Dateline: Copenhagen

Climate activists demonstrate outside the negotiation hall.

Negotiators have proposed not to amend the Kyoto Protocol or create a new legally binding successor treaty under the convention, but rather aim at a “political agreement” as the outcome of this conference. The progress has led Tuvalu to propose halting the negotiation process.

Demonstrators, whose access to the plenary halls has been restricted, rallied in support of Tuvalu. They also threw their support behind a growing developing country demand that negotiators create a treaty limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above industrial levels. Current projections suggest climate change could create an atmosphere up to three to four times as warm.

Tuvalu, a series of low-lying islands, faces the very real possibility that a cyclone or sea level rise will submerge their nation underwater. The United Nations does not recognize peoples without land.

“If their land disappears, their nation disappears,” said Fanny Heros of Alofa Tuvalu, a French solidarity group.

In the video, UN security guards record demonstrator’s names. They recorded mine, too, although I was only filming. Why? “You are involved,” I was told. My response: “You are involved as much as I am.”

Oct 24: International Day of Climate Action

350.org, an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis, is organizing a global day of action on October 24, 2009. The focus of the campaign is on the number 350 – as in parts per million, the level scientists have identified as the safe upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere. As of right now, there are close to 1800 actions happening in 140 countries, as our friend Bill McKibben, founder and Director of 350.org, writes in a letter we just received. Worldwatch supports the goals of the 350 degree campaign and its events on October 24. Read McKibben’s letter, posted below.

Take Action October 24^th

By Bill McKibben

For the last 20 years or so, there’s been a reasonable excuse for not building a movement big and tough enough to tackle climate change: It had no chance. Washington was filled with such obstructionists that everybody knew meaningful change on a scale large enough to dent the carbon concentration in the atmosphere was pretty much doomed.

Well, we screwed up that excuse last November. With the advent of the Obama administration, there was suddenly at least the possibility of real change. It’s populated by people who believe in science, who think about the future instead of obsessing over the past, and who even believe in working with other countries.

But it would be utterly foolish to imagine they can do what they need to do by themselves.

For one thing, the scale of change required is so massive it must frighten even Barack. Look, in the last couple of years the science has been unremittingly dark. We now know that global warming is not a future problem—that it’s crashing over our heads right now. We know that from the evidence around us: the melting Arctic ice, the rapidly dying forests of the north, the spike in methane releases from beneath the tundra. And we know it from our best scientists: James Hansen and his team at NASA have said, unequivocally, that any concentration of carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible with the planet “on which civilization developed and to which life is adapted.” That’s Not Good News, since the current level is 387 parts per million and rising. That’s Not Good News because it means that we need to move very, very fast—Hansen’s data indicates that if the planet hasn’t stopped burning coal by 2030, we’ll overwhelm the planet’s systems and never get back where we need to go.

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