What you can do
From the blog
Where are our leaders letting us down?
Earlier this week more than 20 Greenpeace volunteers climbed the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona to tell governments meeting here ahead of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen to "save the climate".
Yesterday Ed Miliband added his voice to the chorus coming from many EU and US officials saying that he's concluded that there won’t be a legally binding agreement at Copenhagen next month. By his measure a proper deal faces a delay of at least six months, and probably more.
From this it would seem that warm words and a warming world are now all we can look forward to from the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Over the past few weeks our political leaders have scrambled to lower expectations. This statement marks a new low. A year ago Copenhagen was going to be it, our best opportunity to avoid unprecedented climatic disaster. Now, we are being told it will be talks about more talks.
Save the Arctic or lose the polar bears
So I was thinking about polar bears the other day. They're not my normal topic for musing while dodging London traffic on my bicycle, but I was thinking about them because a friend told me something I just couldn't believe. She said that polar bears could be the first mammals to lose their entire habitat to climate change. I was shocked. Polar bears have no natural predators. They're on the top of the food chain. They're perfectly adapted to the inhospitable Arctic environment, but now their icy home is disappearing beneath their paws because of our carbon polluting lifestyles.
President Lula plays ball with us over Copenhagen
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"The problem is your European game is too slow and stilted" - Lula might have been saying.
So it's not every day that you tackle the president of Brazil dressed as a member of his national football team. Or at least, I don't. (Tackle in a very metaphorical sense, I should say.)
But when you want to attract Lula's attention in order to tell him that he should really go to Copenhagen in December to push for a strong climate deal, the legendary prowess of the Brazilians at football is an obvious avenue to go down.