Whatever happened to climate change?
I knew we were in trouble when I approached the policeman’s desk in the central lobby. There was a scrum of people trying to find out which committee room we were supposed to be in. The politician who’d booked the room had realised it was too small. Another room was found, but that too proved to be too small.
The scrum was to get onto a meeting in the House of Lords on climate change.
I was chairing a panel that included the former Irish President, Mary Robinson, and Dr David Nabarro, Ban-ki-Moon’s point man on global food security. Mrs Robinson proved to be inspirational. She has set up the Mary Robinson Foundation dedicated to securing “climate justice” for the forgotten victims of climate change – “the poor, the disempowered and marginalised across the world”.
What struck me was the enthusiasm and the youthfulness of the throng in the room. There wasn’t a seat to spare – maybe 120 people sitting, and many others standing crammed around the walls, or squatting on the floor. Beyond myself there wasn’t a single media person there.
The subject was Cop17 – the next UN Climate Change Conference to try to fix what follows the evaporating Kyoto Protocols. A week earlier I had chaired a similar panel at the British Medical Association – it was the same picture, only climate change.
Copenhagen – the trauma of failure
There is a public out there for whom climate change is their passion. But where is the media? What happened to the succession of coherent reporting that accepted ‘climate change’ as a dangerous threat to us all – and man’s role in it – in the build up to the Copenhagen summit two years ago?
Did the American rooted “climate change denial” movement have more effect than we knew? Does it still? For myself, having been Copenhagen, I remember the optimism in the build up. I remember meeting President Mohamed Nasheed and listening to his passionate advocacy of tough new protocols amid the rising sea levels that threaten the very existence of his nation.
Finally I remember the trauma of failure, the dank, dark cloud of despair that gripped diplomats, politicians, scientists and journalists alike as agreements fell apart and the summit ended in calamitous failure.
Neither we, nor the issue have recovered. I have not computed the minutes, or the column inches, but I sense that the reportage of climate change has reduced. Beyond Copenhagen, the confused and curious email traffic out of the offices of key scientists at the University of East Anglia played their part in weakening resolve together with the vast and effective manipulation of their content by opponents of the science of man’s involvement in climate change.
Out of the smoke and steam of failure, inspired political and scientific leadership are needed if the cause is to be rebooted. Only then will the media begin to revive interest. In our hour of economic misery in the north, the poor and the disempowered in the south, that Mary Robinson and President Nasheed are giving voice to, will not be heard without exceptional effort from within our own political and media cohorts.
Last Wednesday in the Lord’s Committee Room 12, I think I glimpsed it. Watch that space.