Gordon Brown: Ramping up the rhetoric to Copenhagen

Have fun in private life because, according to the polls, your political life doesn't have that long to run…

Why people are chilled by warming - The Globe and Mail - Margaret Wente

An international survey of 11 nations, co-sponsored by environmental groups, found that fewer than half of those surveyed (47 per cent) were prepared to make personal lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions, down from 58 per cent before the crash. Most people said their governments should be doing more, but only 27 per cent wanted them to participate in Kyoto-style international agreements. Only one in five said they were willing to spend extra money to fight global warming.

ENTIRE FUTURE IN JEOPARDY, AS USUAL | Daily Telegraph Tim Blair Blog

Canada’s Margaret Wente deals with an Antipodean interloper:

Tim Flannery, the well-known Australian environmentalist, was on CBC Radio the other day to issue more alarms about global warming. He was more pessimistic than ever. “It’s now or never,” he said. “We have about 20 years to address climate change or else our entire future is in jeopardy.”

We’ve got 20 whole years? How come the World Wildlife Foundation is telling us we’ve got just five? And Gordon Brown says we have just 50 days? What we need around here is some kind of consensus.

High Capital Costs Plague Solar (RPS mandates, cost dilution via energy mixing required) Part II — MasterResource

At the heart of the ambitious Desertec project is the goal to establish 6,500 square miles of concentrated solar power plants in the vast African and Middle Eastern deserts, along with a super-grid of high-voltage transmission lines, to supply countries in Europe and Africa with electricity.

Climate change could cause more problems than two world wars, Brown warns - Telegraph

He said failure to tackle the problem would not only result in hundreds of thousands of deaths every year due to floods and droughts, but a greater economic crisis than the recent recession.