Acclaimed writer and journalist George Monbiot has called for "the biggest direct action and civil disobedience and protest campaign ever [...] to face off the biggest crisis humanity has ever encountered".

His call came at a conference on climate change as part of the G8 Alternatives Summit held in Edinburgh on Sunday.

He warned of the almost inevitable melting of the Himalaya glaciers, and the obvious effect this will have on the global food chain. "When the glaciers go the seasonal flow of rivers goes and the potential of using them for the purpose of irrigation also disappears. Some hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people, will be thrown into a permanent humanitarian disaster by that one fact alone."

Some of the biggest rivers in the world - including the Ganges, Yangtze and Mekong - are fed by the Himalayan mountain range.

At the same meeting, leading German environmentalist Jutta Kill lambasted the currently popular idea of a carbon market as "what may turn out to be the creation of the largest property and commodities market that we have seen in human history."

She explained carbon credits as a way for industrial nations and multinational corporations to shirk their responsibilities.

"What this carbon market does, first and foremost, is provide a cheap way for corporations to not address the real problem of climate change." Kill said. She warned of the dangers implicit in this carbon market, with multinationals in effect 'owning' carbon emmissions.

"They can say, 'I don't really want to reduce my emissions here in Britain or in Germany or in the Netherlands. I'd rather pay someone in India, in Ecuador, in Brazil, in South Africa to reduce emissions for me, so I don't have to go through the hassle and inconvenience of doing that at home'".

Climate change is one of two main issues on the agenda of the G8 Summit which starts on Wednesday, but there is widespread doubt that any meaningful decisions will be made in this sphere. European leaders have only expressed confidence that the US may accept the reality of climate change, and no decisions on what to do about it are expected. [source]

As many have long feared and the Guardian newspaper has recently discovered, US government and corporate interests are intertwined, even when it comes to an issue of such urgent global significance.[source]

This makes consensus involving the US - one of the world's largest polluters - particularly difficult.

One option that would show promise if it was more widely discussed is that championed by Aubrey Meyer, head of the Global Commons Institute. It is called Contraction and Convergence, and already has widespread support in Westminster. It is a logical and necessary successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush refused to sign because it would "have wrecked our economy" and wrongly excluded developing countries. [source]

Contraction and Convergence, or C&C, has a chance of success precisely because it appeases US interests by reconciling the climate versus development contradiction while bridging the rich-poor divide. It asks for equal and representative cutbacks in all countries' carbon emissions, with the eventual aim of global parity.

This equity of effort may work, not because of its implicit fairness but because equity between nations, and their economies, is the only basis for a realpolitik deal between rich and poor, North and South, the US and the world.

But C&C may never see the light of day, or more precisely, the round table of the G8 summit.

On Wednesday last week, the Liberal Democrats tabled an amendment to Parliament that aimed to put Contraction and Convergence, or C&C, onto the G8 agenda. The Libs Dems complained of a "total lack of leverage on this issue by the Prime Minister over President Bush, who is still in public denial of even the basic science". [source] The Labour government forwarded a counter-amendment congratulating its own climate change leadership. Under enforced party-line voting the government amendment was passed by 313 to 220 votes. If Labour dissidents are tallied - the 77 Labour MPs who have supported C&C on the record through Early Day Motion 961 and the further 10 who didn’t sign EDM 961 but did take the C&C pledge - the C&C amendment forwarded by the Liberal Democrats would have been ratified. [source]

But it wasn't. So by the end of the week we can expect more platitutes about the seriousness of global warming and little real change, which goes some way to explaining Mr Monbiot's call for action.