In 1991, a cyclone hit the coast of Bangladesh, coinciding with high tides that left 10 million people homeless and killed 139,000. Most of these people were living on mudflats in the deltas. People continue to live there in large numbers because they have nowhere else to go. But if sea levels continue to rise, many peasant farmers will have no land left. As many as 70 million people could be affected in Bangladesh, and a similar number in China. Millions more Egyptian farmers on the Nile delta also stand to lose their land.

Almost all the world's glaciers are now retreating. Permafrost in Alaska and Siberia, which has remained frozen since the last Ice Age, has started to melt. Parts of the Amazon rainforest are turning to savannah as the temperatures there exceed the point at which trees can survive. Coral reefs in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific have begun to wilt. The World Health Organisation estimates that 150,000 people a year are now dying as a result of climate change, as diseases spread faster at higher temperatures. All this is happening with just 0.6 degrees of warming.

Like most climate scientists, Sir Nicholas [Stern] seems to believe that if we want to avoid dangerous climate change, we should seek to prevent the global teamperature from rising by 2 degrees centigrade above its pre-industrial level. If we fail to do so, he says,'0.7 to 4.4 billion people' could suffer 'growing water shortages'. There is a high chance of 'falling crop yields in many developing regions'. The Amazon rainforest 'could be significantly, and possibly irrevocably, damaged'; 15-40% of the world's species face extinction; 'small mountain glaciers disappear worldwide', threatening water supplies; and there is the 'potential for the Greenland ice sheet to begin melting irreversibly, accelerating sea level rise and committing the world to an eventual 7 metre sea level rise'.

Professor Martin Parry of the UK's Meteorological Office estimates that a rise of just 2.1 degrees will expose between 2.3 and 3 billion people to the risk of water shortages. The disappearance of glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas will imperil the people who depend on their meltwater, particularly in Pakistan, western China, Central Asia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. As rainfall decresases, there are likely to be longer and more frequent droughts in southern Africa, Australia and other countries surrounding the Mediterranean.
The FAO warns that 'in some 40 poor, developing countries, with a combined population of 2 billion... [crop] production losses due to climate change may drastically increase the number of undernourished people, severely hindering progress in combatting poverty...'

It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks.

Researchers measured world carbon emissions from 1950 to 1986 and found that the United States, with about 5% of the world's population, was responsible for 30% of the cumulative emissions, whereas India, with 17% of the world's population, was responsible for less than 2% of the emissions. It is as if, in a village of 20 people all using the same bathtub, one person had shed 30% of the hair blocking the drain hold and 3 people had shed virtually no hair at all.

Two thirds of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originates from the G7 countries, with currently 13 per cent of the world’s population

Based on direct analysis of gases found trapped in cores of polar ice, it is known that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide for several thousands of years before 1750 was about 280 parts per million. Between 1750 and 2000, during which industrialisation has occurred, the concentration rose by about 31% to 368 parts per million. The IPCC report noted that the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years and that “the rate of increase over the past century is unprecedented, at least during the past 20,000 years

China is increasingly blamed for its levels of pollution in general, and its rising greenhouse gas emissions in particular. But it is demand from countries like the UK which leads to smoke from Chinese factories and power plants entering the atmosphere. Because China's energy mix is more fossil-fuel intensive than those of Europe, Japan or the USA, it also means that outsourcing to China creates more greenhouse gas emissions for each product made.
"As China is increasingly attacked because of its rising pollution levels, people overlook two important issues. First, per person, China's greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of those in Europe and the United States. Second, a closer look at trade flows reveals that a large share of China's rising emissions is due to the dependence of the rest of the world on exports from China - a Chinadependence," adds nef policy director, Andrew Simms.
"There is also the fact that a lot of heavy industry has simply relocated to China from apparently cleaner, richer nations - when our major retailers scour the world for the cheapest production costs, the result is that more greenhouse gases get pumped into the atmosphere for every product we buy."

In December 2004, Naomi Oreskes of the University of California at San Diego reported in the leading journal, Science, on her analysis of a sample of 928 papers published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 under the keywords "climate change"...

Of all the papers, 75% either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or climate issues in the geological past, taking no position on current human-induced climate change. Remarkably, not one of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

The principal mechanism for cutting carbon dioxide emissions is carbon trading, which essentially entails enclosure of the last remaining commons – the carbon absorption capacity of the atmosphere – by allocating property rights to those who are already destroying it. This is none other than a neoliberal extension of commodification of the atmosphere...

Two senior White House officials published an open letter seeking to correct inaccurate stories in the press 'that the President's concern about climate change is new'. 'In fact', they reported, 'climate change has been a top priority since the President's first year in office'. To prove it, they had found 37 words he said about the subject in 2001; 46 words in 2002, and 32 words in January 2007. In January 2007, he had even managed to say 'climate change'. This demonstrated, the claimed, that he has shown 'continued leadership on the issue'.

It was a case of getting seriously unjust desserts for one Plane Stupid activist last week. On Sunday 8th, cycling along a cycle path close to Heathrow in West London, she was randomly stopped and searched by police for no apparent reason. Although not carrying anything apart from a recipe for avocado ice cream and a cycle map, she was arrested under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and held, along with another campaigner, for over thirty hours before being bailed on charges of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. Must have been the threat of green ice cream.

Sir Rod Eddington, [former chief executive of British Airways] was asked to advise the government on the links between transport and the UK's economic growth. He found that even when the costs of climate change... are taken into account, the total costs of expanding the UK's airports and road networks are lower than the amount of money to be made. Though he never spelled it out in these terms... Eddington discovered that it makes economic sense for people to die in order that we can travel more.
Those who will feel most of the costs of climate change do not live in the United Kingdom... Eddington has decided that it makes economic sense for other people to die in order that we can travel more freely.

On one level there is absolutely nothing wrong with importing goods and services to meet our needs; but our eyes are bigger than our planet. If the whole world understandably wanted to copy our levels of consumption, we would need the resources of more than three planets like Earth. And, we only have one. Our economy and way of life need to make contact with the real world before we eat accidentally eat it whole.

The United States curreently produces more than 5 tons of carbon per person per year. Japan and Western European nations have per capita emissions that range from 1.6 tons to 4.2 tons, with most below 3 tons. In the developing world, emissions average 0.6 tons per capita, with China at 0.76 and India at 0.29. This means that to reach an 'even-handed' per capita annual emission limit of 1 ton of carbon per person, India would be able to increase its carbon emission to more than three times what they now are. China would be able to increase its emissions a more modest 33 per cent. The United States, on the other hand, would have to reduce its emissions to no more than one-fifth of present levels.

The grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol (240 kilograms of maize for 100 liters of ethanol) could feed one person for a year.

In February, two senior White House officials published an open letter seeking to correct inaccurate stories in the press 'that the President's concern about climate change is new'. 'In fact', they reported, 'climate change has been a top priority since the President's first year in office'. To prove it, they had found 37 words he said about the subject in 2001; 46 words in 2002, and 32 words in January 2007. In January 2007, he had even managed to say 'climate change'. This demonstrated, they claimed, that he has shown 'continued leadership on the issue.'

What the FrameWorks Institute found was startling. It found that the more people are bombarded with words or images of devastating, quasi-Biblical effects of global warming, the more likely they are to tune out and switch instead into "adaptationist" mode, focusing on protecting themselves and their families, such as by buying large vehicles to secure their safety.
FrameWorks found that depicting global warming as being about "scary weather" evokes the weather "frame" which sets up a highly pernicious set of reactions, as weather is something we react to and is outside human control... Also, focusing on the long timelines and scale of global warming further encourages people to adapt, encouraging people to think "it won't happen in my lifetime" and "there's nothing an individual can do".

* Junk mail in the U.S. accounts for one-third of all the mail delivered in the world
* More than 100,000,000,000 pieces of junk mail are delivered each year (that’s more than 800 pieces per household)
* The greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the manufacturing of the 6.5 million tons of paper required for junk mail annually is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 3.7 million cars
* More than 100 million trees a year are cut down and made into paper for junk mail. Those trees come from endangered forests like Canada’s Boreal and Indonesia’s rainforests

In keeping with the spirit of contemporary corporate awareness of environmental issues, BAE has started work on designing green munitions, lead-free bullets and rockets with reduced toxins. It said: ‘Lead used in ammunition can harm the environment and pose a risk to people.’ The company doesn’t make jokes and of course they’re right. Nobody wants to be shot with a bullet that pollutes the air it passes through or to be blown apart by a missile that contains toxic substances.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed to in 1992, and ... has been accepted by 181 governments... The developed nations committed themselves to 1990 levels of emissions by the year 2000, but this commitment was not legally binding. For the United States and several other countries, that was just as well, because they came nowhere near meeting it. In the US, for example, by 2000 carbon emissions were 14% higher than they were in 1990. Nor was the trend improving, for the increase between 1999 and 2000 was 3.1%, the biggest one year increase since the mid 1990s.

Nobel Laureate Henry Kendall, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists said: “Let there be no doubt about the conclusions of the scientific community that the threat of global warming is very real and action is needed immediately. It is a grave error to believe that we can continue to procrastinate.”
Shortly thereafter, ‘Hurricane Mitch’ wrecked Honduras, killing 11,000 people, in 1998. A year later, tens of thousands died in the ‘super cyclone’ that hit Orissa, India. In December 1999, 20,000 people were killed in Venezuela’s biblical floods, and many more in giant cyclones that have since struck Mozambique and Madagascar, with hundreds of thousands made homeless.