"water turns out to be responsible for about 60% of the greenhouse effect, while the much-reviled carbon-dioxide molecule accounts for just 26%."

 http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/5/7/3

well done to all who took part, hope they get another visit soon.
No more wars for oil.

co2 you should not just quote a line from an article, futher down the article you linked to it says the water effect balances itself by creating more cloud cover which in turn reflects more of the sunlight back into space thus reducing the impact of the water molecules on global warming.

Greenpeace report 16-02-2005

 http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/climate.cfm?CFID=1210633&CFTOKEN=61188071&UCIDParam=20050216144617

Today is a day for action. After a long and arduous process the Kyoto Protocol comes into force and business as usual is not an option.

Thirty-five Greenpeace volunteers halted trading on the global oil market by occupying the International Petroleum Exchange in London. They entered the high security building near Tower Bridge shortly before 2pm, just as the world market in Brent crude was about to switch to London.

They attached distress alarms to helium balloons, blew foghorns and handcuffed themselves to the trading pit, forcing the exchange to shut down. The International Petroleum Exchange does one thousand billion dollars of business each year and trading at the London exchange sets the price for 60 percent of the world's oil.

The Exchange specialises in so-called 'open outcry' trading, where all orders have to be shouted in a clear and audible voice. But the Greenpeace volunteers with their floating alarms and foghorns have made that form of trading impossible.

The Kyoto Protocol is designed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels like oil. But Kyoto targets, which are now legally binding, fall well short of what is needed to seriously fight climate change. We are rapidly approaching a point of no return. Tony Blair and other world leaders must use this year's G8 to move the world onto a different track.

Dangerous climate change is already with us. According to the World Health Organisation 150,000 people are killed every year by climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body comprising the world's most eminent climate scientists, predicts temperatures will rise this century by as much a five degrees Celsius.

Tony Blair has said he will put climate change at the top of the agenda for this summer's G8 meeting in Scotland, but he has thus far failed to push for a strong European position or extract concessions from President Bush, while UK carbon dioxide emissions have not gone down since New Labour came to power.

Listen to an update from Greenpeace ED Stephen Tindale on the scene. Warning, it is very noisy:
 http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/audio/stepehen_ipe.mp3

Send an online fax to Tony Blair today and tell him to take action immediate action against climate change and use this year's meeting of G8 world leaders to move the world on a different track:
 http://act.greenpeace.org/ams/e?a=1668&s=gen

==============================================

Activists disrupt oil industry annual jamboree
16-02-2005

On the day the world finally enacted Kyoto, the oil industry tried to hold a huge party to say, 'we don't care, it's business as usual'. We hope for at least one evening they've been forced to face the reality of what they're doing.

Greenpeace volunteers disrupted the oil industry's most prestigious annual gathering in a Park Lane hotel. The activists blockaded the ﾣ250-a-plate dinner as Middle-East energy ministers and the heads of some of the world's most powerful companies arrived.

They gathered to listen to the world's no. 1 climate criminal - Esso boss Lee Raymond - the man who led efforts to wreck Kyoto.

But dozens of Greenpeace volunteers locked themselves together to block the entrances to the Great Hall, where the dinner - intended as the centrepiece of the 91st International Petroleum Week - was due to begin at 7.30pm. Two activists also gained entrance to the Great Hall and disrupted the defiant celebration by pouring wine over the tables. Climbers also hung a banner across the front of the Park Lane venue, saying: "CLIMATE CHANGE KILLS - OIL INDUSTRY PARTIES".

Greenpeace climate campaigner Emily Armistead said from the scene: "According to the UN, climate change is already killing 150,000 people a year, yet Raymond and Esso have waged a ten-year campaign against efforts to tackle the threat. The men and women who feed the world's oil addiction came to London to hear him speak in a show of defiance against Kyoto. Instead we told them to consider the terrible damage they're wreaking on our planet."

 http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/climate.cfm?CFID=1210633&CFTOKEN=61188071&UCIDParam=20050216202113

Good action! Good stuff; keep it up..

I'd have been a lot more impressed if you hadn't all arrived in a minibus. What was wrong with public transport ?

Re: Sam's 'Hypocricy'

Public transport has gone retrograde since trolleys - a better question might have been "What's wrong with governments that don't promote better means of transport - like electric cars charged from wind-generators?"

You can be as sceptical as you like - you're not yet drowning, starving or otherwise in dire straights, are you?

I hope the phenomally self interested oil user:

Gets a really nasty tropical disease from a mosquito bite.
Have your home completely flooded one year by extreme weather.
Find it impossible to subsequently insure your home.
Are crippled by rising food prices as traditional agriculture becomes impossible in many parts of the world.
Get caught up in a terrorist attack carried out by those who resort to extreme measures when they witness apalling injustice in this world caused by western "lifestyles".
Are wracked by guilt as more and more millions from the third world starve to death because of drought.
Are also wracked by guilt as tens of thousands of species become extinct every year.

Wishful thinking on those last two as you're clearly incapable of thinking about anything else except maintaining your own completely selfish lifestyle.

You also display a particularly vicious streak by thinking it's a good thing that peaceful protestors get "a right kicking". Are you methinks one of those same loathsome barrow boys who actually work at the petrolheads exchange? Doubtless you also felt no shame when you saw the limbs blown off Iraqi children so as to maintain your oil fuelled lifestyle.

27 arrested after oil trade protest
 http://icthewharf.icnetwork.co.uk/thisweek/national/tm_objectid=15199357&method=full&siteid=50102&headline=27-arrested-after-oil-trade-protest-name_page.html

global warming photos
 http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/

 http://www.gn.apc.org/gci/

Most of the prominent organizations making the case aginst mainstream climate science have avowed agenda of promoting free markets and minimal government . they often accept funding from the fossil-fuel industry. few employ climate scientists.

new scientist 12 feb 2005,no 2486 pg40, meet the sceptics,

read it go on

Nice one Greenpeace. - that's a lot better than your wanky RSA Greenpeace Business lectures. Corporate responsibility - you must be avin a larf.

ps. Remember Carbon Trading is greenwash. Simple. It is not good for the environment and people have already suffrered a great deal due to this bullshit. More city profits. Fuck the Carbon Trust.

The UK Parliament's Environment Audit Committee is at present conducting an Inquiry into the "International Challenge of Climate Change: UK Leadership in the G8 and EU."

The Corner House and two other groups, SinksWatch and Carbon Trade Watch, have submitted written evidence to the Inquiry on the feasibility of emissions trading systems as a framework for negotiating a post-Kyoto Protocol international climate agreement.

Its principal conclusions are that:

* International emissions trading systems as currently conceived are not feasible.

* ALL trading systems in which the state allocates large quantities of free emissions rights to business are prone to a contradiction that renders them climatically ineffective. They are also unlikely to be politically sustainable due both to their inegalitarian allocation of property rights and inegalitarian structural tendencies.

* MIXED trading systems involve an additional regressive global redistribution of land, water, air, forests and other goods, which also renders them politically and environmentally unsustainable. (Mixed trading systems treat as exchangeable (a) allowances for the emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion; and (b) credits for carbon sequestration, "avoided emissions", "emissions reductions" or baseline-and-credit projects generally.)

* CONTRACTION AND CONVERGENCE involves a nominal egalitarian pre-distribution of private property rights in the earth's carbon-cycling capacity and overcomes some political difficulties associated with current trading systems. It reflects the need for effective climate action over realistic time periods.

* But insofar as Contraction and Convergence allows mixed trading systems, it would be climatically ineffective and prone to set off conflicts over land, water, air and other goods in local areas. Moreover, insofar as it appends itself to current neoliberal regimes of commodity trade and national sovereignty, problems of inequity in practice need to be considered.

* Numerous more effective, more efficient, and more egalitarian alternatives exist both to emissions trading systems and to the particular types of emissions trading system currently in vogue.

* The UK government should promote a public debate on the issue, halt the rush into emissions trading systems, and redirect research and development toward more realistic, non-market-based schemes.

* Even more important, the government must halt subsidies for continued exploration, extraction, exploitation and burning of fossil fuels. Instead, it must support and foster communities' and local authorities' existing attempts to follow low-carbon ways of life; institute deeper cuts in carbon use; respect regional decisions to exclude mining or refining of fossil fuels, power production, and so forth; and support energy efficiency, renewables, non-fossil-fuelled technologies and responsible tree-planting without trading them for continued fossil fuel extraction.

* The UK should exercise leadership both in the G8 and the EU on all these scores. As a first step, it should abjure reliance on carbon credits of type (b) and on all mixed trading schemes.

* Currently, the policy of different UK government departments is united around the objective of maximizing the flow of fossil carbon from underground to above-ground biophysical systems, whether through subsidies for fossil fuels or, indirectly, through emissions trading. Government policy must be turned around so that the work of different departments is joined up around a different objective. The ending of subsidies for fossil fuel extraction and exploitation must go hand in hand with an abandonment of emissions trading, particularly mixed trading systems, and with new support for efficiency, renewables, and community-based sustainable energy.

KYOTO: WHAT'S TO CELEBRATE?
Activists Put Kofi Annan on Notice


While many are celebrating the Kyoto Protocol‚s entering into force this
week, others are finding cause for grave concern.


A coalition of NGOs, social and environmental activists, communities,
scientists and economists from around the world concerned about the
climate crisis, the Durban Group, charged that the 1997 climate treaty not
only fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert climate
catastrophe, but also steals from the poor to give to the rich.


The Kyoto Protocol says that industrialized country signatories must
reduce their emissions 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. However, the
group noted, the scientific community has called for global reductions of
over 60% below 1990 levels.


What's more, the carbon trading promoted by the Protocol hands Northern
governments and corporations lucrative tradable rights use the earth‚s
natural carbon-cycling capacity, effectively stealing a public good away
from most of the planet's inhabitants.


Just last month, Danish power utility Energi E2 sold hundreds of thousands
of dollars of the rights it had been granted free by its government to
Shell after mild temperatures kept the utility's carbon emissions below
expected levels. No such free rights have been granted to ordinary
citizens.


The Kyoto Protocol‚s attempt to create 'carbon dioxide-saving' projects in
poorer countries is meanwhile stirring protests from Brazil to South
Africa. Such projects - which include industrial tree plantations and
schemes to burn off landfill gas - are designed to license big emitters in
the rich North to go on using fossil fuels. But they usurp land or water
ordinary people need for other purposes.


'We're creating a sort of "climate apartheid", wherein the poorest and
darkest-skinned pay the highest price˜with their health, their land, and,
in some cases, with their lives, for continued carbon profligacy by the
rich,' said Soumitra Ghosh of the National Forum of Forest Peoples and
Forest Workers in India.


Worse, such carbon projects don't work. 'Even in purely economic terms, a
market in credits from 'carbon-saving' projects will fail,' said Jutta
Kill of Sinkswatch, a British-based watchdog organization. 'You simply
can't verify whether a power plant's emissions can be 'compensated for' by
a tree plantation or other project. Ultimately investors are bound to lose
confidence in the credits they buy from such projects.'


Kill noted that almost all of the methods proposed so far for proving how
much carbon is saved by Kyoto's 'carbon-saving' projects have been
rejected by the UN itself. 'People are beginning to realize that this is
ENRON accounting,' she said.


Ricardo Carrere of the World Rainforest Movement added that 'so-called
carbon sink plantations will result in the further spread of monoculture
tree plantations, which are already having enormous impacts on people and
the environment. The Kyoto Protocol also allows genetically engineered
trees to be used in carbon-absorbing plantations. 'This will open up a
Pandora‚s box of impacts we can‚t even guess at,' said Anne Petermann of
Global Justice Ecology Project in the US.


One of the biggest promoters of the carbon market, including
'carbon-saving' projects in poor nations, is the World Bank, ironically
also a major financier of fossil fuel developments.


'It's ridiculous that the Bank, which has a mission of entrenching the
fossil fuel industry, is now advertising itself as solving the climate
crisis,' said Nadia Martinez of the Sustainable Energy and Environment
Network in Washington.


'If we are to avert a climate crisis, drastic reductions in fossil fuel
investment and use are inescapable, as is the protection of remaining
native forests,' confirmed Heidi Bachram of Carbon Trade Watch. 'We're
joining many other movements of Northern and Southern peoples to take the
climate back into our hands.'


Members of the Durban Group are today sending an open letter to UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan excoriating the UN's failure to take
constructive action and giving notice of their intention to build
independent alliances to 'press governments to limit fossil fuel
extraction and use while supporting grassroots alliances struggling
against fossil fuel exploration, extraction and use and against unjust
'climate mitigation' projects.'

Why on earth are people still writing articles about stopping climate change ?

It seems remarkable to me that despite the evidence of numerous independent scientists rather than those with either a political agenda or funding from Greenpeace etc there are still those who think humans are responsible for climate change. Yes of course the earth's climate is changing, it's been changing ever since it cooled. The world has gone through many (some say twenty, others as many as fifty) climate cycles since it became habitable but none of these have been influenced by the actions of us. David Fullen said that the theory of mankind influenced climate change was our ultimate arrogance. The climate is changing therefore we are changing it.

The world will change and of course if you want to believe that is the fault of fossil fuel burning, chemical plants or nuclear bomb testing in the 1970's go right ahead but it's not. Our time and energies will be better spent developing ways to protect those whi will be affected by the change rather than finding somebody or something to blame.

corporate media pics used in stories around the world

Excellent the sooner we can move away from oil based power and move to clean nuclear generated electricity the better. The French are way ahead of us on this with nearly 80% of the electricity being produced by clean, stable, low cost nuclear power. Electric cars are here now, electric heating and industrial power usage can all be easily serviced by nuclear power.

No Greenhouse gases - use nuclear

Greenpeace executive director Steven Tindale said traders tried to force several of the protesters out of the trading pit.

"We were nonviolent and peaceful and we made it clear that's what we were there for, but there were quite a few blows raining down on our heads," Tindale said.

"They pulled a metal bookcase down on our heads. They were trying to use that to push us back out so that was the moment we decided to retreat for everyone's safety."

One protester was injured. He was treated at the scene before being taken to a hospital.

"Numerous independent" scientists? Nice try Tom. I haven't come across these crowds of 'independent scientists". Funding in science and corporate and political involvement has long been a cause for concern and debate in the pages of science journals. I agree that 'man' may be arrogant ( or more accurately a lot of powerful men are ) but your argument is heavily reductionist and I suspect with your own agenda.

"They attached distress alarms to helium balloons, blew foghorns and handcuffed themselves to the trading pit, forcing the exchange to shut down."

Not all violence is physical.

Was glad to hear about Greenpeace action and surprised at some of the comments on Indymedia. Climate change is happening, whether we choose to believe it or not. And oil production is reaching peak - but many choose not to believe that either. 68% of UK oil use is for transport (Numbers from DTI website for 2002) - how will nuclear power fuel all our cars? Some of the sceptics out there need to brush up on net energy & we all need to change our lifestyles.

It takes energy to make energy. We use energy to find and pump oil but, luckily for industrial society, oil has huge net energy and we can usually obtain more than 200 times the amount of energy from oil than is required for its’ extraction. Oil has the highest net energy return of any fuel; gas, coal, wind and solar all have dramatically less. Hydrogen has negative net energy meaning it takes more energy to produce it than it contains, this highlights the first problem of a hydrogen society.

Counting Calories
Although it is the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen is not very easy to obtain. Ironically, petrol is the most concentrated form of hydrogen available for human consumption containing more hydrogen by volume than pure hydrogen itself, since the structure of the atoms in hydrocarbons use less space. Hydrogen also has a very low calorific value (a gallon of petrol has 115,000 btus, a gallon of liquid hydrogen has only 30,000 btus) so it takes about 4 times the volume of hydrogen (compared with petrol) to travel the same distance, requiring larger and heavier fuel tanks (compressing or liquifying hydrogen uses more energy) which require additional energy to transport. This low calorific value dictates increased volumes (or high pressures) throughout the entire hydrogen system.

Hydrogen manufacture
There are several ways to obtain hydrogen; by electrolysis of water, by splitting water using light, by collecting and reforming gas from biomass, by reforming natural gas or any other fossil fuel. Each of these processes is extremely energy intensive and always results in hydrogen with a negative net energy, electrolysis (the cleanest and most appropriate process for obtaining hydrogen from wind and solar power) is the most energy intensive of them all – roughly 75% efficient and costs roughly four times as much as reformation. The simplest, cheapest and most efficient process is the reformation of natural gas, an established industry, yet this is still only 85% efficient. It is therefore less polluting and resource intensive to simply burn natural gas.

Sorry folks, but I don't know of a scenario which plugs the energy gap & allows our modern lifestyle to continue without oil. And as oil prices go up (which they will when depletion starts to hit) oil will become an even more profitable resource. Anyone concerned about climate change should also be concerned about oil depletion.

For more info on oil depletion, please see www.depletion-scotland.org.uk or come to Edinburgh on 25th April for a conference on Peak Oil.

Several posts recently are either saying 'but ooh how did you go to your action - by car?' or 'climate change is happening but it's not necessarily the fault of man made climate effects'...

WELL WHO GIVES A FUCK?!

Sorry, but really. It doesn't matter to an extent what the cause it... no government is really going to face up to the honest agenda of implications. We have lots of statements - climate change a bigger threat than global terrorism and so on... the truth is that most gov's don't want to talk through the implications in public... but the natural effects are beginning to force the issue. A lot of people will die. A lot of people will try and move around the globe, and a lot of government's will try and resist this mass movements of people. A lot of conflict will be generated.

The discourse really needs to focus on ADAPTION.

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO TO DEAL WITH THE EFFECTS???

ANYONE GOT ANY IDEA?

pps at least the millions raised for the tsunami appeal has given some hope showing how much people do care about other people.

ps nice actions :-)

On the day the world finally enacted Kyoto, the oil industry tried to hold a huge party to say, 'we don't care, it's business as usual'. We hope for at least one evening they've been forced to face the reality of what they're doing.

Greenpeace volunteers disrupted the oil industry's most prestigious annual gathering in a Park Lane hotel. The activists blockaded the £250-a-plate dinner as Middle-East energy ministers and the heads of some of the world's most powerful companies arrived.

They gathered to listen to the world's no. 1 climate criminal - Esso boss Lee Raymond - the man who led efforts to wreck Kyoto.

But dozens of Greenpeace volunteers locked themselves together to block the entrances to the Great Hall, where the dinner - intended as the centrepiece of the 91st International Petroleum Week - was due to begin at 7.30pm.

A group of activists also gained entrance to the Great Hall and disrupted the defiant celebration by pouring wine over the tables. Another two activists camouflaged in their finest evening wear were later able to distrupt Esso boss Lee Raymond's speech.

Greenpeace climate campaigner Emily Armistead said from the scene: "According to the UN, climate change is already killing 150,000 people a year, yet Raymond and Esso have waged a ten-year campaign against efforts to tackle the threat. The men and women who feed the world's oil addiction came to London to hear him speak in a show of defiance against Kyoto. Instead we told them to consider the terrible damage they're wreaking on our planet."

 http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/climate.cfm?ucidparam=20050216202113

Kyoto protests disrupt oil trading
The Guardian (United Kingdom)
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1416295,00.html
Violent clashes at London energy exchange after Greenpeace activists use direct action to mark global warming treaty...

Oil brokers trade blows with eco-warriors
The Independent (United Kingdom)
 http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=611828
Greenpeace campaigners, not a group of people unaccustomed to flying in the face of danger, were forced into a tactical retreat yesterday after feeling the wrath of angry oil traders...

Kyoto supporters halt oil trading
Reuters (United Kingdom)
 http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=0XP3CRQP2O21MCRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=674158
Environmental activists have burst onto the floor of London's International Petroleum Exchange and have halted trading in protest at oil industry activity the day the Kyoto climate treaty has come into force.


Oil trading protesters are bailed
BBC Online
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4271381.stm
Protesters unfurled banners at Grosvenor House Hotel and the IPE
Twenty-nine Greenpeace activists arrested for trying to stop trading at the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) have been released on bail...

What seems to be working, and not working?

So Tindale* said the traders weren't interested in listening to what they had to say. Exactly what sort of rhetorical points were they trying to make with foghorns and rape alarms? What would have been an appropriate rejoinder in that conversation? Air raid sirens and a hundred guys chanting "BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA"?

*Tindale - an appropriate name for a protestor, neh?

I want to see the hydrogen economy happen--nuclear power plants powering electrolysis plants where hydrogen is generated.

Also, CO2 also gets balanced out as a greenhouse gas, it just takes thousands of years and includes sweltering heat followed by ice ages.

Unbelieveble
you guys rock...who cares abouut the SAS and the Marines we've got Greenpeace.
Thanks guys you give a new face and meaning to the word independence. Well now its waiting for the storm,
Good luck.