Ask not what P&P can do for you, but what you can do for P&P…
Tuesday,3 November 2009 by dan.morton
… though actually, I’ll talk about both!
Balancing your time campaigning with your time spent studying can sometimes be tricky. As a member of the London South Bank University P&P group, I am finding that juggling my time between People & Planet and my study is more difficult this year as I am on placement. Where there is a will there is way, however, and in the spirit of putting your principles first I thought I would share my recent rejuvenation!
Last week I went to two P&P related events that shook me out of my slightly irresponsible sloth.
First, on Thursday night I waited for 10 minutes to get into Portcullis House, Westminster, through a hefty security process which included a full x-ray and search. I traipsed intimidated past imposing portraits of former Prime Ministers to a meeting with the UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC) and Liberal Youth.
I must admit I was bit uncertain about the ‘Future Perfect’ event, which was hosted by the Liberal Democrats. However, the evening did not involve me being co-opted into a LibDem campaign, but rather was a very useful opportunity for two reasons. First to pass a briefing to P&P from the Spokesman on Energy and Climate Change regarding the Copenhagen climate summit, and second to envisage positive low-carbon visions of the future, learning from the experience of another NGO and a mainstream political party.
I felt uncomfortable at the level of knowledge the UKYCC reps had on the minutiae of the COP 15 talks and admitted to myself that despite having read plenty over the years in the subject I cannot effortlessly summon up information about emissions targets related to parts per million of CO2 and the timescale in which it needs to be done. Additionally, the positive future visioning idea was a challenge. Over the last 14 months I’ve had several stabs at raising the severity of the environmental crisis we face with students and I would give myself 4 out of 10 for my efforts. It not surprising that I’ve not been successful when I haven’t imagined a cohesive future existence myself. The fear is that if we don’t articulate an alternative future to people, then they will deduce that a low-carbon world would be austere and dull. What does this lack of knowledge and imagination say about me, if I consider climate change to be the single biggest challenge facing humanity? Simple: I should find the time to put the work in, not excuse myself.
That evening we shaped some idea of the kind of future we would want and could imagine, and contributing to this was a challenge for everyone. My ideas were enriched by having talked to people who do not share my political ideology nor group membership. I was particularly impressed with one woman from UKYCC who had committed everyone’s names in the room to memory within the first thirty seconds. That’s the kind of passion and energy I should be aspiring to!
On Saturday morning I arrived for another event, the P&P London Regional Training, rather hung-over but eager to get cracking. The day was an opportunity for our new committee to be trained and brainstorm together and I must admit I was proud that we managed to get 6 LSBU students along. I hope we repay the free training by successfully campaigning!
Highlights included the Going Greener training, meeting other groups who face similar problems (after meeting the guys from Brunel, I know LSBU is not the only group which is stubbornly stuck at 5 or 6 regular attendees!) and the support of the P&P staff. Margo, Jo, Emma and Lucy each did a great job of training us, providing free coffee, lunch and a cracking subsidised curry on Brick Lane afterwards! It is easy forget the support that they can provide and using them to the full is our responsibility.
There are plenty of inspiring people who are involved with People & Planet. I was pulled up by the boot straps when I heard from two of the management committee who are still involved now after 5 years!
The point is campaigning with P&P is usually fun, but I will have to use reserves of tenacity and imagination when it looks like my group aren’t making progress on a campaign or when there seems like there’s too much else going in life. Leaving it to others just ain’t on…
Tags: climate change, People & Planet, regional training, UKYCC
November 30th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
I am sorry to see you are becoming involved with P&P. I have followed the global warming debate for about ten years and have become more and more depressed at the direction that it has taken. Are you aware of any real facts? A sample of dry air consists of 78% Nitrogen, 21% oxygen and the remaining 1% is mainly Argon. Carbon dioxide is at 0.038% and methane is at 0.000175%. The main “greenhouse”gas is water vapour at around 96% of all greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant as we are being led to believe. It is a tasteless, odourless, collourless gas which is essential for all life on Earth. The propagandists prefer to talk about carbon, thus bending the mind to think that carbon dioxide is dirty when it is not.
The IPCC’s Summaries were politicised from the start to suggest that our output of a harmless plant-food gas is somehow effecting the climate; note that it is the latter that we are now apparently changing as opposed to global warming because they are not telling you that warming has stopped over the last decade and they cannot explain it.
Climate is one of the most complex, non-linear, chaotic systems known to man. By definition, therefore, it cannot be predicted. To ignore chaos is fraud. To claim that any severe weather is caused by man is fraud. To claim that the main driver of climate change is increased CO2 is fraud when you go back in time and find that, as recently as the medieaval period, it was warmer than today. CO2 has also been higher in geological history. Most of the real scientists provide information which shows that the main driver of climate change is the Sun - always has been and always will be. The Sun has entered a quiet phase and the climate is likely to be cooling off rather than heating up. So your cold student house is going to get even colder! Arctic ice is not disappearing and sea levels are not rising any faster than they have been for hundreds of years. Apart from the Sun, there are many other factors which can have an effect. There are plenty of books which firmly debunk the theory of manmade global warming by eminent independent scientists and researchers. If you prepared to consider the opposite view, then I can tell you about them. Plenty of info on other internet sites.
Have you not heard of what is now being termed as “Climategate”? This is about the leaked information from the Climatic Research Unit which appears to show that much of the data has been bent to give the “right” result. Indeed, it appears that much of the data and workings out are in chaos, yet politicians are basing their actions on all this. Any idea how much all of this “research” is costing us let alone what it is all going to cost us in the future? I invite you to check on the information at http://www.wattsupwiththat.com. The BBC and mainstream newspaper are desperate to keep the lid on the revelations because they are so incredibly biassed on this subject and they do not want to have to confess that they have got it all wrong.
I really do hope that you will reassess the information before you get too involved on the wrong side. How much do you trust politicians? Are they telling you the truth? This all about power and control on a global scale. Do you value real democracy?
Yours sincerely
Rowland
Colchester
November 30th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Rowland,
I am afraid that you have either not read/studied the facts or have been told ‘fraud’ulent facts. I start with the first paragraph - you point out the composition of the atmosphere. In relation to your later mentions of chaotic systems - if there’s only one thing to know about chaos theory it’s that very small changes in initial conditions can lead to massive changes in outcomes. So regardless of the initial concentration of CO2, small changes of this can lead to run away changes on the surface of the earth.
The IPCC reports are scientific publications, and are the result of a lot of work by a large number of scientists. It is clear when reading these reports that they are not ‘politicized’ - much to the contrary. It is also clear if you actually read the reports that they don’t make concrete statements about anthropomorphic climate change - the IPCC is made up of scientists who are well aware of limitations to their model and the chaotic nature of climate, and they discuss these issues in A LOT OF DETAIL.
Your third paragraph doesn’t even count as an argument because it’s simply a list of unsubstantiated claims - ‘the main driver of climate change is the sun’ yes true, but i suggest you read up on radiative forcing and again, read the IPCC reports, they go through this in, surprise surprise, a lot of detail. I would like to know what you mean by ‘most’ and who are the ‘real’ scientists, because i hate to burst your bubble, but a significant number of scientific articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals much to the contrary of what you say (you see, there’s not really any such thing as a ‘real scientist’ without further definition - if you are somebody doing scientific research this is a start, but unless you have had relevant articles published in peer-reviewed journals, you can not legitimately make outlandish claims simply on the basis that you’re a ‘real scientist’). Furthermore, i have read some of the ‘plenty of info on other internet sites’ but unfortunately most of this is, frankly, nonsense. I am on my way to becoming a scientist and I do not trust websites - i trust peer-reviewed articles, and this information debunking anthropomorphic climate change is not widely published. I have read one or two published articles, which were interesting, but they do not debunk the idea of human induced climate change, and there were not as many of them as you make out.
About ‘climategate’ - this was a small group of scientists, and it’s not even that certain that they did anything wrong. Also read http://bit.ly/4RAIUh - when you have thousands of scientists working on something, even if this lot did go a bit rogue and mess around with data, it would not affect the reports in any way.
I’m sorry if i’ve come across patronizing, I am just so tired of having to explain to people some very basic principles about science and the how the science community works. If you really want to find out the facts, try reading some of the scientific articles and the full ipcc reports (not just the summaries). The science isn’t always too intense, and the jist of what’s being said can be understood by the layman - what you will definitely see is that these scientists are not the idiots that climate change deniers make them out to be - all of these things you think are flaws in their arguments they have noticed long ago, and investigated. I would very much like you to find the scientists that have spent the last 20 or 30 years in greenland and the arctic and tell them that “Arctic ice is not disappearing”.
November 30th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Oh, and great blog post by the way! I have a great deal of respect for the P&P bloggers
Keep it up!
November 30th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Rowland, I sorry to hear you becoming involved with denial of perhaps the biggest threat to life on this planet.
I suspect that this person is spamming all campaign sites on climate change, to capitalise on last weeks’ email leak from the Climate Centre at UEA.
Ignore.