I stayed up late last night (UK time) to watch Barack Obama deliver his 2015 State of the Union address to the United States Congress. I was particularly interested to hear what he had to say about climate change. In the event he said the word "climate" four times. Apparently that's a new record.

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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.

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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:

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After an expensive and thoroughly negative campaign that failed to mention climate change at all, Barack Obama has been voted another four year term in charge of a nation that pumps a lot of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.  According to the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL for short):

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Four years ago Barack Obama was President Elect.  Here's a speech he gave at that time:

Notice his concluding remarks:

Once I take office you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in…. negotiations, and help lead the world towards a new era of global cooperation on climate change. Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences too serious. Stopping climate change won't be easy and it won't happen overnight, but I promise you this. When I am president, any governor who's willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that's willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that's willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America.

Stopping climate change hasn't happened overnight, or over the last four years for that matter. The stakes are higher. The consequences more serious. Stopping climate change is now much harder. Whether as a result of Michael Bloomberg's last minute introduction of climate change onto the agenda or not, Mr. Obama has just been voted another four years in office by the U.S. electorate. Here's his 2012 acceptance speech:

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The United States' National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC for short) has just issued a press release about the amount of ice in the Arctic at the moment. You may be wondering why on Earth that is relevant to you, but please bear with me as I endeavour to explain, with the help of a few videos. Here's the first one which shows summer 2012 in Sidmouth, a seaside town down here on the not so sunny south coast of Devon:

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The COP17 climate change conference in Durban finally finished on Sunday a day and a half late. According to the final press release it:

Delivered a breakthrough on the future of the international community's response to climate change, whilst recognizing the urgent need to raise their collective level of ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the average global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius.

The press release itemises the "breakthrough" decisions as follows:

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Regular readers will know that the  17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change  begin in Durban, South Africa in less than a week. At the same time and place the 7th Session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (CMP7) to the Kyoto Protocol will also take place.  The question now is what if anything all these discussions will achieve apart from a modicum of global warming from all the hot air that will doubtless be emitted by the attendees?

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I've been involved in quite a few debates in various places around the web over the last week or so, and I've been revisiting those conversations and reflecting on what our glorious Group of 20 leaders achieved in Cannes last week, particularly regarding what they refer to as "Global Governance".

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As we reported last week, the leaders of the G20 nations (plus a few others) are on a jaunt to the Mediterranean seaside in Cannes this week. Amongst other things they are scheduled to discuss the global financial crisis. As luck would have it another item will have added itself to their agenda this morning. According to Yahoo!

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