The COP18 climate change negotiations have now concluded in Doha. According to the BBC:

UN climate talks in Doha have closed with a historic shift in principle but few genuine cuts in greenhouse gases.

The summit established for the first time that rich nations should move towards compensating poor nations for losses due to climate change.

Developing nations hailed it as a breakthrough, but condemned the gulf between the science of climate change and political attempts to tackle it.

For an alternative interpretation let's also take a look at a couple of video reports from Doha, courtesy of Al Jazeera. Here's the first one:

As you can see Connie Hedegaard, the EU's first ever Commissioner for Climate Action, said that:

If you ask me "Is this a fantastic step forward when it comes to reducing emissions?", no it's not! This is more like a "working COP" where it's not very spectacular, it's not revolutionary steps forward but it's rather insisting steps forward and that's very, very important.

whereas Samantha Smith of the World Wide Fund for Nature said that:

We ended up with an incredibly weak deal. This is a year when people all over the world have felt the impacts of climate change, yet governments came here with no money for developing countries, no real emissions cuts and no ambitions to help themselves prepare for a global agreement in 2015. It's a weak deal. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Do you suppose "not very spectacular" actually means "weak"? Here's another video, in which Al Jazeera's Nick Clark talks to Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo:

Kumi says that:

It's a betrayal of our children's and grandchildren's future. It's out of touch with the science. It's out of touch with what's actually happening on the ground like we've seen in the Philippines and Hurricane Sandy and so on, and basically what we've seen is an absence of political will and a really desperate state of cognitive dissonance.

Here's how Nick Clark summed up matters:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned in his opening address in Doha that events like Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines and Hurricane Sandy in the US could become "the new normal". It's felt that urgent action is required, but if this conference is anything to go by, urgency is in short supply.

Whilst we wait to see what pronouncements emerge from the COP18 climate change talks in Doha over the next day or two, back in the Philippines the  National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council report in their 5:00 PM bulletin on December 7th that concerning what they call "lifelines":

• Thirteen (13) bridges and twelve (12) roads are not passable.
• Thirty-four (34) municipalities and cities experiencing power interruption.
• Five (5) areas are experiencing interruption in water supply.
• Davao Oriental experiencing communication interruption.

whilst regarding "affected population":

A total of 1,077,541 families / 5,317,275 persons are affected. A total of 28,587 damaged houses were reported, of which 11,002 were partially damaged while 17,585 were totally damaged.

and regarding "casualties" that:

456 were reported dead and 445 were injured while 533 are still missing.

The NDRRMC also put a price on the damage to life and property in Mindanao:

A total of PHP 4,001,924,688.02 cost of damages: PHP 630,970,000.00 damages in infrastructure, PHP 3,365,534,688.02 in agriculture, and a total of PHP
5,420,000.00 worth of damaged private properties.

To sum up the chaos caused by Typhoon Bopha/Pablo the NDRRMC also point out that:

As of 07 December 2012, a total of forty five (45) provinces, municipalities and cities in Regions IV-B, VII, X, XI, and CARAGA declared state of calamity.

Finally, for the moment at least, the United States Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center graphical representation of where Bopha has been, and where she will go next, looks like this:

The 5 day forecast for Typhoon Bopha/Pablo on Friday 7th December 2012

As you can see, whilst she is currently expected to loop back towards the northern Philippines, no further "calamities" seem likely at the moment. There's probably a fair few "casualties" yet to be reported however.

Typhoon Bopha is very unusual. According to Jeff Masters' Weather Underground blog yesterday, she is:

The 2nd most southerly typhoon ever recorded in the Western Pacific. Bopha became a tropical depression unusually close to the Equator, at 3.6°N latitude. Tropical cyclones rarely form so close to the Equator, because they cannot leverage the Earth's rotation to get themselves spinning.

An unfortunate side effect of the southerly track of Bopha is that:

Bopha will make landfall on Mindanao in the early morning on Tuesday local time. Mindanao rarely gets hit by typhoons, since the island is too close to the Equator, and the infrastructure of Mindanao is not prepared to handle heavy typhoon rains as well as the more typhoon-prone northern islands. Bopha is likely to hit at Category 4 or 5 strength, making it the strongest typhoon ever recorded in Mindanao. Bopha is potentially a catastrophic storm for Mindanao.

According to the Republic of the Philippines National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council in this morning's bulletin on the effects of  Typhoon Bopha (known as "Pablo" in the Philippines) :

The landfall of Typhoon Pablo [took place] over Baganga, Davao Oriental this morning at 4:00 AM, 4 December 2012

According to the BBC:
More on Typhoon Bopha Batters the Philippines

According to the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change:c

Energy and Climate Change Secretary Edward Davey and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker will both be attending the second week of the COP18 negotiations in Doha, commencing on 3rd December

The second week of the "18th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC and the 8th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol" starts tomorrow at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha, Qatar.

According to DECC's rather terse press release Ed Davey said last week that:

A global effort is needed if we are to achieve our climate goals – we need to pave the way for the new global deal while delivering more action now.

Many developed and developing countries have already come forward with pledges under the UN framework to reduce their emissions by 2020. I want to encourage more to do so at Doha and beyond.

The EU has led the way in calling for more ambition and in enshrining emissions reductions in law. I want to encourage it to move to a more ambitious 2020 emissions reduction target of 30%.

Here in the UK we are driving forward our plans to move to a lower-carbon energy mix, and this week we will be publishing the Energy Bill which will enable this.

I also want to see progress at Doha on achieving the global deal that all countries agreed to work towards in Durban last year. For the first time all countries agreed to sign up to a legally-binding deal to be adopted by 2015, and at Doha we need to agree a plan for these crucial negotiations.

More on Ed Davey Says "A Global Effort Is Needed If We Are To Achieve Our Climate Goals"

Roland Emmerich's "The Day After Tomorrow" is a BAFTA award winning action/adventure movie in which, according to the Internet Movie Database:

A sudden international storm plunges the planet into a new Ice Age.

A large team of scientists have spent the last four years investigating how close to the truth the movie is, under the auspices of the European Union's "Thermohaline Overturning – at Risk?" project (or THOR for short). The project web site states that their objectives are to:

Establish an operational system that will monitor and forecast the development of the North Atlantic THC on decadal time scales and assess its stability and the risk of a breakdown in a changing climate.

Identify induced climate impacts of changes in the THC and the probability of extreme climate events with special emphasis on the European/North Atlantic region.

Develop and operate an optimal ocean observing system for the North Atlantic component of the THC.

Forecast the Atlantic THC and its variability until 2025.

Assess the stability of the THC to increased fresh water run-off from the Greenland ice sheet for various global warming scenarios.

More on The Day After Tomorrow – Coming Soon?

According to the latest advisory bulletin issued by the United States Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC for short), based at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, Tropical Storm Bopha has now developed hurricane force winds, and is therefore now classified as a typhoon:

WARNING POSITION: 301200Z — NEAR 4.2N 144.3E
MOVEMENT PAST SIX HOURS – 295 DEGREES AT 10 KTS
POSITION ACCURATE TO WITHIN 060 NM
POSITION BASED ON CENTER LOCATED BY SATELLITE
PRESENT WIND DISTRIBUTION:
MAX SUSTAINED WINDS – 065 KT, GUSTS 080 KT
WIND RADII VALID OVER OPEN WATER ONLY
RADIUS OF 050 KT WINDS – 035 NM NORTHEAST QUADRANT
035 NM SOUTHEAST QUADRANT
035 NM SOUTHWEST QUADRANT
035 NM NORTHWEST QUADRANT
RADIUS OF 034 KT WINDS – 075 NM NORTHEAST QUADRANT
075 NM SOUTHEAST QUADRANT
070 NM SOUTHWEST QUADRANT
070 NM NORTHWEST QUADRANT

TYPHOON (TY) 26W (BOPHA) LOCATED APPROXIMATELY 605 NM EAST-SOUTHEAST OF PALAU, HAS TRACKED WEST-NORTHWESTWARD AT 10 KNOTS OVER THE PAST SIX HOURS.
MAXIMUM SIGNIFICANT WAVE HEIGHT AT 301200Z IS 26 FEET.
NEXT WARNINGS AT 302100Z, 010300Z, 010900Z AND 011500Z.

A picture is worth a thousand words and here's the pictorial forecast for Bopha:

More on Typhoon Bopha Has Her Eye on the Philippines

Professor David MacKay used to work in the Physics department of Cambridge University. Now he's the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change.  Here's a video in which he explains how he halved his own personal energy consumption, and how you can too:

As David puts it:

If everyone halves their energy consumption, that really makes a big difference!

For a rather more comprehensive tutorial on saving energy, which incidentally means saving money as well, you can also download the Rough Guide to Saving Energy totally free of charge.

Note that Prof. MacKay doesn't only appear in YouTube videos.  He also wrote a book entitled "Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air". It's also available online free of charge, and here are a few choice extracts from the initial "Motivations" section:
More on David MacKay Explains How You Can Halve Your Energy Usage

Earlier this month Professor Kevin Anderson, Chair in Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, gave a presentation at the Cabot Institute at the University of  Bristol. He expressed his basic thesis as follows:

The [climate change] emperor is streaking in front of us naked.I think actually if you stand up and say that the Climate Change Emperor is naked most people will shut you down. They do not want to hear that, however obvious it may be.

Kevin explains his analogy as follows:

Many scientists and policy-makers continue to claim it is possible, albeit challenging, to contain the global increase in mean surface temperature at or below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels.  However, despite the increasingly vociferous rhetoric around ‘transitioning to a low carbon economy’, current emissions growth is much more aligned with temperature rises of 4°C or higher, and possibly within just a few decades. Disturbingly, against the backdrop of unprecedented emissions growth, even a 4°C future now demands significant levels of mitigation.

We face a profound paradigm shift, triggered ostensibly by climate change, but with repercussions across all facets of contemporary society. Such a fundamental transition leaves society with three clear choices. To continue the delusion that climate change can be addressed adequately through rhetoric, financial fine-tuning and piecemeal incrementalism; to interpret such conclusions as a message of despair and futility; or to acknowledge that “at every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different”, and that through immediate harnessing of human will and ingenuity we can yet deliver relatively low-carbon and climate-resilient communities.

Here's an hour long video showing Kevin's entire presentation:

Do you have any conception of how things could be different, or is lack of clarity and imagination still a huge obstacle to making progress along the long road to salvation, both personal and mutual? Are you willing and able to harness your human will and ingenuity to help solve the conundrum originally posed by R. Buckminster Fuller:

How do we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time?

Time is getting ever shorter.

Whilst it doesn't say as much on their web site just yet, Cornwall County Council have effectively approved the application from German developers Kronos Solar to construct the 25 MW Canworthy Solar Farm on 50 hectares of land at Maxworthy near Launceston.  Cornwall planning committee have approved the scheme, but delegated responsibility for dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts on the conditions associated with the application to their planning officers. This will make it the larget solar PV park in Cornwall, and in the UK for that matter.

Some local residents are needless to say not happy about the decision itself, or the way it was arrived at. According to the Little Exe Cottage Solar Farm web site, for example:

I find it quite bizzare in a age of “democracy” and “localism”, that a Solar Farm of this size, 138 acres, with a 3,000 square metre substation, the largest in the UK, can be decided in about 30 minutes with 14 councillors for and 1 against.

The Council and the energy company has made it look like the community are behind it but this is not the case.

I suspect there will be many more such stories emerging over the next few months.

After diverting around a flood or three I've just returned home from Newton Abbot, where I put on something of a performance before the Teignbridge District Council planning committee as they debated Inazin Solar's application for a 13.5 Ha solar photovoltaic "farm" on land owned by the Fulford Estate near Gold's Cross Hill, between Tedburn St. Mary and Cheriton Bishop.  Due to Inazin's apparent difficulty comprehending the subtle difference between MW, MWh and MWh/year I have somewhat impudently christened the project "The Fulford Solar Kettle". I was up first, and this is the approximate text of the impassioned speech I then delivered.  I say approximately because I did get a bit excited and thus diverted slightly from my hastily scribbled script on one or two occasions:

Mr. Chairman, Councillors, fellow citizens. As this long and winding planning process has proceeded it seems to me to have become more and more surreal.  I'm an expert in such matters. My partner is a surrealist artist!

Amongst other things I'm as mad as the proverbial hatter about this stupid waste of my time. I've been interested in "alternative" electrical energy my entire adult life, and I've been working in the field for the last 15 years. I should be sat in my office working my backside off to save The Planet, not sat here. The applicant is also wasting Andy's time and this committee's time, along with the associated waste of a large pile of public money.

Before getting on to planning matters (which haven't changed significantly since the last time we all gathered together here) I'll talk briefly about surreal stuff like "Democracy" and "Climate Change". We've all had plenty of evidence of the side effects of the latter in recent days!

Going back in time to my most recent set of objections. This nonsensical email (waves printout) from Liz Marsden of Inazin was sent on 8th November at 15:31. In subsequent conversations with a planning officer, who is sadly off sick today, I discovered that by then it was already too late for me to object to the contents of this email, without my rebuttal finishing up as part of the "Last Minute" process.

In view of the surreal nature of all this, and the fact that first time around I never got to deliver my punchline, on this occasion I'm going to start with my punchline, then go through my arguments in reverse order!

I invite Inazin's representative to be bold, beautiful and brave when your turn to speak comes. Stand up and stop wasting everybody else's time and money, withdraw this frivolous, free of charge application.  Do the same for the ongoing appeal.

I've spoken in correspondence of "surreal capitalism".  Chris Huhne (who sadly was too stupid to keep his flies buttoned) spoke of "casino capitalism" before he fell on his "sword". Does the applicant understand that they are playing in this "Last Chance Saloon". The game is poker, but without cards (waves book then slams on desk).

I invite my fellow citizens, and the committee too if they so desire, to play another little game.  Find a video revealing me getting dressed in my current "mourning suit" (whilst removing green and blue tie).  YouTube and other video hosting web sites don't count. Leave a comment, explaining the connection (whilst removing black shirt).  The first correct comment, and the best correct comment, will both win a tee shirt!  The text of the revealed tee shirt reads as follows:

My name is Mintaka.

I was born in the Nebula

of the Constellation of Orion.

These species here are weird.

I am trying to understand them,

but it's impossible.

Now I am waiting to see them

Beautiful and Brave.

Maybe one day…..

Then I moved on to discuss the technicalities of distributing electricity around the countryside of South West England, and finished talking approximately one second before the bell went, signalling the end of my 5 minutes of "fame". As I returned to my seat a Councillor whispered the words "Well done" into my ear.

I sat and listened to Andy's very professional presentation of the planning arguments against the proposal, and the committee debated the issues.  After due deliberation their verdict was announced. The application was rejected by 11 votes to 4, with one abstention.

I offered Andy my hand by way of congratulations, but he declined it.  On my way out of the building I gave one personalised copy of the "Age of Stupid" DVD to a total stranger.  Then I gave one personalised copy of Ben Mack's book  "Poker Without Cards" to another complete stranger.