July 2001

Climate change: English country floods

Flash floods have killed at least 150 people in Pakistan in the last 48 hours. The floods have buried homes built of corrugated iron and wood, sent mountains of mud crashing into villages and turned dried canals into roaring rivers.

Torrential rains that began before dawn on Monday wreaked havoc in Pakistan's mountainous north-west, where rivers of mud slammed into villages burying homes and killing more than 120 people. Many more people are still missing and authorities fear they are buried beneath the mud.

Standing 24 feet above the high-tide line, Greenpeace volunteers and sunbathers at Smathers Beach Wednesday marked the loss the beach could face if global warming continues at its current pace.

"The Keys are going to go under," said Kitsy McMullen, Greenpeace climate impacts campaigner, as the group opened its Take Back the Earth Tour in Key West.

Rising sea levels threaten shorelines and coral reefs everywhere, and Greenpeace activists say President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's energy plan is likely to speed up the effects.

sounding the climate alarm

Sirens set off by Greenpeace activists outside the United Nations climate conference sounded the alarm - it is time for ministers to start talking. Activists outside the conference unfurled a banner which read "Australia, Canada, USA - Climate Criminals" while inside Australia and Canada were doing their best to either stall or vandalise the Kyoto Protocol and frustrate attempts to combat climate change.

"It's desperation time for the world's climate and this conference," said Steve Sawyer, Greenpeace climate campaigner.

Update: 23rd July

0600 hrs: As dawn broke over the conference center in Bonn, our emotional roller coaster hit another trough, as word came through that the rumors of a deal that we had heard of a few hours earlier, had run onto the rocks again.

Most of us had been up all night, as well as most of the night before, and the strain was just enormous. As I left the conference center to run back to the office, the banner the students had hung in the trees stood out against the dawn, a forlorn plea for sanity and a stark reminder of the simplicity of the fundamental issue - to either move forward, or move backward in our fight to protect the climate.

Under threat - polar bear

Update: 21st July

The highlight Saturday outside the conference center, was a massive lifeboat organised by Friends of the Earth, constructed with planks covered in messages from all over the world, and towed throughout the city of Bonn and eventually into the Robert Schumann Platz at the conference center. A party atmosphere prevailed throughout the demonstration, and a good time was had by all.

Inside, Chairman Pronk outlined the process that he planned to use to get us through the final stage of negotiation, which is complicated enough to not bear repeating.

Suffice it to say that his plan called for a series of working groups which would report back to him. Then he would write up a text for consideration by the different groups. This was to happen sometime late in the afternoon. The paper finally arrived some time after 11 PM, so Greenpeace and all the other organisations got hold of copies and rushed off to put together commentary on it.

In the early hours, George Bush got a dawn wake up at Chequers when a micro-lite, trailing a "George W Bush - International Outlaw" banner, buzzed the house around 10 times.

George Bush and Tony Blair have flown out to Genoa for the start of the G8 summit today. G8 will bring together world leaders to debate globalisation.World Meteorological Organisation

Whale tail

Melting polar ice is threatening the main food source for Antarctic blue whales and could lead to their extinction, an international environmental group said yesterday. The whales feed on small sea creatures known as krill, which in turn eat microscopic marine algae. These live in sea ice and are released in the summer when the ice melts.

wave energy: a green and sustainable energy resource

A tiny South Pacific nation is planning to evacuate the islands because of rising sea levels. Tuvalu has asked Australia and New Zealand for help in resettling its 11,000 people. The government says the islands may be engulfed in 50 years.

A Tuvaluan government spokesman says New Zealand has agreed to help but there have been no guarantees from Australia.