Federico Pistono

A few hours before the flight it always feels kind of strange. A sense of excitement, coupled with the sweet taste of what could be coming starts to invade you. You begin to image everything that you want to do: people to meet, palces to go, photos to take, amazing interviews... you fantasize about the live reporting that you will be doing and create a mental scheme for the blog posts to come.

Then, your face hits the hard wall of reality. The enthusiasm of thousands of bloggers, activists and journalists may be not enough: there is simply not space for them.

Al Jazeera journalist Jonah Hull explains the situation, in a twitter-style reporting:

Delegates, campaigners and journalists trapped outside the Copenhagen climate conference as summit is oversubscribed.

Goodness knows what's actually happening inside the Bella centre in Copenhagen. I have reports of course, but that's it.

I can tell you what's happening outside. Hundreds, perhaps more, newly-arrived, accredited delegates, campaigners and journalists crowded in the cold waiting to collect their passes to enter. Many have waited for hours, laden with laptop bags, satchels and briefcases, tempers sharpening.

My first taste of the chaos was at the airport, waiting for the COP 15 shuttle bus to whisk us to the conference in very good time.

A man turned up and warned us he'd been waiting in a queue at the Bella Centre for six hours this morning only to be told accreditation was temporarily closed. He told us not to bother trying. But we proceeded.

At the Bella Centre we were barred from even joining the throng for accreditation.

I was unable to reach a colleague who'd been in the queue for eight hours, with no end in sight. The policeman was polite but unflinching. Maybe tomorrow morning, he said. Maybe? We will have to get there very, very early.

The evening Danish news has a report saying the venue is now full, no one else will be allowed in. The leaders themselves haven't even arrived yet.

I'm told 45,000 people have been accredited in all. The venue only has a 15,000 capacity and already 30,000 are attending. More are arriving all the time as the summit enters its most fraught and crucial final period.

One woman grumbled bitterly into her mobile phone in Spanish. I couldn't hear the detail but she repeatedly and loudly stressed the word 'cojones'. One can only guess.

You have to wonder at the organisers' competence here. How on earth can they be entrusted with saving the planet?

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

A few weeks ago I made a short video for the YouTube/CNN debate, asking to include water in the list of priorities at the COP15.

I was surprised to see an excerpt of my video in the official reel, which has been viewed more then 170 thousand times.

The two winners will be selected by public voting on YouTube from Nov 6-30, and may be aired in front of world-leaders and decision makers in this global TV debate on climate change. If you want to vote for my video follow these instructions:

• Go to http://www.youtube.com/cop15
• Click "vote"
• search for a specific video and write "Priority number one"
• Vote with the thumb up (green button)

:D

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Guess what?

A couple fo days ago an editor of the Huffington Post, the first blog in the world, asked to to take part in the competition for becoming Hopenhagen Ambassador at the COP15.

I made a small 1-minute video, here's to link for voting:
http://bit.ly/8WkZVd

Vote 10 ;)

I'm getting a little confused. Just when you thought things would eventually get better for the COP15, there it comes. First Obama warns that there will be no deal: we're out of time. Then John Prescott encourages us explaining why the Copenhagen conference will be 10 times more difficult than Kyoto, finally the consideration that the US is a dead weight on Copenhagen talks, pulling down ambition ever lower. All of this just in the last three days.

Magic of Life by victor_nuno (CC-BY-NC).

Now, we come to know that the US and China, the world's two biggest polluters with over 40% of the emissions, today said they aimed to set targets for easing greenhouse gas emissions next month, potentially breathing new life into the flagging Copenhagen climate negotiations ¹.

This continuous ping pong, while expected, is making me very suspicious, as well as frustrated. But I can understand that their position is not as easy one. On my side, it's all pretty simple. Identify the problem, look for solutions, apply them. Unfortunately, when you are in politics, things are far from being this easy. Obama and Jintao had a lot to talk about: Tibet, human rights in China, internet censorship, trade, Iran. And then, of course, climate change.

Being a politician, especially at this level, is very much like being a juggler: you need to keep things in balance, you have may balls in your hands, each of which plays a role in the success of the performance, and if you don't pay enough attention, they will fall to the ground. However, there is a catch: the balls are connected with a wire. That means, if you let one down, they all fall.

We all play a role in this big game: the outraged blogger, the "evil corporation", the corrupt politician, the environmental activist... but in the end, we are all people. We all have the same final goal: preserve life on this planet, especially ours. If you have any notion of biology, however, you would know that species are inter-connected, and that we can't live by ourselves. In the face of the obliteration of the species, economic growth, profit, class, the old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervor, seem utterly irrelevant. Some of us just seem to forget what's most important.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

I wanted to write about this since October 10, when I read Richard Black's BBC article
'Scary' climate message from past, then for some reason it slipped away. My interest came back after looking at Vitezslav' hilarious post 5000 ppm: What happens when CO₂ levels are 20 times higher?. I say hilarious not a disrespectful way, but in true meaning: some of the phrases pronounced really made me laugh out loud.

How about the CO₂ is green advertising-like catch-up spot?

Save the plants! Support more CO₂ emissions! Maybe instead the 350.org campaign we should start some 3500.org campaign.

Or the even better false syllogisms (please forgive him, Aristotle), such as:

Life is based on carbon. Declaring carbon as a "pollutant" is the greatest insanity in history. It is like declaring life a pollutant.

I could not help but reading again Adela's excellent post on the subject Flashnews: CO₂ is green and noticing how we seem to take a direction and follow that path without considering other people's work. Adela's made some very sensitive social remarks and presented unequivocal facts, which were mainly ignored and the questions remained unanswered.

So, what can we learn from the past? In the last few million years CO₂ concentration cycled between 180ppm and 280ppm in rhythm with the sequence of ice ages and warmer interglacial periods.

Scientists have been able to map relatively well the last 800,000 years from ice cores drilled in Antarctica, but now a new research allows us to look back in time 20 million years, to the Miocene period.

Data came from samples brought up by
the drilling ship Joides Resolution (BBC)

At the start of the period, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere stood at about 400 parts per million (ppm) before beginning to decline about 14 million years ago - a trend that eventually led to formation of the Antarctic icecap and perennial sea ice cover in the Arctic.

"What we have shown is that in the last period when CO₂ levels were sustained at levels close to where they are today, there was no icecap on Antarctica and sea levels were 25-40m higher," said research leader Aradhna Tripati from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

"At CO₂ levels that are sustained at or near modern day values, you don't need to have a major change in CO₂ levels to get major changes in ice sheets," she told BBC News.

This amount of CO₂ on the air and sea levels were associated with temperatures about 3-6^o C higher than today.

"This is yet another paper that makes the future look more scary than previously thought by many," said Jonathan Overpeck, who co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) work on ancient climates for the organisation's last major report in 2007.

"If anyone still doubts the link between CO₂ and climate, they should read this paper." I think they are referring to "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis". It's 996 pages long, and some of the best scientists in the World contributed to it. Before posting any more pro-CO₂ propaganda, maybe you should take a look at it.

"We can say that we've identified past tipping points for ice sheet stability; the basic physics governing ice sheets that we've known from ice cores are extended further back, and... I think we should use our knowledge of the physics of climate change in the past to prepare for the future."

"But what this new work suggests is that... efforts to stabilise at 450ppm should avoid going up above that level prior to stabilisation - that is, some sort of 'overshoot' above 450ppm on the way to stabilisation could be playing with fire."

This concern is shared by other people and organisations alike. Low-lying countries such as The Maldives, Palau and Grenada, and of course 350.org, are pushing for adoption of the much lower figure of 350ppm.

Let's hope this position will be shared at the COP15 by the big five as well: China, India, US, Japan and Europe.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.