Building up to Copenhagen

Environmental charity BioRegional is in Copenhagen for the climate change conference that begins next week. Here some of the group offer their initial thoughts on the gathering

A one year journey to Copenhagen

A small team from BioRegional are going to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference today. Our train leaves London at 2.30pm, but for me the journey to Copenhagen started just over a year ago.

I’m also a member of Al Gore’s Climate Project and was invited to a briefing to hear the latest climate science first hand from the IPCC in October 2008. It was bad. They said the latest science shows that the climate is more sensitive than previously thought and we are on a trajectory for a 7C rise by the end of the century - off the scale of the worst IPCC projections. The most shocking news was when an audience member asked if they agreed with NASA scientist James Hansen’s work that year which showed that the limit of carbon in the atmosphere should be 350ppm. We are already at 387ppm. IPCC scientist Jean-Pascal van-Ypersele said yes, although we have never modelled carbon levels as low as that. Try Jean-Pascal’s climate model here: http://www.climate.be/jcm. The whole room went really quiet as everyone realised we are no longer trying to avoid reaching some ceiling or limit, we’d already exceeded it. I’ve had climate trauma
How depressing you might say, but read on. If there is one thing we do at BioRegional it’s a bit of “yes we can”. Jurgen le Fevre, the EU Climate negotiator also spoke at the Al Gore event. He said I need some compelling materials showing what our low carbon future will look like. This will help me to convince the politicians and will help the politicians to convince the voters. Luckily, creating real-life examples of our low carbon, one planet future is what we do. So that’s why we are going to Copenhagen. Have a look at our brochure which provides real life case studies from around the world. ever since.