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| Yemen divided Crises multiply for beleaguered Sanaa government news.bbc.co.uk |
If you want to know who's to blame for Copenhagen, look to the US Senate | George Monbiot Obama's attempt to put China in the frame for failure had its origins in the absence of American campaign finance reformThe last time global negotiations collapsed like this was in Doha, in 2001. After the trade talks fell apart, the World Trade Organisation assured delegates that there was nothing to fear: they would move to Mexico, where a deal would be done. The negotiations ran into the sand of the Mexican resort of Cancún, never to re-emerge. After eight years of dithering, nothing has been agreed.When the climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last week, Yvo de Boer, the man in charge of the process, urged us not to worry: everything will be sorted out "in Mexico one year from now". Is Mexico the diplomatic equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch: the place where failed negotiations go to die?De Boer might pretend that this is just a temporary hitch, but he knows what happens when talks lose momentum. A year ago I asked him what he feared most. This is what he said. "The worst-case scenario for me is that climate becomes a second WTO … Copenhagen, for me, is a very clear deadline that I think we need to meet, and I am afraid that if we don't then the process will begin to slip, and like in the trade negotiations, one deadline after the other will not be met, and we sort of become the little orchestra on the Titanic."We can live without a new trade agreement; we can't live without a new climate agreement. One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated. So here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places which can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was 4C. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the body that summarises the findings of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production "is very likely to decrease above about 3C". The panel uses the phrase "very likely" to mean a probability of above 90%. Unless a strong climate deal is struck very soon, the probable outcome is a rise of 3C or more by the end of the century.Even in higher latitudes the habitable land area will decrease as the sea level rises. The likely rise this century – probably less than a metre – is threatening only to some populations, but the process does not stop in 2100. During the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, the average global temperature was about 1.3C higher than it is today, as a result of changes in the earth's orbit around the sun.A new paper in the scientific journal Nature shows that sea levels during that period were between 6.6 and 9.4 metres higher than today's. Once the temperature had risen, the expansion of sea water and the melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica was unstoppable. I wonder whether the government of Denmark, whose atrocious management of the conference contributed to its failure, would have tried harder if its people knew that in a few hundred years they won't have a country any more.As people are displaced from their homes by drought and rising sea levels, and as food production declines, the planet will be unable to support the current population. The collapse in human numbers is unlikely to be either smooth or painless: while the average global temperature will rise gradually, the events associated with it will come in fits and starts – in the form of sudden droughts and storm surges.This is why the least developed countries, which will be hit hardest, made the strongest demands in Copenhagen. One hundred and two poor nations called for the maximum global temperature rise to be limited not to 2C but to 1.5C. The chief negotiator for the G77 bloc complained that Africa was being asked "to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries".The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama.The man elected to put aside childish things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal that outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation: either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown.The British and US governments have blamed the Chinese government for the failure of the talks. It's true that the Chinese worked hard to mess them up, but Obama also put Beijing in an impossible position. He demanded concessions while offering nothing. He must have known the importance of not losing face in Chinese politics: his unilateral diplomacy amounted to a demand for self-abasement. My guess is that this was a calculated manoeuvre guaranteed to produce instransigence, whereupon China could be blamed for the outcome the US wanted.Why would he do this? You have only to see the relief in Democratic circles to get your answer. Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible.So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn't do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you.Is this music not to your taste, sir, or madam? Perhaps you would like our little orchestra to play something louder, to drown out that horrible grinding noise.Copenhagen climate change conference 2009Climate changeUnited StatesBarack ObamaChinaGeorge Monbiotguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
In pictures Swimming for life in Vietnam's Mekong Delta news.bbc.co.uk |
Welcome judgment on stop and search | Henry Porter Henry Porter: The European Court of Human Rights ruling against the use of Section 44 stop and search powers is hugely importantThe decision by the ÂEuropean court of human rights to find against the use of section 44 stop and search powers because they lack proper safeguards against abuse is of immense importance for civil liberties in Britain. Not only is the specific practice of random search rendered illegal by the court but its judgment focuses attention on the increasing abuse of measures brought in by the Terrorism Act 2000, and the resentment of the public.It is interesting that the government has said it is disappointed with the ruling and will seek to appeal, because it has already ignored an equally categÂorical decision in 2008 concerning the retention of innocent people's DNA. However, the case brought by Pennie Quinton and Kevin Gillan, protesters stopped in 2003 outside an arms fair in London, is going to be extremely difficult to ignore, for the simple fact that so many people find themselves being stopped.Last year about 250,000 people were stopped – about 700 a day. This jumped by one third in 2008. There has been a steady increase since the first year of the Act, when just 10,200 were stopped. Even Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of terror legislation, who normally supports a tough government line, suggested that implications of the ruling were quite serious and added that Section 44 was being used far too much.In 2006, the House of Lords unanimously dismissed the pair's case with this: "In particular, the Law Lords were doubtful whether an ordinary superficial search of the person could be said to show a lack of respect for private life, so as to bring article 8 of the European convention on human rights into operation. Even if article 8 did apply, the procedure was in accordance with the law and it would be impossible to regard a proper exercise of the power as other than Âproportionate when seeking to counter the great danger of terrorism.The European court disagreed and said it was "struck by the statistical and other evidence showing the extent to which police officers resorted to the powers of stop and search under section 44 of the act and found that there was a clear risk of arbitrariness in granting such broad discretion to the police officer". The judgment finds that a public search clearly interferes with the right to a private life, that it creates humiliation and embarrassment, and that there were not sufficient safeguards against arbitrary use by the police. The court highlighted that the failure to oblige police officers to show reasonable suspicion makes it impossible to prove that the powers were improperly used.Quinton and Gillan, who with Liberty should be praised for their stamina and tenacity on this crucial issue, lodged their appeal against the House of Lords decision five years ago. The wait has been worth it. Here is another significant part of the judgment: "While the present cases did not concern black applicants or those of Asian origin, the risks of the discriminatory use of the powers against such persons was a very real consideration and the statistics showed that black and Asian persons were disproportionately affected by the powers."Last year it was revealed that since May 2007 the number of searches under section 44 powers had risen by 322% for black people, 277% for Asian people, but only 185% for white people. The result was that police reportedly increased the searches in order to balance racial quotas, in one instance mounting an operation at the entrance of the British Library in London.This is a very welcome judgment and I cannot believe a government that introduced the Human Rights Act with so much fanfare is seeking to appeal it.Stop and searchCivil libertiesLawTerrorism policyHenry Porterguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Making Sense of the New Political Anger There is a widening divide in American politics, exemplified by the purist Tea Party brigades on the right and disillusioned populism on the left. feeds.nytimes.com |