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.

Follow Jon on Twitter: @JonSnowC4

Two days now of rail travel on sun-kissed days in Southern England. Today to and from Brighton, and  yesterday, Cambridge. My dad went to Oxford. I didn’t have the Latin to go to either. I did go to school amid the dreaming spires, and had a sublime period of being Chancellor at Brookes, but Cambridge I hardly know.

I have done evensong in Kings, been to dinner with Amartya Sen in Trinity, never punted, and never stayed a night. So cycling through the town in a mad breeze of students and dons on bikes was an education – at speed. My destination was the archive at Churchill College where I’m working on some stuff from the 1980s.

The train to and from Cambridge was itself a breeze. The bike was tolerated aboard and so I was able to go from home to the College in an hour and twenty three minutes. The train was packed… every  doorway sported a bike askew. No storage space provided, but no awkward squad trying to throw you off with it either.

The Brighton train was different. A Gestapo style ban on ALL bikes. And when you arrive at London Bridge station, no obvious place to park the thing until you find there are platform racks AFTER the ticket barrier – presumably for all the machines they have just thrown off the trains.

Someone talks environment at us every day. Yet the obstacles to car free environmentally friendly travel are everywhere. In forty years of UK bike life I have seen little dramatic change – painted cycle lanes that run out; cycle parking hoops on pavements that are forever full; the glorious Boris bikes; York, Cambridge, and a few other urban beacons, but not much else.

It would take so little: compulsory bike spaces on ALL trains – urban streets with cycleways as an everywhere norm in every town and city linked up and integrated.

Like the politicians, it doesn’t do for objective journalists to talk of further restrictions on the lone motorist – car sharing; the complete re-jigging of congestion charging in all cities so that it more honestly reflects the environmental damage being wrought.

None of these are my ideas, they swill around the Department of Transport waiting for that day when the sky falls in and someone somewhere has to act.

This week’s publication of worse than anticipated global CO2 emissions may herald the sky falling in. 2010 was the worst year on record according to the International Energy Agency figures (published May 30th).

But we won’t believe it until it happens, that is, until the sky really does fall in. Will we then be able to breath, as we try to sort it out?

A dead body on a European mountain; a surfeit of fish off Iceland; and still more flooding in Pakistan and Niger.

The excitement over the body was restricted to the fact that it was that of a First World War soldier, still in his fatigues and boots, found on the highest peak in the Italian Dolomites. The fact that he’d been exposed by the retreating permafrost was a bit part player in the report.

It was in talking to the Icelandic fisheries minister on Thursday, that yet again the matter of climate change arose as a mere side-issue. Jon Bjarnason’s government is wrestling with the EU over fish quotas.

The steep rise in water temperatures off Iceland have a bigger part to play in delivering the unprecedented tonnage of mackerel than the careful husbanding and quotas established by the international community. Yet rather than wonder about the rising sea temperatures and the implications for mankind, the issue was restricted to the fish.

It is still raining in Pakistan, and the south is being inundated by what had already engulfed the north.

Understandably, the agony and suffering of the people has been paramount. But this is a wholly unusual event that goes far, far beyond heavy monsoon activity.

It is still raining in Niger – this dusty, sandy, Saharan state is awash from the capital city to the outback – after months and months of drought.

Four stories, four instances in just one week, in which climate change, global warming, and man’s involvement rear their head as central issues for debate.

Yet no one could emerge from this week thinking – this was a week when the world took note.

Sure they took note of the suffering, but of the threads beneath? Was it the disastrous Copenhagen Summit last year; the e-mail furore amongst climate change scientists, or the recession that dealt the blow?

Is the climate change debate dead? Or is it still to be had? It has certainly ceased to dominate the West’s current agenda. Why?

A prophetic ad in Copenhagen airport’s terminal 2 – picturing an Obama as old as Nelson Mandela, the caption reads ‘back in 2009 we could have turned the tide on global warming….we didn’t.’

It’s true, the climate change summit failed. On the opening day I talked to the UN chairman of the summit, Yvo de Boer. He told me that if the meeting did not conclude with clear global carbon emission targets and a specified date in June 2010, upon which to sign a legally binding climate change treaty, the summit would have failed.

There is to be no treaty in 2010 and no promise of one any time soon thereafter.

Barack Obama, who for the international community has for so many months ‘walked on water’, had a bad summit. His body language at the plenary, two hours after he landed, was ungracious. Instead of doing what the heads of government from every other attending state did – taking a seat in the belly of the hall – he entered somewhat ostentatiously from a door beside the stage. He left the same way, never therefore appearing to participate in the wider aspects of the summit at all.

Having talked so strongly of reengaging with the international community, Obama eschewed the UN run negotiations and conducted backroom deal making, picking off assorted heads of State – Brazil, India, China, South Africa and eventually announcing his decisions, not to the summit participants but to the world beyond.

His row with the Chinese over external monitoring of their carbon emissions claims served to obscure his own senate imposed failure to offer any hope of new and more radical immediate carbon emission levels inside America.

Indeed in facilitating the finger pointing against China with his emphasis on ‘transparency’, Obama retreated to that safe old Cold War territory of castigating the ‘other’ superpower – China becoming most assertively right now that new ‘other’.

On the plane home I had the good fortune to sit between ministers and delegates from Trinidad, St Lucia, and Nigeria. They confessed shock that Obama’s behaviour had appeared to them virtually interchangeable with George Bush’s. Although they concede that Obama does at least believe the science.

Yet these people were still buoyed by the reality that their voices had been heard even if rejected by what they termed ‘American and other big power arrogance’.

I find myself thinking of President Nasheed of the Maldives, holding court yesterday at a round table in the public area of the summit…beseiged by cameras, telling us the meeting was in trouble and that his country would be the first to pay for it.

His, and other small island states like Pacific Tuvalu, whose delegates, hailing from his 11,000 people, took six long days to make it to Copenhagen and who found his room given to someone else when he arrived.

But these guys believe they are at last in on a process and whatever failure the big powers may have authored in Copenhagen, there is no turning back from this inclusive global process that is begun…and they intend to continue it until it is thoroughly finished.

We northerners may concentrate on the new super power collision, but if we do so we are in danger of missing the other big moment that Copenhagen represents.

We have just glimpsed the new global order so many have dreamt of. The giving of voice to the left out, the forging of coalitions – north and south. It may LOOK like the old order, but the NEW is definitely there to be seen, if we want to look.

The most abiding and incurable aspect of the recession remains the 100,000′s of thousands of unemployed teenagers. As the government announces schemes to absorb them into training and ‘work creation ‘ programmes, I return to a theme I have blogged about in the past. The solution is staring government in the face.

You don’t need a ‘Climate Change Conference’ in Copenhagen to tell you that Britain remains one of the most inefficient and carbon emitting economies in the industrialised world – it’s just that people don’t notice because China and the US are so much worse.

Our inefficiency is rooted in our collective failure both to discover the scale of badly insulated housing, commercial, and industrial buildings in the country – and the will to do anything about it.

This is why I am thinking about how government could set up a programme that is not designed to employ young people, but is designed to inspire the nation to green its housing and commercial building stock.

The ‘GreenUK’ project would divide the country into its local authority constituent parts and then establish teams – ‘Green Teams’ of young people to make an inventory of every building in the country and its insulation needs.

Each team would be led by a more experienced team leader. There would be data bases established to manage the statistics from the operation.

A second wave of Green Teams, trained for the purpose, would be established to insulate the buildings on the basis of the needs established by the first wave of green teams.

Insulation is not a complex job – depending mainly on loft lagging and cavity wall injection.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognise that huge swathes of young unemployed could be asked to volunteer at minimum wage rates to undertake the work. The project would have to have the feel of saving ‘saving the planet’, ‘saving the nation’. It would require dedicated and inspiring leadership. The media would have to put its shoulder to the wheel.

But if the threat to the planet is as we are told it is by the Copenhageners and the threat to the futures of young people already on the dole queues is so great – combining both to green Britain by 2020 is a deliverable solution on both fronts.

It would also prove socio-economically cheaper than attempting to green Britain any other way, or employ the young any other way.

‘GreenUK’ – ‘Team Green’ . You KNOW it makes sense!

Bah humbug!

Cycling gives you an interesting perspective on how people feel about climate change. Am I imagining that more folks driving Porches, Bentleys and the rest are beginning to feel a little more shifty about what they are doing to the environment?

On a bike one often makes eye contact with drivers – these days I find that some drivers in the higher range gas-guzzling barouches are averting their eyes.

On the other hand there have always been those who look shifty in such vehicles. There’s always a slight suspicion that anyone who could splash out in excess of £50,000 for a car must have made the money by questionable means – drug dealing or white collar crime of some sort.

My renewed interest in these drivers may be a consequence of spending the last couple of weeks in Brazil and at the Copenhagen climate Change summit.

I’m suddenly actively looking for one of those domestic waste bins that are divided into colour-coded individual quadrants to make recycling easier.

Each quadrant can be separately removed from the bin – paper, plastic, glass, organic etc. Anyone know where you can find such a thing? I’ve seen them all over Portugal and in a few US hotels, and UK hospitals, but never in a UK home.

The most powerful sense I have is that Britain lags desperately in personal behaviour, particularly on recycling and alternative clean energy.

I have some solar panels, but it was a heck of a business getting hold of them and getting them fitted – and I’ve worked out that I will have to live to 87 before the panels pay for themselves and their installation!

Finally, are we finally seeing the retreat of the Christmas card? Every thump of the odd-sized envelope on the mat this year seems to feel like an anti-environmental act.

My own prejudice, having sent a few in the past, is to restrict them to nearest and dearest. I have started to enjoy what I once dreaded – the email card.

Must make me sound like Scrooge. This character I actually WILL be this Christmas – for one night only (20 December) – in Sandi Toksvig’s panto at the Royal Festival Hall (charitable proceeds to New Horizon – the young homeless project of which I am chair).

I am playing opposite the great Dane and Ronnie Corbett – I am learning my lines, and ensuring I go by bike.

UPDATE: 15.13

Wow – well LucyTweeting has fixed my recycling bin requirements and I promise not to bored you with too many requests. But as of next week I shall be equipped with exactly what I was after.

The winning bin was this one: http://www.homerecycling.co.uk/catalogue.php?product_id=222
Thank you.

JS

Goldman Sachs was right when, earlier this century, its chief economist came up with the concept of the BRIC economies…these were the big economies likely to make it into the top league in the first part of the 21st century: Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Some questioned whether Brazil should be there. After my first visit and a lot of ferreting and talking and traveling I certainly emerge convinced that this is a big country with a burgeoning economy, huge human capacity and much potential.

Sure, there are the problems – poverty, and the rain forest, but all in all there is a dependable if at times corrupt system of government.

The armed forces are in their barracks. Business is booming. Many rich Brazilians are investing in Brazil and many outsiders too. Growth is on track for more than five per cent next year.

So I leave Brazil an optimist. I awoke in the Amazon this morning to the sound of rain on my tin roof. Rain. This thirsty droughty land had waited an overdue month for them. By day break a watery sun greeted the day.

The monkeys scampered about, their feet rattling where the rain had fallen on the tin roofs. A speed boat dash across the 10 miles of Amazon to Manaus.

A quick pause at the opera house where the vast voiced Marcia Siqueira was in full flow rehearsing with piano, snare drum, and full string orchestra.

Magnificently ringing round the chandeliers, pouring off the gold leaf – such total romance! Now I shall have to hunt her records down as a tangible reminder of this extraordinary wilderness. The opera house itself built on rubber exports 100 years ago, is a fitting artifact, as sumptuous as the forest beyond.

And so to Sao Paulo, a plane change and Europe.

If it’s Monday, it’s Copenhagen and the climate change summit – Snowblogging from there.

I’m very conscious I haven’t blogged for a few days.

Partly a consequence of the gigantic scale of Brazil – every night is spent flying and manoeuvring to get somewhere deep into the issues on climate change ahead of Copenhagen.

I’m sitting in the early morning sun on the far side of the Amazon (ten miles wide at this point) south of the city of Manaus. City it is – 1.5 million souls.

Enriched by rubber in the 1900s it sports the improbable and glorious Opera House with its chandeliers Roco gold trim and plush red velvet 700 seats.

But in other ways it’s a sad and jumbly place.

Fish and chainsaws seem to be the market staples. A whole street of chainsaw stalls – heaven preserve us and the Amazon tree! The drought has killed trees and reduced carbon absorption.

Steam is rising from the waters; monkeys, tiny ones, dash about; parrots squawk; alligators glide, just their eye balls peeping above the waters.

Why should Utopia sit in the heart of global dispute about the future of our plant? Come back Graham Greene all is forgiven!

This is his kind of a place. There’s a pantile roofed cathedral and the priests etched dark against grimy stucco walls.

Oh well, soon to the pristine cleanliness of Copenhagen.

Can’t say it feels very optimistic.

Got to dash there’s a fisherman with a bow and arrow waiting to take me to observe his way of life, untouched by time.

A week in Brazil – an emotional roller coaster of an experience. Life in the shanty favellas is so completely deprived of the mod cons we in the North take for granted yet when people emerge from the side alleys onto the built up streets of Sao Paulo, they are meticulously dressed in beautifully laundered skirts, blouses, jeans and T-shirts.

I visited Vuilmer who has a husband and five of her 11 children living with her in her 10-foot-by-10-foot dank room beneath a muddy Favella path. There’s a loo in an alcove at the back and an oven and basin under the crumbling stairs up to the street.

Amilcare Dalevo’s helicopter, which he pilots himself, lands from his condominium home, on his downtown office block. He’s one of hundreds of executives here who commute by helicopter (there are over 200 helipads in Sao Paulo). I took a flight with him to his suburban condominium.

My sense of direction couldn’t quite locate Vuilmer’s favella shack but the contrast between the Italian-built helicopter, the omnipotent corporate magnate at the controls, and her wretched life below took me to the core of the cavernous ravine that exists between Brazil’s rich and her poor.

It’s here that I have come to understand Brazil’s President Lula’s belief that you cannot combat global climate change without combating global poverty, that the two are inextricably linked. That in a globalised world, you simply cannot have the rich (be they countries or persons) consuming wanton quantities of everything, to the exclusion and pollution of the poor.

I’ll be blogging tomorrow on Lula but for now I have one last observation before our Brazil Week kicks off on Channel 4 News, that as a reporter I have been dispatched all my life to sudden natural disaster, to summits, to wars, and to pestilence, political and physiological.

I have rarely been sent to report so tangible yet abstract a subject as global warming. Being here ahead of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, looking North, is an extraordinary experience.

For Brazil has no border war, no civil war..though it has gangs and numerous killings.

Brazil is booming, rendering the poor slightly less poor and rich even richer, the country has masses of agricultarual land and potential for more.

Its burden in a sense, is the precious Amazon rain forest size of the EU’s territory and preventing the logging, tree clearances, cattle ranching, and soya cropping that threaten to destroy it (18 per cent of it is already gone forever).

Is it news? Of course it is, it is happening and is largely unreported both as a crisis and, in Brazil, as a country.

Coming here I am more convinced than ever, that this is the most important story mankind needs to know. Above war, above swine flu, above the tittle-tattle of celebrity.

We are confronted by an historic choice. If we fail now our own children grandchildren will pay the price and their children may not live their full span to see its eventual consequence.

MANAUS, BRAZIL – I’m writing this in darkness on the roof of the Palace Hotel (a misnomer!) where we are staying here in Manaus.

We are a world away from Sao Paolo – or should I say a four hour flight – yet still well inside Brazil. That gives you a sense of the size of the place.

This is the heart of the Amazon region, itself at the very heart of the Copenhagen climate change talks. They are relieved here to learn that Obama is finally going to be there if, rather curiously, in the middle of the thing rather than at what many hope will be a climactic ending.

The battered white Amazon steamers and ferries are drawn up against the promenade below me the twinkling street lights dance on the water – a breadth of water so wide it’s almost an unending fast moving muddy lake.

And what is man up to here? For a start he and she are here in vast profusion, a million and a half of them. And yet here it has the feel of a developing country. The multi-ethnic Brazil of Sao Paolo has given way to a more homogenous Amazon Indian ethnicity.

Many have the appearance of having come from the rural poor, drawn here by industry – rubber – and on the run from those who have stolen their lands and felled the trees.

Here there are few tower blocks. What man is doing, heaven help us, is constructing a gigantic bridge to span these waters and carry the dreaded car across to the virgin forest wastes on the other side. The pylons stand like match sticks in the water a mile down river from here. It will be a graceful structure, one must hope it serves no disgraceful future.

The shops are poor, the market extensive, rambling and packed. Each shop and stall seems to sell much the same as the last – Christmas decorations, cooking pots, towels and cheap nylon garments. In this heat! In this humidity!

We are on the equator and you drip from every pore, your hair is soaked. We could be in Nigeria, in Calcutta, in Burma, but we are in thrusting cutting-edge Brazil. Brazil with its space programme, its helicopter commuters, its Samba dancers and its bankers.

Yes, rich Brazil and its rain forests (a stretch of trees nearly the size of Wales is felled every years to make way for cattle farming).

Suddenly we are at the very epicentre of what Copenhagen is all about. It is about this vast CO2-sapping country with its ethanol and its dams and its surging carbon-emitting development. What combustion.

So what answer can we give Brazil? Cut your emission, we can’t but you could? No, they will have to do better than that and much better than Obama’s paltry offer of, in effect, a six per cent reduction of emissions on 1990 levels. By 2020.

It’s all to play for and this country is in the thick of it. Pay us to keep our trees up to sustain the world’s lungs, goes the cry. And why not? Take a look at the matter of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) – it’s one bit of Copenhagen that may get through.