrating time lag when it comes to publishing data). “The continuing growth of emissions from industrialised countries remains worrying, despite the expectation of a momentary dip brought about by the global recession”, says climate chief Yvo de Boer. He says (he has to, really) this underscores the need for a “comprehensive, fair and effective climate change deal in Copenhagen in December”. Too true. I wish our decision-makers would come up with the decisive action (and funding) to make it happen.

According to the official source, the UNFCCC, the latest round of climate talks in Bangkok have led to more clarity on the “bricks and mortar” of a Copenhagen agreement. But when it comes to actually reducing emissions from industrialised countries in the mid-term and finance to help developing countries limit their emissions growth and adapt to the inevitable effects of climate change, even Climate Chief Yvo de Boer – an optimist by nature and profession – has to admit little progress was made. And we all know these are key issues.
WWF said the text for the Copenhagen climate agreement was “shorter but not much sweeter”. Kim Carstensen, the organisation’s climate intiative leader, like de Boer sees some technical progress, but still huge political hurdles when it comes to governments committing to emissions cuts and providing funding for the developing world.
The WWF is calling for another meeting of heads of state before the Copenhagen talks. Yvo de Boer is calling for “bold leadership” to “open the roadblocks around the essentials of targets and finance so that the negotiators can complete their journey”.
There are still the grand total of five official negotiating days ahead of Copenhagen , at a meeting in Barcelona, Spain. The “meetings to prepare the meetings” are clearly anything but mere “talk-shops”, plenty of hard work on the nitty-gritty. I don’t envy the people who have to argue over every word, figure or comma.
The lack of a bill from the United States Senate is one major hurdle to progress towards a new agreement. Good will alone will not make for an agreement without the necessary political backing from home. WWF is also calling for a clearer stance from the EU.
It looks to me like the overall message at the end of the Bangkok talks is that things are moving forward – but not nearly fast enough to guarantee the breakthrough in Copenhagen that would bring about the cuts in emissions the IPCC says we need – and there is no shortage of experts who say those targets themselves are no longer tough enough.