The weather couldn't have been much more cruel for the climate change protest - a gale and horizontal rain for much of the day. There were few if any really large banners - they would have been blown away by the gusting wind. I watched 4 persons really struggling to hold quite a small banner aloft. By the end of the march, nearly all the placards had reverted to wood pulp in the rain. My camera seemed to fill with water as it really started misbehaving. Yet despite the shite conditions, the 10,000? or so dedicated marchers who braved the elements remained cheerful throughout. I'm not going to spin any theory about such weather being certain evidence of climate change as it's really not that abnormal for it to be like this in December. The only theory I would question is deciding to have such an important protest at this time of year even if it does coincide with the wheeling and dealing in Bali. Numbers of feet on the streets is crucial for this issue so staging the protest in a more favourable time of year and well before the quasi religious consumer orgy that takes over the western world each December would guarantee a FAR higher turnout.

I found myself asking why are we still having to stomp the streets in this repetitive manner every year? Isn't the tidal wave of scientific evidence of accelerating climate change enough to make our politicians do anything of real substance yet without us having to metaphoricallly kick their useless arses all the time? Obviously not. I pay fairly close attention to mainstream coverage of environmental issues and in the last year, our corrupt leaders have done nothing that I see is going to be really effective at even starting to tackle this country's increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Really they've done fuck all of significance even since climate change was discovered as a global threat decades ago. Announcing more road building and a massive expansion of airports and therefore highly polluting flights shows without any doubt at all that economic growth is still what they blindly care about more than anything else. To be sure climate change is a complex issue. More and more gloomy facts and figures are emerging all the time. Latest one I heard from one of the speakers in Grosvenor Square was that a vegan driving a 4 X 4 produces lower emissions than a carnivore riding a bicycle because of the gross inefficiency of growing high energy foods to be fed to methane farting animals so they can be eaten by us. Agriculture, particularly that requiring high input of artificial nitrogen fertilisers is increasingly seen as a huge contributor to CC because it releases nitrous oxide (N2O) which is a massive 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. This is likely to become exponentially worse because of the obscene and lunatic scramble for biofuels. See here:
 http://www.physorg.com/news109581631.html

The FIT team were present as they always are these days no matter how tame the event might be. One interesting thing I saw on the march was a group of three cops in a good vantage point on an outside corner watching everyone go past. Every few seconds, one of them would whip a notebook out of his pocket, quickly write something in it before hastily hiding it back in his pocket. It wasn't until I returned home and was able to zoom into the pic I took of the notebook that I realised he was probably just doing a low tech tally count... Or maybe they were having an I spy competition between themselves to see which of them could clock the most from a list of known dodgy activists they carry in their heads. I suspect they normally count numbers present on demos by flying a helicopter above the crowd which must cost so many thousands of pounds/hour running cost but cloud was probably too low and wind too strong to allow this today.

 http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/index.php
 http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/
 http://www.planestupid.com/
 http://www.seizetheday.org/
 http://www.campaigncc.org/