For thousands and thousands of years, ever since agriculture began, farmers have been saving seeds to replant the following year. It’s a practice that is fundamental to the entire global system of food production, and for small scale and subsitance farmers, and Indigenous Peoples, in many cases their very survival depends on the ability to save viable seed from one year to the next.

So nobody would want to stop farmers saving seed, right? “Of course not,” I would have said, if you had asked me that question a few months ago, “no person, company or government in their right mind would seriously start messing with the very life processes that ensure our survival, would they?”

Yes, they would. And they are. It’s called Terminator Technology, and it’s scary stuff. Not only are corporations and governments trying to stop farmers saving seeds, they’re doing so by genetically modifying the plants so that they produce seeds that are sterile. That’s right, sterile seeds — by some twisted logic motivated by profit that flies in the face of thousand of years of common sense and traditional practices.

The good news is that we can stop it. There is a really important United Nations meeting coming up next March that has the power to Ban Terminator if we put enough pressure on governments now and in the run up to the meeting. Please take the time to visit the Ban Terminator Campaign website — I’ve been working on the technical side of it solidly all this week, and there is a good resource of information growing there already that explains what Terminator Technology is, and most importantly how YOU can help get Terminator banned. This one is winnable, but we need your support. Spread the word.

www.banterminator.org

It’s almost as if Earth is fighting back. The loss of life from Hurricane Katrina is a terrible thing (all loss of life is) but I couldn’t help but notice the dark irony in the fact that it was yet another freak weather event that finally pushed the price of a barrel of oil over $70 bucks for the very first time by forcing oil and gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, which pump a quarter of the United States’ oil and gas supplies, to shutdown. Yes, I am fully aware that it’s impossible to point at one particular storm and say unequivocally “that is due to global warming” but it’s the pattern that counts — and we are quite simply seeing bigger, more devastating freak weather events more and more often now, right across the globe. What more of a wake up call does the US federal administration need than climate chaos on it’s doorstep?

Update: Elissa just sent me this article by Ross Gelbspan, which makes the point very well.

Katrina’s Real Name

Commentary: It’s Global Warming.
By Ross Gelbspan

August 30, 2005

The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming.

When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was global warming.

In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years, the explanation was global warming.

When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees and killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.

And when the Indian city of Bombay (Mumbai) received 37 inches of rain in one day — killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million others — the villain was global warming.

As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.

Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying.

Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.

The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history.

In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.

In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when President George W. Bush was elected president — and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.

As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.

Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.

When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.

For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.

Today, with the science having become even more robust — and the impacts as visible as the megastorm that covered much of the Gulf of Mexico — the press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the oil and coal industries.

As a Bostonian, I am afraid that the coming winter will — like last winter — be unusually short and devastatingly severe. At the beginning of 2005, a deadly ice storm knocked out power to thousands of people in New England and dropped a record-setting 42.2 inches of snow on Boston.

The conventional name of the month was January. Its real name is global warming.

Forget The Day After Tomorrow — gulf-stream shutdown, if it were to happen, would be a slow, gradual process. We have bigger problems. As reported in The Guardian today, one of the ‘nightmare’ scenarios for anyone who has studied climate change science is now happening. Scientists in Siberia have found that the worlds largest peat bog — permafrost the size of Germany and France combined — is melting. In it is trapped one quarter of the world’s methane deposits, and methane is an order of magnitude more potent a greenhouse gass than carbon dioxide. In a nutshell, the frozen earth is now boiling.

The problem is that the climate is a non-linear system, and feedback mechanisms mean that the relatively small amount of warming we have seen thus far now appears to be enough to tip natural systems over the edge. As they are released, the emissions from Siberia will double the atmospheric concentration of methane, evidence that we have now pushed the climate into dangerous runaway warming, and that the ‘wait and see’ attitude of many of ther world’s governments was — categorically — the wrong decision.

“This is an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”

Oh Shit.

From New Scientist:

THE world’s largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world’s least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”. He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this “has all happened in the last three or four years”.

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.

Similar warming has also been taking place in Alaska: earlier this summer Jon Pelletier of the University of Arizona in Tucson reported a major expansion of lakes on the North Slope fringing the Arctic Ocean.

The findings from western Siberia follow a report two months ago that thousands of lakes in eastern Siberia have disappeared in the last 30 years, also because of climate change (New Scientist, 11 June, p 16). This apparent contradiction arises because the two events represent opposite end of the same process, known as thermokarsk.

In this process, rising air temperatures first create “frost-heave”, which turns the flat permafrost into a series of hollows and hummocks known as salsas. Then as the permafrost begins to melt, water collects on the surface, forming ponds that are prevented from draining away by the frozen bog beneath. The ponds coalesce into ever larger lakes until, finally, the last permafrost melts and the lakes drain away underground.

“This is an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”

Siberia’s peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.

His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.

An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released,” said the project’s chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia.

The G8 on energy and climate: all talk, no action

At the start of this month, the leaders of the G8 (the eight richest industrialised nations) met in Scotland for their annual get together to discuss issues of common interest. The mainstream media focus was on Climate Change and Africa, but behind the scenes Trade, the Global Economy, and Iraq were also on the agenda. In the run up to the summit, the communique on Climate and Energy - especially - was watered down with each successive (leaked) draft, apparently under pressure from the U.S. administration, and the final document - whilst making broad statements about partnerships and cooperation - utterly failed to include any specific targets or timetables for vital at-source emissions reductions. Campaign groups such as Friends of the Earth, and grassroots groups of protesters gathered in Scotland, were quick to condemn the outcome as a farce - all talk and no action.

Outside of Fortress Gleneagles, protests and creative resistance to the G8’s agenda, and the lack of real action on Climate Change flourished around the world during the summit…

In the U.S. several hundred people, including leaders from faith, student and community groups showed their commitment to getting the US to take action by fasting during the three days of the G8 summit, urging President Bush to make a commitment to reduce global warming pollution, and face up to the reality that 94 percent of the U.S. public support limiting greenhouse gas emissions (University of Maryland poll).

In Scotland, activists shut down main roads leading to the summit on the first day, and on the final day of the summit, a call to action on the root causes of climate change saw a mass blockade of the A74 bridge over the river Clyde in Glasgow (a road scheduled for carbon-guzzling expansion) and an afternoon-long street party.

The G8 outcome documents

Specific documents of interest on Climate & Energy:

Climate Change Chapeau
Climate Change Plan of Action
Global Economy & Oil

Finally, there is loads of independent non-commercial coverage of the G8 on Indymedia

Early this morning, activists from Oxford successfully blockaded the main bridge leading out of Crieff, one of small villages close to Gleneagles where delegates to the G8 summit are staying. There have been distributed blockades around the entire region, bringing traffic to a standstill in places.

Numerous reports from the blockades are now up on Indymedia, as are a selection of my photos from the Crieff blockade. That page will be updated with more photos later, when I can get back to my laptop.

Update: According to the end of this Guardian article it appears that another blockade to the South East of Crieff was also successful this morning, substantially increasing the impact of the blockades.

Crieff Blockage Press Release:

6th July 2005

Anti G8 Protesters block bridge in Crieff

Traffic in and out of Crieff has been brought to a standstill early this morning by a group of people protesting about the G8 summit in Gleneagles. A group of people blocked the bridge over the river Earn on the main exit road to the south of Crieff, the A822, by locking themselves onto a piece of heavy metal in the middle of the road.

Leaflets are being given to motorists disrupted by the action to explain the motives being this blockade. The aim of blocking the road at this point is to prevent American delegates to the G8, understood to be staying in accommodation in Crieff, from getting to Gleneagles.

Duncan Locke, a self-employed carpenter from the South of England said, “The G8 is an elite club intent on pursuing their agenda of free trade capitalism across the world, at the expense of people, environment or justice. We took this action to try to send a message of hope to the rest of the world that this situation will no longer go unchallenged. We are sorry to be adding to the disruption to local people caused by the G8. However, the issues we are highlighting are of such fundamental importance globally that we felt honour-bound to take action.”

The first vehicle stopped by the road block was a delegation headed for the summit. Other drivers have been sympathetic to the protesters. One lorry driver commented that the trade liberalization being rolled out by the G8 leaders has led to the situation where foreign workers now do jobs for £3 an hour that local people used to get paid £7 an hour to do.

The action was visited by some Critical Mass cyclists and some people dressed as fairies too!