Global warming? But it’s SNOWING! How d’you explain THAT etc etc etc.

Glad to see one of these marches being held on a weekend for once, although it’s still not much help to we who live outside the capital. I guess we provincals should get our act together.

Help us spell out a message for Zero Carbon by 2030

I hope someone brings a good dictionary………..

Sunny, how does making Britain a zero carbon economy fit with your opposition to the slow down in the growth in total Government expenditure and the cuts that will take place to individual budgets?

The idea of this march just leaves me cold I’m affraid. If I was in London I might have gone along just to observe the kind of people that turn out for this kind of thing.
David Attenborough style.

Sunny, how does making Britain a zero carbon economy fit with your opposition to the slow down in the growth in total Government expenditure and the cuts that will take place to individual budgets?

Simple – economic growth doesn’t have to necessarily mean more pollution and environmental degradation. The problem isn’t just that the economy is being destroyed, but that there’s no investment in green tech in the numbers that China and the US are investing.

If you read the Zero Carbon Britain report you can learn more.

The campaign against climate change has taken a flawed approach by seeking to blame individuals rather than the wider political system we live under.

Do you know what would be funny? If people start tweeting from a zero carbon march.

I’m sure all seven of Michael Meacher’s houses are well insulated.

Next week: Zero Oxygen March.

Sunny, do you believe that we can have a growing economy built on ‘green’ jobs alone?

Will it be called off if the snow is too deep?

I hope the police aren’t going about punching people in the face.

cjcjc: I’m sure all seven of Michael Meacher’s houses are well insulated.

Precisely the sort of whataboutery you were criticising earlier in a thread about the EU. Not sure why it’s even relevant: MM isn’t an environmentalist.

Well he is speaking at the rally.

Sunny,

Whilst the rally is well intentioned, just a look at the list of speakers would put off someone with my political viewpoint (and less knowledge of the debates going on about the whole climate thing…). There is a worrying left-wing tendency there.

For the action on carbon movement to really get anywhere, it is no use just preaching to a shrinking number of converted – you need to find a way to convince those who are politically opposed. Stacking rallys with speakers who are Labour MPs, committed environmentalists with a record of calling for state intervention etc effectively loses all this.

If climate change is the big issue you believe it is, surely this sort of event should be non-partisan? Did anyone think to invite Zac Goldsmith for example… Otherwise you end up politicising an apparently important issue, and also risk tying your political ship to an issue that looks to me like it may be rapidly sinking.

How is this march being advertised?
Are people standing outside tube stations in London tonight, handing out notices to the general public? Or is it something that you’ll only know about if you are already within some orbit of people who are concerned about this issue?

Watchman @ 14

Whilst the rally is well intentioned, just a look at the list of speakers would put off someone with my political viewpoint (and less knowledge of the debates going on about the whole climate thing…). There is a worrying left-wing tendency there.

To be honest, though Watchman, the Right are standing in the sidelines, fingers in ears, nar, naring at everyone within a ten mile radius. The political Right have abandoned the issue and appear more than happy to make inane statements like ‘It was hot when the dinosaurs were around and hey didn’t have 4x4s’ etc. You can not blame the orginisers for that, can you?

Really, if you subscribe to a political viewpoint that rejects science, then I cannot see why anyone should that political ideology seriously, especially on a science debate.

You are bringing up a legitimate point, watchman, but you are addressing the wrong people. The people you should be asking questions are those on the Right who have reject science.

“the threat of catastrophic Climate Change [hasn't got] any less grave or less urgent.”

On that, at least, we agree. Though not quite in the way you think.

“Zero Carbon March”

They’ll all be holding their breath for the entire march then?

@ 5 Sunny – without a technological leap of Star Trek proportions I think you’ll find that you cannot have zero carbon economic growth. Economic growth needs energy, a lot more energy than can currently be generated from renewables, even if you accept the most optimistic figures for renewable growth.

@16 What “the right” are referring to is the basic scientific principle of correlation, which in simple terms means that if MMGW theory cannot explain all past climate as a function of human activity then the theory is weakened (although not necessarily falsified).
Hence if temperatures have been higher in the past than they are now, but with no, or limited carbon emissions attributable to human activity, MMGW hypothesis is weakened. Any genuine scientist (as a opposed to charlatan) would therefore understand the need to empirically demonstrate why, in the absence of 4x4s, it was hotter in the past than it is now, rather than attempting to laugh it off without actually giving any semblance of empirical refutation.

And I put “the right” in quotes because the first documented policy to address the greenhouse effect was sponsored by that well known Trotskyite US President Richard Nixon. The first in the UK was under the premiership of “red” Maggie Thatcher.

In an ideal world, if the growth of the world’s population stopped this minute, and everyone, out of the goodness of their hearts, stopped wanting the latest consumer toys, and the manufacturers, out of the goodness of their hearts stopped manufacturing them, there might be a chance, but none of this is going to happen. It’s pie in the sky. A pipe-dream. The game’s over. Even the former head of the IPCC says so:

http://www.economist.com/node/17572735?story_id=17572735

“The IEA also looked at what it might take to hit a two-degree target; the answer, says the agency’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, is “too good to be believed”. Every signatory of the Copenhagen accord would have to hit the top of its range of commitments. That would provide a worldwide rate of decarbonisation (reduction in carbon emitted per unit of GDP) twice as large in the decade to come as in the one just past: 2.8% a year, not 1.4%. Mr Birol notes that the highest annual rate on record is 2.5%, in the wake of the first oil shock.

But for the two-degree scenario 2.8% is just the beginning; from 2020 to 2035 the rate of decarbonisation needs to double again, to 5.5%. Though they are unwilling to say it in public, the sheer improbability of such success has led many climate scientists, campaigners and policymakers to conclude that, in the words of Bob Watson, once the head of the IPCC and now the chief scientist at Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, ‘Two degrees is a wishful dream.’
The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over”.

Hundreds of people in Hyde Park formed themselves into a “2030″ with a giant zero – spelling out the date by which campaigners want a ‘Zero Carbon Britain’.

Don’t you wish you’d gone now?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5gzZnmhA_wuXGCWi5E25q7APrSNvA?docId=N0439711291486751920A

MM @ 19

Hence if temperatures have been higher in the past than they are now, but with no, or limited carbon emissions attributable to human activity, MMGW hypothesis is weakened.

This is exactly the ‘logic’ that the fuckwitted Right bring to the debate. They are too stupid to understand the science and have nothing to add to this debate, hence their absence from the platform.

Think about what you are attempting to say here, Matt. Have another go at this.

Is it your contention that the existence of a natural event will weaken the case for a man made influence? Is that what you are trying to say? Are you suggesting that death by natural causes means that there can never be a murder?

Sums you up to a tee, Matt.