climate change

"I've always wanted to meet someone from Greenpeace. Are you one of those nutters who climbs stuff?"

"Unfortunately not." I had to explain sheepishly to Paul – my newfound friend in Old Blackfriar's, an Aberdeen pub – that not all of us at Greenpeace are daring heroes who can nimble up Arctic oil rigs.

Behind those taking action in front of the camera, there are loads of others in the background: from cooks to deckhands, from radio operators to - in my case - web geeks.  Together, we're a veritable army of activists.

Watch this animation to find out how your pension money could be bankrolling destructive oil companies like BP - and what you can do about it.

Many of the world's most popular pension funds are deep in dirty oil. If you've got oil in yours, you're not alone, but it also means that collectively, we've got the power to influence our pension funds to shift the big oil companies to clean energy.

The first Greenpeace ship - the Phyllis Cormack - in 1971 © Greenpeace / Robert Keziere

Today is the 39th birthday of Greenpeace and we have just arrived in Aberdeen on the Esperanza. Back in 1971 on September 15th, the first Greenpeace ship set sail to protest against a US nuclear test zone and peacefully prevent the destruction of Amchitka, a pristine island ecosystem off the coast of Alaska. They didn't make it all the way to Amchitka but what followed was a wave of public support that ultimately shut down the US nuclear testing program, won Amchitka designation as a wildlife sanctuary and gave birth to the Greenpeace movement.

Serendipitously, we have just returned to the UK on Greenpeace's birthday from a mission to the Arctic where we peacefully stopped offshore drilling for 40 hours to minimise the chances of an oil strike before drilling stops for the winter. But while Cairn Energy continues dangerous drilling in the Arctic, we're hoping that together with our supporters we've helped to catalyse the movement to go beyond oil. 

Small islands bereft of mountains are going to sink beneath the waves as sea levels rise and for the millions of people living on them, climate change is not some distant, abstract concept but a concrete reality. As noted last week, the Sundarbans islands of India and Bangladesh have lost four islands completely. Sorry, 'lost' implies that they were carelessly misplaced behind a cupboard. 'Forcibly taken' would perhaps be more apt.

Still melting

Juliette in our international office posted this on the Climate Rescue blog and, as similar thoughts have been going through my head in response to the current cold weather, it's worth reposting here.

It cannot be said too often that climate and weather are not the same thing. The first regulates the temperature and weather patterns on a long term basis, the other one is guilty for blocking the traffic with snow this morning, or making the heat today unbearable. NASA puts it better than I could:

Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time.

At the mouth of the Ganges River lies the Sundarbans - 20,000 square kilometres of Unesco protected mangrove forest stretching between India and Bangladesh. It is home to 500 endangered Bengali tigers, countless crocodiles and around 4.3 million people.

Climate change is a global problem - one which demands cooperation and action from the world's heads of government. And for that to happen, we need world leaders to attend the UN Climate Change summit in Copenhagen next month.