Oh bugger...

China spurred a jump in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to their highest ever recorded level in 2011, offsetting falls in the United States and Europe, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday.

CO2 emissions rose by 3.2 percent last year to 31.6 billion metric tons (34.83 billion tons), preliminary estimates from the Paris-based IEA showed.

China, the world's biggest emitter of CO2, made the largest contribution to the global rise, its emissions increasing by 9.3 percent, the body said, driven mainly by higher coal use.

"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050), which would have devastating consequences for the planet," Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist told Reuters.

Scientists say ensuring global average temperatures this century do not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is needed to limit devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.
(Reuters, 25 May 2012)

Why can't it rain?

NAIROBI, Kenya—In the sprawling hills of the Kangundo district in Kenya’s Eastern Province, just a few hours outside of capital city Nairobi, Fred Kiambaa has been farming the same small, steep plot of land for more than 20 years.
Born and raised just outside Kathiini Village in Kangundo, Kiambaa knows the ups and downs of agriculture in this semi-arid region. He walks up a set of switchbacks to Kangundo’s plateaus to tend his fields each morning and seldom travels further than a few miles from his plot.
Right now, all that remains of his maize crop are rows of dry husks. Harvest season finished just two weeks ago, and the haul was meager this time around.
“Water is the big problem, it’s always water. We have many boreholes, but when there is no rain, it’s still difficult,” he said.
Kiambaa and his wife, Mary, only harvested 440 pounds of maize this season, compared to their usual 2,200. They have six children, meaning there will be many lean months before the next harvest, and worse: Though March is Kenya’s rainiest month, it’s been mostly dry so far.
“The rain surely is not coming well this year. Rain is the key. We can only pray,” he said.
(From http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/155376)

The future - our African future - is here. Never mind the cautious weather service spoksepeople saying on air, "It's not unprecedented to have such warm weather in May," or "Of course, we do have years when rainfall is down" - this is a trend. It's years of unusual weather, months when the maxiumum temperatures rise daily (and I mean every day, day after day after day) up to four degrees celsius above normal. Radio presenters burble on about "such fabulous weather!" but we are starting to pay the price - for the global north's and our own South Africa's profligate use of fossil fuels - in poor crops and hunger. (I do hope the myriad stories like Fred Kimabaa's will be taken into account when the rich and powerful put their heads together at Rio+20.)
Last year, I saw a local atmospheric scientist present models of southern African climate for the next 80 years or so. It was one of the defining moments of my life. This is how I described it in the July issue of Skyways magazine:
Pretoria: a lecture room at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research on a sunny late winter day. The equipment is modern and streamlined, the lecturer is an atmospheric modeller who speaks dispassionately, temperately, calmly, explaining the features of the map on-screen that shows southern Africa. And then he presses a key on his laptop, and all of a sudden, the audience is in a horror movie.
On the screen, the map ticks over with the regularity of a metronome, year by year, decade by decade: 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050… The colours that indicate temperature and rainfall change. Blue turns to peach which deepens to orange, to russet, to scarlet. I scrawl on my notepad, “Namibia, Angola, Botswana, gone, gone, gone!”
It’s been known for a long time that Africa would be one of the hardest-hit regions as climate change kicks in. But somehow, seeing the changes visually represented like this has a visceral effect. It’s got the heart-breaking impact and inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
Dr Francois Englebrecht, an atmospheric modeller at the CSIR, has done a range of models that peek into the future. Six simulations were performed in what is the largest experiment of its kind yet done on African terrain. Each of them gives slightly different results, but all show the same trends in the same areas.
Climatic features of our region dictate that we will buck the trend elsewhere in the world, in which a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. Southern Africa is going to be warmer and drier. We’re special in yet another way: actual observation shows that over the last century, our temperatures have risen in tandem with the rising temperatures around the world – but our increase is always almost exactly double that of the rest of the world’s average. The models mercilessly show this trend continuing into the far, foreseeable future.


Here’s a telling quote from one of Dr Engelbrecht's colleagues, quoted on www.liveeco.co.za:
Dr Constansia Musvoto from the Council for Scientific and industrial Research (CSIR) told members of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU) that agricultural production in Southern Africa is projected to be halved within the next 70 years as a result of climate change.
“Temperatures will increase by up to 6ºC, while rainfall will drop by as much as 40 percent in some parts of the region.”

Smart Alec... NOT!

Caption: Clever monkey

Am I glad I live in South Africa, where laws like this have not been passed (yet). This is a law in Tennessee which will govern how climate change is taught in classrooms.
"...the Tennessee bill is based on an ALEC model bill passed in May 2000. We explained at the time,

'The bill's opening clause reads [PDF], 'The purpose of this act is to enhance and improve the environmental literacy of students and citizens in the state by requiring that all environmental education programs and activities conducted by schools, universities, and agencies shall…'

Provide a range of perspectives presented in a balanced manner.

Provide instruction in critical thinking so that students will be able to fairly and objectively evaluate scientific and economic controversies.

Be presented in language appropriate for education rather than for propagandizing.

Encourage students to explore different perspectives and form their own opinions.

Encourage an atmosphere of respect for different opinions and open-mindedness to new ideas.

Not be designed to change student behavior, attitudes or values.

Not include instruction in political action skills nor encourage political action activities.'


To summarize, under this model bill and its relatives, global warming will be taught as a "theory" among other "credible theories," including those unscientific "theories" peddled by the well-paid "merchants of doubt."

This, of course, flies in the face of the well-accepted scientific consensus, which has proven global warming as the harsh reality, time and time again. The science speaks for itself, and thefossil fuel money funding climate change deniers speaks for itself.

The Tennessee Bill

Key portions of the Tennessee bills are as follows (emphases mine):


"The teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to,biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and humancloning, can cause controversy."

"The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, directors of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to…respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues."

Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught."


Look familar? It should.

The bill was opposed by a broad-based coalition, including the National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the Knoxville News Sentinel, the Nashville Tennessean, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, and all eight Tennessee members of the National Academy of Sciences.

These voices of reason were no opposition to ALEC, its corporate backers, and the politicians who serve them, which saw the bill pass with little opposition whatsoever."
(From http://truth-out.org/news/item/8136-alec-climate-change-denial-model-bill-passes-in-tennessee )

Stormy weather

Waiver: these are NOT tropical storm clouds!

The South-West Indian Ocean Basin is apparently one of the most dangerous tropical storm regions in the world, with an average of 80 deaths a year. Apparently Hurricane Irina, which just caused havoc along the KwaZulu-Natal coast, brings the death toll for this year so far to 164 - and there are still at least two months of the season to go.
is this fall-out from warmer seas due to climate change, one wonders?

Summer temperatures and food security

Summer temperatures will rise (or rise and fall) to a point where you can't grow certain crops. And the losers are? Wait, I have the envelope right here: "the biggest impacts will be on Europe, Africa and South America.

Models underestimate future temperature variability; Food security at risk

Climate warming caused by greenhouse gases is very likely to increase the variability of summertime temperatures around the world by the end of this century, a University of Washington climate scientist said Friday. The findings have major implications for food production.

Current climate models do not adequately reflect feedbacks from the relationship between the atmosphere and soil, which causes them to underestimate the increase of variability in summertime temperatures, said David Battisti, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.

While warmer temperatures already have implications for food production in the tropics, the new findings suggest the increase in the volatility of summertime temperatures will have serious effects in grain-growing regions of Europe and North and South America, Battisti said.

"If there's greater variability, the odds of the temperature being so high that you can't grow a crop are greater," he said.

"In terms of regional and global food security, it's not good news."

[...]

Earlier research has shown that by the end of this century, the increase in average growing season temperature, if other factors remain the same, will likely reduce yields of rice, corn and soybean 30 to 40 percent. Already rice yields in the tropics are being affected by higher temperatures, affecting nations such as Indonesia, which frequently imports rice to stabilize prices, Battisti said.

In addition, the scientists say global warming will have greater impacts than previously thought on the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a tropical phenomenon that has global impact on climate and food production. Their conclusions are based on geological and other proxy records of climate and El Niño from the last 10,000 years, plus recent analyses of long-term climate changes because of global warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body conducting ongoing assessments of climate change, has estimated that future month-to-month temperature variability during summer months is likely to be greater in some places and less in some places, but should stay roughly constant in many places.

But the new modeling work, Battisti said, shows most areas can expect to see greater variability in summer temperatures between now and 2085, with the biggest impacts in Europe, Africa and South America.

"The increased variability will be pretty ubiquitous. You will see it pretty much everywhere."

Increased temperature variability compounds the loss of production because of higher average temperatures, Battisti said. Add higher fertilizer prices and other market pressures to the mix "and food insecurity is likely to be higher than it has been for some time."
(EurekAlert 17 Feb 2012)

Thalassa, oh thalassa!

Unprecedented, man-made trends in ocean's acidity


Oh, the sea! Though not unexpected, this is such awful news:

Nearly one-third of CO2 emissions due to human activities enters the world's oceans. By reacting with seawater, CO2 increases the water's acidity, which may significantly reduce the calcification rate of such marine organisms as corals and mollusks. The extent to which human activities have raised the surface level of acidity, however, has been difficult to detect on regional scales because it varies naturally from one season and one year to the next, and between regions, and direct observations go back only 30 years.

Combining computer modeling with observations, an international team of scientists concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions over the last 100 to 200 years have already raised ocean acidity far beyond the range of natural variations. The study is published in the January 22 online issue of Nature Climate Change.
EurekAlert, 22 January 2012

Over the peak: the limits of fossil fuel

Caption: Trips to the Kruger National Park are getting more expensive!

Sometime back in 2008, I think, I wrote about the shocking things that had happened to oil prices - they'd leapt from a 'norm' of $35-40 a barrel a couple of years earlier to a new norm of around $70-80. Now the new norm seems to be around $100. All just as predicted by peak-oil experts. Here's some new corroborating evidence:

Commentary in Nature: Can economy bear what oil prices have in store?

Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy.

That's the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in the current issue of the journal Nature (Jan. 26) that the economic pain of a flattening oil supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels.

"Given our fossil-fuel dependent economies, this is more urgent and has a shorter time frame than global climate change," says James W. Murray, UW professor of oceanography, who wrote the Nature commentary with David King, director of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The "tipping point" for oil supply appears to have occurred around 2005, says Murray, who compared world crude oil production with world prices going back to 1998. Before 2005, supply of regular crude oil was elastic and increased in response to price increases. Since then, production appears to have hit a wall at 75 million barrels per day in spite of price increases of 15 percent each year.

"As a result, prices swing wildly in response to small changes in demand," the co-authors wrote. "Others have remarked on this step change in the economies of oil around the year 2005, but the point needs to be lodged more firmly in the minds of policy makers."

For those who argue that oil reserves have been increasing, that more crude oil will be available in the future, the co-authors wrote: "The true volume of global proved reserves is clouded by secrecy; forecasts by state oil companies are not audited and appear to be exaggerated. More importantly, reserves often take 6 - 10 years to drill and develop before they become part of the supply, by which time older fields have become depleted." Production at oil fields around the world is declining between 4.5 percent and 6.7 percent per year, they wrote.

"For the economy, it's production that matters, not how much oil might be in the ground," Murray says. In the U.S., for example, production as a percentage of total reserves went from 9 percent to 6 percent in the last 30 years.

"We've already gotten the easy oil, the oil that can be produced cheaply," he says. "It used to be we'd drill a well and the oil would flow out, now we have to go through all these complicated and expensive procedures to produce the oil."

The same is true of alternative sources such as tar sands or "fracking" for shale gas, Murray says, where supplies may be exaggerated and production is expensive. Take the promise of shale gas and oil: A New York Times investigative piece last June reported that "the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells."

Production at shale gas wells can drop 60 to 90 percent in the first year of operation, according to a world expert on shale gas who was one of the sources for the commentary piece. Murray and King built their commentary using data and information from more than 15 international and U.S. government reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, reports from groups such as the National Research Council and Brookings Institution and association findings.

Stagnant oil supplies and volatile prices take a toll on the world economy. Of the 11 recessions in the U.S. since World War II, ten were preceded by a spike in oil prices, the commentary noted.

"Historically, there has been a tight link between oil production and global economic growth," the co-authors wrote. "If oil production can't grow, the implication is that the economy can't grow either."

Calculations from the International Monetary Fund, for example, say that to achieve a 4 percent growth in the global economy in the next five years, oil production must increase about 3 percent a year.

"Yet to achieve that will require either an heroic increase in oil production, ... increased efficiency of oil use, more energy-efficient growth or rapid substitution of other fuel sources," according to the commentary. "Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth. But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven't identified the necessary solutions: weaning society off fossil fuel."

The commentary concludes: "This will be a decades-long transformation and we need to start immediately. Emphasizing the short-term economic imperative from oil prices must be enough to push governments into action now."

Citizens get it - their governments don't

A recent survey by Yale University’s Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that 65 percent of Americans polled “said that global warming is affecting weather in the United States”; half believe it is caused “mostly by human activities,” up 3 points since May. A similar survey by the nonprofit environmental group ecoAmerica found that 57 percent of Americans realize, “If we don’t do something about climate change now, we can end up having our farmland turned to desert.” (From Salon.com, 16 Dec 2011)
According to the latest Eurobarometer opinion poll (October 2011), 68% of Europeans polled consider climate change a very serious problem (up from 64% in 2009). Altogether 89% see it as a serious problem (either 'very serious' or 'fairly serious'). On a scale of 1 (least) to 10 (most), the seriousness of climate change is ranked at 7.4, against 7.1 in 2009. (From Media Lens, 17 Dec 2011)

Nice work if you can get it

If you've attended every single one of the UNFCCC's Conference's of the Parties since the first in 1995, you'll have visited:
Berlin, Germany
Geneva, Switzerland
Kyoto, Japan
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Bonn, Germany
The Hague, Netherlands
Bonn again (lol!)
Marrakech, Morocco,
New Delhi, India
Milan, Italy
Buenos Aires again
Montreal, Canada
Nairobi, Kenya
Bali, Indonesia
Poznan, Poland
Copenhagen, Denmark
Cancun, Mexico
Durban, South Africa
And joy of joys, the next one will take you to Qatar in the Middle East, where the temperatures late in the year will be in the upper twenties Celsius (good thing it won't happen in July, when 41 degrees is the daily average high). In 2005, Qatar had the highest per capita carbon emissions, at 55.5 tons, so COP18 will take place right in the hot-spot in many ways. Women can legally drive in Qatar, which will make life easier for delegates, but for NGOs and protesters, be aware that the death penalty is used 'mainly for threats against national security'.
Nice work if you can get it. A sort of temperature-tourism. All paid for by taxpayers. (In Durban's case, stories surfaced in the immediate aftermath of COP17 teasing out exactly how many millions of tourist dollars the moveable feast had brought to Durban, as delegates ate, drank and bought the obligatory soapstone carvings and beadwork necklaces.)
How long will this circus continue to roam the world? What happened in Durban constitutes a grave threat to the world: we are simply not going to get it together fast enough to deal with anthropogenic global warming. But, as one person said to me, it's "the only game in town". How else, she askedf, are we supposed to get governments and business and all to negotiate and take action?
I believe it's time to deflate the circus tent and take away the clown's unicycle. Change has almost always happened because a groundswell of the people wishes it, not because governments or other major roleplayers do.
Governments have a very short time-horizon: they're looking to the next election. Some corporates have an even shorter one, but in the fossil fuel game, it is quite often longer - if you're mining a seam of coal, you may have to plan for a life of twenty years and up; coal-fired power stations are in operation for forty years and more. But that's not as long as yours and mine: our time horizon should only begin to fade away as our great-grandchildren utter their first cries.
So we need to pick up the reins of power and tell them what we want. We want food, clean water, clean air, health and a stable climate for ourselves and our seed. That is not a political goal: it's one that virtually every person, of every stripe, can share, whether you're a conservative or a radical lefty, Ba'hai or Roman Catholic, farmer or retail assistant.
How can we do this? It will take creativity and guts and commitment, but it can be done - there are examples in history to inspire us. I will be thinking a lot on these lines in the days ahead, and will share my thoughts here. ("Is there anybody out there?" Pink Floyd)

Whose process is this?

Captions: Bobby Peek of groundWork addresses the last remaining activists on 9 December; Africa will be hardest hit; some youngsters joined the all-night vigil, under tarpaulin due to the rain.



The Conference of the Parties is winding to a close. We've seen a document which suggests that the result will be the launching of "a process in order to develop a legal framework applicable to all" (this, of course, means developed and developing countries), a framework agreement committing countries to new targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, "after 2020". Yippee. This puts us on course to (at least) hit a global increase of 4 degrees, which means 8 for us in southern Africa.
As one woman said at the traditional all-night vigil which started at 7:00 pm (she's been to three COPs and attended vigils at each one), "If this isn't working" - as plainly, after 17 years, it isn't - "then what do we do?"
I doffed my journalist's hat and made an activist's plea. Let's take it away from them, I said. Let's mobilise people to put pressure on them - the governments and corporates inside the UN precinct. They live, breathe and make money off us, so we do have power over them. Civil disobedience campaigns, boycotts, persistent picketting, we've used them before with success. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." (Margaret Mead)
We just have to get the message through to people that this is not a political cause, this is about things that do and will matter to them where they live: food, water, air, health, life. Understand that, and massive mobilisation is possible. It's time to tell those who are delaying and backing and filling that we have withdrawn their permits, their rights to act against our common interests. Panzi! Vamos!
Siyaya!

Green Bombers

Ever since Saturday’s Global Day of Action at COP17, it’s been apparent that there are some people wearing the green uniforms of Host City Volunteers who are not quite the innocent volunteers they seem. Activists have taken to calling them the Green Bombers, and I had a taste of them today at Durban’s City Hall.
I’d joined a very small group of angry people who were staging a spur-of-the-moment protest outside City Hall, where President Jacob Zuma was addressing a meeting. There’d been talk that the Kyoto Protocol was dead, and the so-called Durban Mandate would take its place, which activists feel is a very unsatisfactory result. When we arrived, the two people carrying banners reading ‘Africa will burn’ and ‘Blood on your hands’ were immediately accosted by the Green Bombers and told “You can’t be here”. A journalist from Montreal came to their rescue, getting indignant about the infringement on people’s rights.
In addition to the small group I’d linked up with, there were a number of people from the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, and the contingent of aggressive Green Bombers got to work, trying to clear them from the public space as well. (I asked one to tell me what regulations he was operating under. His response was, “Lady, I don’t know, I’m just following orders from security.” Cops in riot gear were spread out across the entrance to City Hall, and the police and Green Bombers communicated with each other frequently.
‘My’ banner holders painted their palms with red paint to symbolise the ‘blood on our hands’, and the fashion soon spread across the square. To our amazement, the Green Bombers refused to let anyone with painted hands into the City Hall to attend the meeting. It would, explained one man to me, “make people excitable” inside.
As I listened in on one woman argue with the Bombers, I heard him say that he was with intelligence. Naturally, I trotted over and asked him to repeat this and explain. He said, “Of what value would it be to you to know?”
“I think it would be of great interest to the citizens of South Africa to know that their intelligence officers were dressing up in UN Host City Volunteer outfits.”
At that, I was subjected to a tirade about “you journalists”; that wonderful pejorative, ‘opportunistic’ was used, as I began to walk away. I turned and charged back, asking the user to explain exactly what ‘opportunistic’ means. Apparently it means people like me, who listen for something they can use that’s sensational, “even a joke like this”, and then write “stories without content”.
“Why don’t you simply tell the media the truth?” I asked. “When I asked about the comment, why did you not just say it was a joke?”
“You, you represent a noble profession which has lost all its morals,” I was told, along with much more about how I write such stories simply to make lots of money and the like. All the time, the aggression was palpable and the sense that one wrong move would provoke some kind of threat, at the least.
Shortly after this, a very angry man burst out of City Hall, waving a small poster. He and the young woman who followed him out were enraged that they had been thrown out of the meeting for silently and peacefully holding up posters. They melded with the protesters outside, and some very loud and angry chants of Panzi followed (Panzi means ‘Down with’ and is always repeated, as in “Panzi Canada, panzi!”). We had Panzi Zuma, Panzi the USA and EU, Panzi COP17 – and, from the angry young woman, “Panzi people who dress up in uniforms and pretend to be volunteers, but are getting paid by who knows who, panzi!” (That’s a loose translation given to me by a fellow journalist.)
After two hours at the protest, I moved on to the exhibition next to the UN precinct for an interview with singer-songwriter Robby Romero, United Nations Ambassador of Youth for the Environment (more on that later – but to hear some of his music, go to http://eaglethunder.com , it’s good stuff). It was quite a bizarre contrast to move from a group of people so impassioned, so engaged and angry to the smooth, slick environs of what is, really, a sophisticated trade show showcasing mining houses, petrochemical companies and a certain famous soft drink… “Civil society has bought into the life of convenience,” said Romero. “While we don’t hgave to give up everything, the Age of Convenience has to be checked. We need to follow ‘No Harm’ policies.” Once, he said, humans were caretakers of the earth, and they have to become caretakers again, caretakers who are connected to each other and the planet.
Looking around at the ‘business-as-usual’ expo, he said, “As the climate changes, we need to change, too.”
9 December: Update
Since writing this, I've discovered that my sense of physical threat from the Green Bombers was accurate. Inside the hall, activists were slapped, punched, kocked down and kicked by them.
Timeslive, 8 Dcember:
''Volunteers'' employed by the city of Durban at COP17 yesterday slapped and kicked environmental activists who confronted President Jacob Zuma for not standing up for Africa at the climate change talks.

The heavy-handed actions of the "green bombers" - so called by activists because of their green uniforms and aggression - and of unionists, who kicked an activist, were in full view of the world's media.
After Zuma had told the activists at a report-back session in the Durban City Hall that he felt that it was necessary for him to interact with civil society, pandemonium broke out when placards calling on him to "ditch Europe and the US" and not "let Africa fry" were held up.
The volunteers and Zuma's bodyguards pulled the placards from the activists and tore them up.
When the activists demanded that they be allowed to hold up their placards as part of their interaction with Zuma, the volunteers pushed and slapped them while trying to throw them out of the hall. A group of people, wearing SA Municipal Workers' Union T-shirts, then started singing in support of Zuma.
Zuma did not intervene in the scuffle but had a clear view of the assault on local climate activist Rehad Desai, who was slapped by a volunteer and then pushed to the ground when he called for the president to stand up for Africa.
After Desai fell, the unionists formed a ring around him and kicked him as they sang.
Moe Shaik, the head of the Secret Service, and Cosatu's KwaZulu-Natal secretary, Zet Luzipho, tried to stop the chaos by pushing the volunteers away but the group continued to kick Desai.
After KwaZulu-Natal Premier Zweli Mkhize, the programme director, repeatedly called for calm police broke up the scuffles.
Desai and several other activists were thrown out but the volunteers, who started the trouble, remained. No arrests were made.
The meeting continued with Zuma denouncing the chaos as "uncalled for".
"I don't agree with people who disrupt and loot in the name of democracy," he said. "We must tolerate other people's views."
But the activists slammed Zuma, saying he did nothing to protect their rights.
"He just sat there and did nothing. It happened right in front of him," Siziwe Khanyile, of South African environmental group Groundwork, said.
Desai said he was kicked for raising his concerns about speculation that Zuma was planning to side with the EU during the climate negotiations.
He said he had it on good authority that the ''green bombers'' were members of the ANC Youth League, employed by outgoing Durban city manager Mike Sutcliffe to intimidate activists at COP17.
eThekwini municipal spokesman Thabo Mofokeng confirmed that COP17 volunteers were hired and paid by the city, but he rubbished claims that they were told to intimidate activists.
Sutcliffe said the volunteers did not initiate the scuffle.
"The meeting, which was progressing positively, was interrupted by a small group of protestors who chose the opportunity to attempt to disrupt proceedings by raising posters while their own representatives were engaging with the president.
"After a few minutes of disruption, members of the audience tried to get the protestors to take down their posters and allow the proceedings to continue. The situation escalated and a scuffle broke out between protestors and the audience. Security, both SAPS and municipal, became involved and then a few COP17 volunteers, who were standing close by, were drawn into the fray," he said.
The secretary of the ANC Youth League's eThekwini region, Vukani Ndlovu, dismissed the suggestion that the volunteers were recruited from the league, saying they were "just youth".
***

CIty Press
Activists claim Zuma supporters attacked them
2011-12-08 16:

Yolandi Groenewald
Tensions between local left activists at COP17 in Durban and the government exploded again today with activists claiming they were assaulted by “a group of pro-Zuma supporters” at a meeting with President Jacob Zuma.

“In a meeting designed for engagement between President Zuma and communities and civil society, violence broke out when peaceful civil society demonstrators silently held up signs asking ‘Zuma to stand with Africa,’” said Tristen Taylor from Earthlife Africa.

He said the “pro-Zuma supporters”, many wearing the uniforms of COP17 volunteers then attacked the demonstrators “in an act of mob violence”.

“Demonstrators were roughed up and some had to flee the hall,” he said. “While all of this went on, President Zuma sat up on the podium and remained quiet. Furthermore, it took nearly ten minutes before police entered the hall to restore order.”

Greenpeace activists were also caught in the fistfight. Greenpeace activist Melita Steele was injured. She tweeted: People attacked in the meeting for protesting. I ended up getting punched and other people were kicked.

Her colleague, Ferial Adams, told Eyewitness News that youths started singing and toyi-toying before they were joined by a group of ANC supporters, dressed as COP17 marshals, who then attacked the activists.

Adams was also punched and kicked by the crowd.

Siziwe Khanyile of groundWork said: “This was our event, organised to communicate with President Zuma. We were then abused, kicked out, robbed, and manhandled by Zuma supporters disguised as COP17 volunteers.”

The latest incident follows violence over the weekend where activists were attacked by a group of COP17 volunteers, also dressed in their bright green uniform.

The “green bombers” as they were dubbed by the activists roughed up the green activists and pelted them with stones over the weekend at the Day of Global Action march.

Before COP17 the leftist activists also complained that they were closely being watched by both National Intelligence and the police’s crime intelligence.

Zuma’s office would not say how the president reacted during the scuffle, reports Sabelo Ndlangisa.

In a statement, Zuma’s spokesperson, Mac Maharaj, said there had been “an unfortunate scuffle at the beginning of the meeting” with groups jostling to be heard.

“The Presidency acknowledges the intervention of the police who did their jobs to restore order in the Durban City Hall. The meeting continued successfully and constructively with civil society afterwards,” Maharaj said.

Spokesperson for the police, General Vish Naidoo, confirmed the altercation, but denied that it took place directly in front of Zuma.

"There was a difference of opinion and police intervened," he said. "The situation was resolved and normalised immediately."

He said he was informed the fight was between COP17 volunteers and NGOs. No one was arrested.

***

No to backtracking and delaying!

The letter below expresses the anger and unhappiness of many Africans at talk of a 'new mandate' at COP17. It is currently being circulated for signature by organisations, and will be handed over tomorrow. (Signatures - of organisations but not of individuals - can be added by emailing greeder@coa.edu.)

No Durban mandate for the great escape

As African civil society, social movements and international allies, we reject the call of many developed countries for a so-called “Durban mandate” to launch new negotiations for a future climate framework.

A new mandate for a new treaty in place of the Kyoto Protocol should be understood for what it really is – rich countries backtracking and reneging on “inconvenient” obligations, at the expense of the poor and the planet. While developed countries may appear progressive by asking for a mandate to negotiate a new legally binding treaty, the truth is that this is nothing but a veiled attempt to kill the Kyoto Protocol and escape from their further mitigation obligations under the already existing mandate in the Protocol itself, and the agreement in 2005 for negotiating further emission cuts. A political declaration to continue the KP is, in practice, another nail in its coffin. Anything less than a formal legal amendment and ratification process, will deliver an empty shell of the Kyoto Protocol.

Agreeing to a new mandate would mean action is effectively delayed for five to ten years. A new treaty will take several years to negotiate with several more years needed for ratification. Further, there is no assurance that countries that have repudiated the existing legal architecture, like the United States, will agree to or ratify a new agreement, nor that such agreement will not be a weak and ineffective “pledge and review” system.

Developed countries must urgently scale up the ambition of their emission reduction targets. As the latest reports by the International Energy Agency make clear, deep emission cuts are needed now to have a realistic chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C. Current emission reduction pledges will lead us to a world that is 5°C warmer. For Africa, this means 7 or 8°C of warming and unimaginable human suffering. This is why a pledge-based approach with weak review rules, instead of the Kyoto Protocol’s approach of legally binding commitments and international rules that give meaning to these commitments, is completely insufficient to ensure the necessary emission cuts.

While many developed countries condition any further action, including fulfilling their legally binding obligations to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, on greater action by emerging economies, developing country pledges already far outweigh pledges by developed countries. In fact, with accounting loopholes and the use of carbon markets, developed countries could make no net contribution to reducing emissions by 2020.

While many developed countries seek to end the Kyoto Protocol, they simultaneously attempt to retain and expand their favored elements of the Kyoto Protocol, like the CDM, in a new agreement and shift their responsibilities onto developing countries. Without legally binding emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries must not be allowed to have access to the carbon markets. Further, with the price of carbon crashing, paltry emissions reductions pledges from developed countries, there is no rationale for the continuation of the CDM or the creation of new market mechanisms.

Developed countries must scale up their ambition and stop blaming other countries who have contributed far less to the climate crisis, yet are taking on more aggressive action. Developing countries are living up to their promises made in Bali, while developed countries are attempting to re-write the rules of the game to avoid meeting their obligations.

Developed countries are also denying developing countries the necessary finances and technology to address the climate crisis. The provision of finance from developed to developing countries is an obligation in and of itself. It must not be used as a bargaining chip in the Durban negotiations, nor should it be dangled in front of poor countries as a bribe to get agreement for a very bad mitigation deal. The same applies to the operationalization of the Green Climate Fund. Success in Durban depends on the Green Climate Fund not being an empty, ineffective shell.

We will not accept a “Durban mandate” or any outcome that locks in the current low ambition and inaction for many years, and condemns billions of people in Africa and across the world to suffer the worst impacts of a warming world.

Signed by:

Africa Trade Network

Alternative Information Development Centre

Democratic Left Front

Friends of the Earth International

groundWork, Friends of the Earth, South Africa

Jubilee South (Asia Pacific)

Pan African Climate Justice Alliance

Rural Women’s Alliance

South Durban Community Environmental Alliance

Southern African Faith Communities' Environment Institute

Third World Network

Trust for Community Outreach and Education

Give the earth her due

Captions: Energy is the key to South African protests; the thick blue line;
Natlie greene's impassioned plea; the Engen oil refinery with houses in the background.

The sharp end of fossil fuel use is felt in the South Durban Basin, nicknamed ‘cancer valley’. This is not just one of the most polluted places in South Africa, it’s one of the worst in the world – and it’s just a twenty minute drive from where the so-called Conference of Polluters (COP17, the 17^th Conference of the Parties) is taking place.

South Durban is where 80% of the imported crude oil in South Africa is refined, at Sapref (jointly owned by Shell and BP) and the Engen refinery which has had a number of fires, the latest in October 2011.

More than a quarter of a million people (mostly blue-collar) live all around these refineries and other polluting industries, including a paper mill – 150 smoke stack industries in all. About 15 years ago, locals started to campaign around the issue of the health impacts they were experiencing – more than half the children in local schools suffer from asthma, for example, while cancer is far too common. (Bobby Peek, one of the founding fathers of activism in this region, grew up playing rugby on a field close to the Engen refinery. Four of his team-mates have since died of cancer. If you live here, research has shown, you are 250 times more likely than residents elsewhere to get cancer.)

The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) won some notable victories, pressurising the authorities to create a local system monitoring and regulating air quality – sadly, this year the staff complement was cut by half, so the activist now use the ‘Bucket Brigade’, a cost-effective system which enables them to sample the air themselves (it gets sent to California for independent testing – the results show massive readings of nasties like benzene, methanol, sulphides and jujst about every chemical you can think of, some of which can readily be smelt in the air). Today, under the guidance of another long-term local activist, Desmond D’Sa, a group of COP17 visitors took what the SDCEA calls ‘the Toxic Tour’ to see houses cheek-by-jowl with massive refineries and stacks belching smoke. We can smell rich whiffs of pungent stuff, and Desmond tells us it’s worse at night.

The tour was followed the whole way by police who, tellingly, conferred with members of the refineries’ security staff. We ended up at the front gate of the Engen refinery, where, it turned out, we had a welcoming committee. Dozens of police, many in full riot gear, were lined up at the gates.

A protest had been planned, and activists whipped out a slew of banners to line the road.

I stepped across the road to get a picture, but was ordered back:

“Get back!”

“But I’m a journalist, I just want to get a picture…”

“Get back, that was NOT in your permit!”

Turns out he took the blue cap I and many others were wearing, with the simple slogan, ‘Unite against climate change’, to mean I was a protestor too. Which made me one of those alien creatures the police have been warmed against. At Saturday’s march, a policeman told me, “These people can be dangerous, you know,” which did seem odd at a moment when a trio of dancing, half-naked women happened to be passing… Yesterday, the waste pickers were protesting – in accordance with their permit – outside the ICC, but when they held up banners and posters, they were apparently ordered to desist – the banners and posters were ‘not in your permit’. (Surely banners and protesters are as natural a combination as love and marriage, beans and samp or cops and guns?) Control of the aliens from NGOs and civil society – fatherly but firm – has been the name of the game.

The protest was used as an occasion to publicise, on a world stage, the campaign to recognise the Rights of Mother Earth. Last year, on Earth Day, a group of 35,000 people adopted a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. This records that Mother Earth has:

The right to live and to exist;

The right to be respected;

The right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue it’s vital cycles and processes free of human alteration;

The right to maintain their identity and integrity as differentiated beings, self-regulated and interrelated;

The right to water as the source of life;

The right to clean air;

The right to comprehensive health;

The right to be free of contamination and pollution, free of toxic and radioactive waste;

The right to be free of alterations or modifications of it’s genetic structure in a manner that threatens it’s integrity or vital and healthy functioning;

The right to prompt and full restoration for violations to the rights acknowledged in this Declaration caused by human activities.

This legal route, says Cormac Cullinan, a South African lawyer who helped draft the Declaration, may be the best to take to protect the environment – give Earth legal rights which can contested and enforced through the courts.

This has already happened in Ecuador, the first country in the world to enshrine these natural rights in law, says Natalie Greene, another speaker at the protest. Greene is an environmental activist with Fundación Pachamama, a group which helped rewrite that country’s constitution in 2008. A recent case in Ecuador offers an example of how such ‘Wild Law’, as Cullinan calls it, could work: “the Provincial court of Loja granted an injunction against the Provincial Government of Loja to stop dumping excavation material into the Vilcabamba river, because it violated the constitutional rights of the river to exist and maintain its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes” (www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/).

By EarthSummit 2012/Rio+20 in June 2012, the aim is to present a petition containing one million signatures calling for the universal acceptance of the rights of nature. Go to www.rightsofmotherearth.com to find out how to add your name.