Take part in The Climate Change Summit 2008.

Climate Change has raced to the head of the global agenda in the wake of the important IPCC reports and Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Hear about how your business is going to be affected in 2008 and beyond.

The climate change debate has shifted from whether we need to act to what we must do and how best to do it.

The window of opportunity to avoid the devastating consequences of doing nothing, while also making the most of potentially lucrative opportunities, is closing much faster than anticipated.

Learn how to prepare for the enormous changes that lie ahead. And discover how to make a virtue out of necessity.

Key topics include climate initiatives that achieve both environmental and business objectives… crafting climate change messages that win over the most sceptical consumers… an A to Z of using offsets and taking advantage of carbon trading…. how to report on your climate change objectives and achievements for maximum impact… and how to manage the many risks of climate change.

• The Climate Change Bill: What will it mean for businesses operating in the UK?
• European and international legislation: what’s happening now and is about to happen in the major business sectors
• Post Kyoto regulations: What’s anticipated – and how to prepare your business
• Nuclear power: Is it responsible to source nuclear energy for your business to cut carbon

The list of speakers already includes senior executives from Tesco, ASDA, HSBC, Cadbury Schweppes, Procter & Gamble, Lehman Brothers, Timberland, Walkers, CEMEX, IBM, British Gas, AXA Insurance, The Co-operative Group, and many more. Join them as they discuss how to adapt to climate change, 12-13th February, London

 The two previous climate change events from ethicalcorp were both sell-outs.

Early registration discounts for the Ethical Corporation’s Climate Change Summit 2008  expire son.

Register by Friday 18^th Januaryand get up to£150 off your ticket price!

For the full programme and the latest speaker line-up and to book your place visit EthicalCorp

We all know Al Gore’s inconvenient truth: global warming is real. Nobel-winning professor Mark Jaccard reveals what he believes is the second inconvenient truth. We have to pay for our emmissions

Climate Change: Further reading

Methane is a much more powerful global warming gas than carbon dioxide. Why should we care? The quantities of methane stored around the planet are astounding. If the sea warms beyond a certain temperature then the stored methane will be released, in vast quantities, from the sea bed and the seas will appear to boil.

In addition Methane is stored in frozen ground and in some places frozen water. When the methane rich ground or ice thaws across the vast area of Siberia, for example, huge quantities of this planet warming gas will be released. 

This is frighteningly well illustrated in the programme on ice in the recent BBC series: ‘Earth: The Power of the Planet’

In the programme geologist Dr Iain Stewart travels to somewhere in the Siberian wastes and there he is shown, by a scientist who studies this phenomena, a graphic demonstation of the amount of methane trapped in the ice there. They cut a hole in the ice and light the escaping gas. The result is an astonishing flame spurting from the ice. A remarkable sight worth seeing.

The series is very well made and full of lots of fascinating titbits. Very well worth going out of your way to watch it.

 ‘Earth: The Power of the Planet’ Book & DVD

 From the programme notes:
 ”But ice does more than shape the Earth. Its peculiar properties mean that small changes in the Earth’s temperature can be amplified massively. This amplification means that ice ages are times of massive climate change – and that helps drive evolution. In fact, ice played a crucial role in our own evolution, by creating many sudden climate changes in East Africa at a time when our ancestors were struggling to make a living.

Now the ice is in retreat again. We explore the speed at which it’s melting – the newly discovered mechanisms which suggest it will disappear faster than we ever thought. We film with scientists on top of the Greenland ice cap as they explore why the ice is retreating. Startling satellite imagery shows the expanded area of melting. And we discover that the melting ice is going to bring some unexpected effects in unexpected places.” more…

Celebrations! The Americans sign up to an agreement to engage in more negotiations on Climate Change mitigation at UN climate conference in Bali. It may only be talking about talking but at least there’s been some agreement. The nations have agreed to seek a new global climate-change treaty by 2012.

However agreement came at a heavy cost. Canada, the U.S. and Japan banded together to force removal of references to specific emissions targets for developed countries by 2020. References to longer-term targets were also removed.

Though I would like to be only positive about this news, it sits uneasily alongside a comment on BBC news a couple of nights ago from a scientist studying the retreat of the artic ice. He revealed that the ice was disappearing so much quicker than scientists have been expecting that all artic sea ice would be gone within five or six years.

Not only have we been astonishingly slow to get the message about global warming, but the scientists who have been studying this phenomena have, it seems, spectacularly underestimated the speed of warming.

Put alongside the emerging understanding that huge quantities of the powerfully global warming gas methane; currently held trapped in the permafrost & in the sea bed;  will be released as the planet warms; one wonders if our response to this ongoing calamity is about as useful a response as the 1950’s UK government’s ’Duck & Cover’ advice was in response to a nuclear strike.

The climate change conference seems to have made some progress, but is it enough. As the artic sea ice melts faster than our worst expectations, are we fiddling while the planet begins to burn?