Rising Tide Australia

Wen Jiabao warns US on currency and defends China's place on world stage, saying his conscience is clear on climate deal

The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, today launched a robust defence of his country's place on the world stage, including a sharp rebuttal of what he called "baffling" criticism of his country's role at the Copenhagen summit.

Acknowledging "serious disruption" in ties with the US and rising criticism of Chinese assertiveness on the climate, currency, trade and other issues, the premier said he wanted to set the record straight.

"Some say China has got more arrogant and tough. Some put forward the theory of China's so-called 'triumphalism'. You have given me an opportunity to explain how China sees itself," Wen said.

In a press conference marking the close of the annual meeting of the National People's Congress, China's rubber-stamp parliament, Wen said the country was still developing and would never seek hegemony even when fully modernised, but had always sought to uphold its sovereignty and territorial integrity. He said China was a "responsible" nation that took an active part in international co-operation on major issues.

In the angry aftermath of the Copenhagen climate conference, China was accused of wrecking a deal by blocking emission reduction targets for 2050 and failing to send its most senior delegates to key meetings. In his most detailed public comments yet about the conference, Wen responded to critics.

"My conscience is untainted despite rumours and slanders from outside," he said. "It still baffles me why some people are trying to make the issue about China. Climate change is about human survival, the interest of all countries, and issues of equity and justice in the international community."

He accused foreign leaders of a shocking breach of protocol in their attempt to press him, with advance warning, into an unscheduled meeting after a welcome banquet. "Why was China not notified of this meeting? So far, nobody has explained. it is still a mystery to me," he said.

The final deal was the best that could be achieved in the difficult circumstances, he said, promising China's support for the Copenhagen accord.

Asked about other areas of friction, particularly with the US, the premier responded: "The responsibility for the serious disruption in US-China ties does not lie with the Chinese side but with the US."

He cited Barack Obama's recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, the announcement of US arms sales to Taiwan and disagreements over exchange rates and trade. "We are opposed to the practice of engaging in mutual finger-pointing or taking strong measures to force other countries to appreciate their currencies. That is not in the interest of reform of the renminbi's exchange rate regime," the premier said.

There is growing pressure for revaluation from the US and Europe, where many analysts argue that the renminbi is massively underpriced. Chinese experts have also argued that a rise in the currency would be in the country's own interests.

Wen told reporters: "I understand some countries want to increase their exports – what I don't understand is the practice of depreciating one's own currency and attempting to press other countries to increase theirs, just to improve exports. In my view that is a protectionist measure."

He went on to warn the US on its own currency, as he did at his last news conference. China holds more US treasury debt than another country.

"If I said I was worried [about the US dollar] last year, I still want to make the same remark this year," he said. "We cannot afford any mistake, however slight, when it comes to financial assets ... I hope the US will take concrete steps to reassure investors."

Turning to domestic issues, the prime minister warned that China faced "an extremely difficult task" in promoting steady and fast growth while restructuring the economy and managing inflationary expectations. Inflation, corruption and unfair income distribution taken together would be "strong enough to affect social stability and even the stability of state power," he said.

The government is seeking to gradually withdraw from the massive stimulus that helped to see China through the global slump, particularly given soaring property prices and rising inflation, which hit 2.7% in the year to February. But it must do so without damaging confidence.

The premier warned of the risk of a double-dip in the global economy and said that while the domestic economy had stabilised, many Chinese businesses were still reliant on the stimulus measures.

• China
• Currencies
• Climate change

Tania BraniganJonathan Watts
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At last, global warming inspires good fiction. And scientists are the rightful heroes

Gossip columnists long ago supplanted the literary editors in media hierarchies, and a writer must be grateful if the press greets the publication of his or her book with anything so quaint as a discussion of its literary merit. When Martin Amis released The Pregnant Widow in February, he discovered that the big issue for journalists was not how he expressed his ideas but whether he had upset Anna Ford. The former newsreader proved she is not at her best when the autocue is off by accusing him of smoking in the hospital room where her husband was dying in 1988 – he didn't, apparently – and of being a neglectful godfather to her daughter, a charge that even if true had nothing to do with his book.

After this, Ian McEwan must be grateful that Angela Rippon is not greeting the publication of Solar by announcing that he stood her up on a date in 1976, or that Fiona Bruce is not telling the papers he snubbed her at a dinner party during Blair's first term.

The "story" about McEwan nevertheless remains as irrelevant to his fiction as the babbling about whether the atheist Amis was a good godfather. Inspired by the Sunday Times, the pack has decided that McEwan is satirising a voyage in which he accompanied Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and other enlightened artists to see the effect of global warming in the Arctic.

McEwan does indeed acknowledge his debt to the Cape Farewell expedition, and includes a scene in which the cynical hero contrasts the idealistic conversation of his progressive companions when they are together at dinner with the naked selfishness with which they steal each other's gloves, scarves and helmets in the ship's boot room. "Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs," says Michael Beard. "Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin… How were they to save the Earth when it was so much larger than the boot room?"

As scoops go, however, the hacks' effort was five years late – and so did not even qualify as yesterday's news. When he returned from the Arctic in 2005, McEwan made the contrast between the highmindedness of the dinner table and the low scramble for petty advantage in the boot room in a speech you can still find on the internet. More pertinently, he understands that the contradiction is at the heart of contemporary environmental concerns. Far from mocking fears about climate change, McEwan is struggling to find a way to write them.

Opposition to global warming has been a good cause which has failed to inspire good fiction. I do not claim encyclopaedic knowledge, but Solar is the first novel I have read to tackle it successfully. The difficulty was that there appeared to be no space for any emotion except despair. If Europe slashed its carbon emissions, would America reciprocate? Even if it did, how could you persuade one billion Chinese consumers not to buy cars or hundreds of millions of Indians and Africans to abandon self-enrichment? The campaign against climate change ran against the grain of human nature.

McEwan has found a way out by turning to the pioneering green thinkers James Lovelock and Stewart Brand, who have been begging environmentalists to stand their old opposition to technology on its head. They want them to see nuclear power, mega-cities and GM food as innovations that can slow down emissions. To put it another way, they hope to use 21st-century science to limit the damage caused by 19th and 20th-century science.

McEwan tells me that he prefers technicians to humanities graduates who spout apocalyptic predictions. He sniffs in some the same fanaticism that inspired millenarian religion, communism and fascism, and suspects they want to compensate for the knowledge of the inevitability of their own deaths by imagining that the species will go down with them.

The optimism – and it may be a false optimism – new technologies bring allows McEwan to create a protagonist who is not an impossibly righteous hero or the gritty survivor of a coming catastrophe but an all too fleshy adulterer and glutton. Michael Beard is a Nobel Laureate whose glory days are long gone. He steals the work of an equally lecherous colleague, who dies, appropriately, by slipping on a polar bear-skin rug. Beard realises the robbed research could create a new source of clean energy and goes on a slob's progress through the arguments against global warming as he tries to cash in.

When his American business partner wonders if the denialists of the Tea Party movement may be right, Beard delivers a devastating account of the arguments for manmade global warming, which ends with the unanswerable point that in the unlikely event of the vast majority of qualified scientists being wrong, we'll be hitting peak oil soon and will need alternative energy anyway. He neatly illuminates the link between Palinism and postmodernism by forcing Beard to endure an audience at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, which bellows that his so-called science is nothing but a "social construct" designed to preserve the "hegemonic arrogance" of the "white male elite". My colleagues should note that McEwan shows that the ICA rather than the Cape Farewell project has been the true butt of satirists ever since Amis invited its relativist crowd to raise their hands if they thought they were morally superior to the Taliban and only one third did. ("So many?" I hear you gasp. Yes, I was surprised too.)

The novel's burning question comes when Beard asks an audience of City investors, "How can we slow down and stop while sustaining our civilisation and continuing to bring millions out of poverty? Not by being virtuous… For humanity en masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention [and] the pleasures of ingenuity."

McEwan attempts the difficult trick of blending raucous comedy with science and politics. I think he pulls it off magnificently. But given the current state of British criticism, I accept that you may want to hear what the newsreaders have to say before deciding for yourselves.

• Ian McEwan
• Martin Amis
• Climate change
• Arctic

Nick Cohen
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Leaked adjudication largely clears government over campaign that some thought 'scary, inaccurate and too political'

Read the full text of the ASA adjudication

The advertising watchdog has mildly rebuked the government over the phrasing of a claim in two advertisements on the danger of climate change, while dismissing the rest of the complaints against the controversial television and newspaper campaign.

The campaign, run by the Department of Environment and Climate Change last winter, brought in 939 complaints. Various groups said the adverts were political, too scary, and factually misleading.

The vast majority of these complaints have now been dismissed by the authority.

The Advertising Standards Authority's only criticism was that a claim that "flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense" should have be phrased more tentatively.

The environment secretary, Ed Miliband, said the authority had "comprehensively vindicated" the accuracy of the department's TV advert and had rebuffed those who attempted to use the advertising standards process to question the reality of man-made climate change.

"Science tells us it is more than 90% likely there will be more extreme weather events if we don't act.

"In any future campaign, as requested by the ASA, we will make clear the nature of this prediction."

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Advertising
• Television industry
• Newspapers
• Law

Robin McKie
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Ruling leaked to the Guardian mildly rebukes government over print and TV campaign

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Advertising
• Television industry
• Newspapers
• Law

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Ian McEwan approaches the climate crisis in comic mode

Climate change is chiefly an engineering problem to Michael Beard, the central character in Ian McEwan's new novel. In a different sense, it is to McEwan too. A practised manipulator of his readers' expectations and responses, he has plainly thought hard about the difficulties of dealing in a work of fiction with something that comes trailing strong emotions and unhelpful narrative models.

In contrast to the politics of global warming, for example, the science can't easily be debated dramatically without giving undue weight to the denialist camp, which he's unwilling to do. On the other hand, apocalyptic urgency, which shadows so much of the rhetoric around the issue, is equally unattractive to McEwan, a long-term fan of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium. Finally, and maybe most intractably, there's the problem of response-fatigue. Pressing invitations to think about global warming aren't thin on the ground. McEwan's solution is both elegant and surprising: instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual.

Beard, a short, fat, philandering physicist, serves as the novel's scientifically informed focal consciousness and as a quasi-allegorical figure. In this, he resembles Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon at the heart of Saturday (2005). But here too comedy gets McEwan round a problem. The earlier novel's unironic stance towards its central figure, along with its vanilla-flavoured politics, grated badly on many readers, who saw it – whatever its technical merits – as a novel about a smug, rich man who's almost proud of his inability to decide if invading Iraq is a good idea. Beard shares Perowne's distaste for zeal: though never in doubt about the basic science of global warming, he begins the novel suspicious of the "Old Testament ring" to environmentalists' forewarnings. This time, however, it's made clear from the start that we won't be asked to admire this mildly preposterous character, a generator of ironies as much as an observer of them.

The first of the book's three sections begins in 2000. Beard is 53, his best days long behind him. A Nobel laureate for his early theoretical work ("the Beard-Einstein Conflation") on the photoelectric effect, he sits on committees, lends his name and prestige to institutional letterheads, and fills the role of "Chief" at a research centre outside Reading that has been set up to allow the Blair government to be seen as doing something to combat climate change. For Beard, this phenomenon is merely "one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action . . . But he himself had other things to think about." The most insistent of these things is his fifth wife Patrice's affair with the builder who did up their house in Belsize Park, an affair she's embarked on in a mood of buoyant vengefulness after coming across evidence of Beard's numerous infidelities.

In order to escape Patrice's icy good cheer, and the attentions of a young physicist at the centre, Tom Aldous, who keeps trying to interest him in artificial photosynthesis, Beard signs up for a trip to the Arctic. This entirely selfish decision is greeted as a great step forward by the centre's idealists and its time-serving co-boss. Beard heads north in the company of various arts-world luminaries. "Everyone but Beard was worried about global warming and was merry"; only the semi-sceptical physicist is appropriately sombre. There's an echo of Perowne's somewhat priggish disapproval of the anti-war protesters' levity in Saturday, but Beard's moroseness springs less from intellectual consistency than the fact that he has nearly frozen off his penis by emptying his bladder in subzero temperatures. This uncomfortable episode, and the journey it takes place on, is the first of McEwan's customary set-pieces in the book, and it's as though he's decided to give full rein to the comic overtones held back in 2007's On Chesil Beach.

Returning to London, Beard is quickly embroiled in more of McEwan's traditional tropes – a life-altering accident and a suspenseful sequence, again given a comic spin. Then a new section starts, set in 2005. Divorced and even fatter, Beard has reinvented himself as a clean-energy entrepreneur. He has, it turns out, been sacked from the centre after making some off-the-cuff remarks on the low numbers of women in high-level physics jobs. McEwan draws fruitfully on his own experiences with the press here and has some satiric fun at the expense of arts academics, though Beard's troubles, modelled on Larry Summers's at Harvard, aren't quite believable in an English setting. The physicist has also acquired a new girlfriend and an addiction to salt and vinegar crisps; weirdly, McEwan uses these last items to have him experience a well known anecdote – another set-piece – and then has an irritating know-all pop up to explain what a well known anecdote it is.

Beard's main business, however, is to lecture a group of institutional investors on alternative energy. The novel carefully undercuts both his virtue and his dignity: he spends his time at the podium trying not to vomit, having eaten a dodgy smoked salmon sandwich, and parts of his pitch are either plagiarised or hypocritical fabrications. All the same, his actual arguments are compelling, and it's hard not to root for him as, in the final section, he prepares to throw the switch on a prototype array of next-generation solar panels in New Mexico. It's now 2009, and Beard, fatter still and trying to ignore a worrying melanoma, has further romantic entanglements and professional complications on his plate. As various chickens from the first two sections start coming home to roost, still in comic mode, McEwan builds up considerable suspense about the fate of Beard's enterprise, a revolutionary technology that, you end up half-believing, might save the world.

In the course of his trip to the Arctic circle, Beard hears some unfamiliar guitar music, "reflective, with a touch of lightness and precision, like something of Mozart's". Solar seems to aim for something similar and, as you'd expect, precision isn't a problem in its brisk tour d'horizon of the ironies arising from climate change. McEwan swiftly persuades the reader that he can write authoritatively not only about science but the culture of scientific institutions, too. He also revels in clever, sometimes over-neat reversals. At one point, Beard's business partner starts to worry that the climate might not be changing after all. "It's a catastrophe," Beard assures him. "Relax!"

Lightness, however, comes less easily to McEwan, whose style depends on deliberateness and a certain ponderousness. The ominous lining up of causes and effects and the patient tweaking of narrative tension don't always mesh well with the aimed-for quickness and brio. Some of the humour is quite broad: there's a rather clunking motif concerning polar bears, and Beard gets involved with a stereotypical Southern waitress who's called, in the way of trailer-trash types, Darlene. He emerges as a figure of some comic dynamism, but the pages on his childhood and youth, though brilliantly done, articulate poorly with the knockabout parts of the plot. Once it became clear that the book's world is comic, I also found myself wondering if it wouldn't have benefited from being more loosely assembled, with shorter, discontinuous episodes and Beard functioning along the lines of Updike's Bech, Nabokov's Pnin or the consciousness in Calvino's Cosmicomics.

At the same time, the overarching plot pulls off a clinching novelistic coup, using comedy to sneak grimmer matters past the reader's defences. Beard's argument about the correct response to climate change, an argument that McEwan has also made, is that we have no choice but to hope that technological ingenuity, enlightened self-interest and the market's allocation of resources can get us off the hook; personal virtue counts for little. For a while it seems as though the slobbish, self-centred Beard might actually bring about such an outcome, and the reader starts to hope he'll manage it. But Beard – self-deluding, a serial breaker of resolutions, hopelessly addicted to overconsumption – also stands for humanity in general. When he gets his comeuppance, it's a powerful reminder that reality isn't a comic novel, and in its deepest implications, this book isn't one either.

• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

Christopher Tayler
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After 13 years with the UN, former Irish president Mary Robinson is coming home to her debt-ridden country – not to retire, but to fight for 'climate justice' for all the world's poor

In 1993, three years into her presidency of Ireland, Mary Robinson paid a visit to west Belfast. The trip was controversial before she went – the Irish government didn't want her there, and neither did the British – but it became far more controversial when, in the course of her tour, she happened to shake the hand of a local politician, one Gerry Adams. The next day, "trying to be a good president, I washed the hair and waited for the hairdresser to arrive," Robinson told an RTÉ radio show recently. "And she was a good northern Protestant, and she didn't turn up." Robinson tried to fix it herself, but at her first engagement her efforts were scornfully dismissed: "You'd think she'd have got her hair done to come and see us!" When she got to the airport to give a final press conference, there was a hairdresser waiting – the Northern Irish security forces were so upset about the incident they'd organised one.

Robinson told the anecdote not in order to complain about being a woman in the public eye, judged on appearance alone, but as an example of unexpected thoughtfulness across political lines. Striking, too, is her sympathy with the woman who didn't arrive to do her job, and her understanding of the power of the simple gesture, both to entrench division, and to heal it: there are those who argue her handshake helped pave the way to the IRA ceasefire the next year. Certainly it was brave; some unionists may also have recognised that her characteristic commitment to a fair hearing worked both ways – in the early 1980s she resigned from the Labour party because she felt unionists had not been adequately consulted about the Anglo-Irish agreement. But in the week when the security forces who helped her then are finally answering to Stormont, rather than Westminster, the anecdote also underscores just how far Northern Ireland has travelled in the past 17 years.

And not just Northern Ireland. Robinson is 65 now, and has spent 13 years in New York, first as UN commissioner for human rights, then, after pressure from the Bush administration contributed to her resignation (they were unimpressed by her warnings that the "war on terror" would compromise human rights and saw her as so pro-Palestinian that the conservative National Review accused her of war crimes) as president of Realizing Rights, the advocacy organisation she founded in 2002. But she is moving back to Ireland this year. A rather bruised Ireland, granted, in the grip of recession and rumours of bankruptcy (the Celtic Tiger, she says forthrightly, was an episode of "sheer selfish stupidity"), but an Ireland whose moral place in the EU, whose liberalised laws and reputation as a modern state, she helped to shape.

We meet at Trinity College in central Dublin, in a bare office at the top of the arts faculty building. She looks tired, but is both gracious and completely controlled – she has the rare quality of seeming approachable, even good company, while also making it clear that certain lines are not to be crossed. Many in Ireland, used to the populist bonhomie of working-class male politicians such as Bertie Ahern, have always found her cool, even haughty. And it is true she is an extremely assured presence. Her sentences – full of world leaders, capital cities, global initiatives, sometimes too full of development and human rights jargon – unspool smoothly and clearly into the silence.

Robinson is obviously looking forward to coming home – not least because it will bring her closer to her four grandchildren – but she will not be retiring. Instead, she will be concentrating her efforts on trying to bring about what she calls "climate justice": trying to ensure that those most affected by global warming (generally those who had least to do with producing it) receive some redress. This is a natural progression of her work in New York: at the UN she widened the brief of the human rights commission to include, for example, security, but in the way that women tend to mean it, not men – security of food, safe water, healthcare, shelter. She was criticised at the time for fatally diluting her mandate but she's still having none of it. "I don't at all subscribe to the notion that you weaken human rights by making it relevant to globalisation and corporate responsibility," she says. "Human rights is about holding those with power to account for abuse of power."

Increasingly, however, she has understood that there is little point fighting on all these fronts if "the development of the poor communities that we were working with is being undermined by the impacts of climate change". She makes no bones about her disappointment in Copenhagen – "there wasn't the political leadership there should have been" – and argues that it was not just a specific failure, of one summit, but rather a kind of canary in the coalmine for the shape of the world to come. Partly this is for the obvious reason of not cutting emissions in time – "You know, you can fail to get a Doha agreement, and it may or may not be serious. The failure to get agreement in Copenhagen has put the whole world more at risk" – but partly because, coinciding with the economic crisis in the west, it was such a graphic illustration of a "huge shift in power and allegiances. We face a world where, increasingly, those with economic power don't have, traditionally, strong values in human rights." For the many millions of vulnerable people in the world it's a toxic combination, and she is aware that there isn't time to lose.

These vulnerable people do, however – as she means to point out forcefully in her climate justice work – have an unprecedented weapon in their armoury: they will "form the bulk of population growth, from the 7 billion we'll probably reach this year, to 9 billion-plus in 2050, in 40 years' time. And so for the first time, I think, in human history, the richer parts of the world are dependent for our future survival on what happens in the poorest parts. It's no longer about compassion and philanthropy – it is in our future self-interest to ensure that the poorest have access to low-carbon strategies."

The trouble is, of course, that their governments are generally too overburdened, indebted and distracted by the present to fight this particular fight, but after Copenhagen Robinson does not think governments are the way to go, if they ever were.

The answer, for her, is "civil society": "I mean churches, I mean business, I mean trade unions, I mean the normal environmental groups, development groups, human rights groups, youth groups – as never before we have to build up the pressure." It's a big, frustratingly vague notion – which, she knows well, has often been touted as the solution to intractable problems, not least in Northern Ireland, where it had distinctly limited success – but she seems hopeful, nevertheless.

Robinson likes to trace her profound sense of fairness, and her belief in the possibility of social change, back to when she was a child in Ballina, County Mayo, and visiting her paternal grandfather, who lived down the road. A retired lawyer, he still had "a passion for law – in the sense of the small guy, the tenant against the landlord, etcetera. My grandfather was of the age and disposition where he had no idea how to talk to a child. So he talked to me as if I was an adult, and I loved it. I felt so important."

Her parents were both doctors, although her mother gave up medicine when she had five children in quick succession, of whom Mary was the third ("that was my interest in human rights, being wedged between four brothers"). Robinson insists her mother never expressed regret about this, but "it led me to understand that the real key is to have choices. And that there really isn't the necessary range of choices for women." She went to a convent school, and was happy there, but higher education – finishing school in Paris, a law degree at Trinity Dublin, then a master's at Harvard during the Vietnam war – shook all the assumptions she had grown up with.

When she became auditor of the law society in Dublin in 1967, her inaugural address was on law and morality in Ireland and took on every sacred cow: contraception, women's rights, abortion, gay rights, "including the status of children", she says, "which is just being, finally, addressed now." Two years later, aged 25 and already Trinity's youngest law professor, she ran for a seat in the Irish senate. Her first bill as a mini-skirted young senator aimed to overturn the ban on the import, distribution and sale of contraceptives. Condoms were posted through her letterbox, and in her home village the bishop denounced her from the pulpit. Her parents, despite being doctors and thus presumably apprised of the individual effects of bans on abortion and contraception, believed in the teachings of the Catholic church and were upset by her attempts to change the law; they were even more upset when she announced she was to marry Nick Robinson, a Protestant lawyer who went on to become a political cartoonist. Although this has been described as a religious objection, she recently corrected this impression in an interview with Irish television presenter Gay Byrne: her parents were, she said, "engaged in over-love" – she was their only girl, good at school; nobody, let alone a man known to have had lots of girlfriends, was good enough, and they declined to come to the wedding. In the event the estrangement lasted only three months – the marriage has now lasted for 40 years – but it simply underlined, again, her stubbornness, and her willingness to stand up for what she felt was right.

Which is not a recipe for popularity. When she ran for seats in the lower house, she failed. She came second in the presidential election, winning only when votes from the third-place candidate were transferred. But there were reports of people dancing in the streets when she won, and she, most of all, knew what she had done: "I was elected by the women of Ireland, who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system." Famously, she lit a lamp in her window, as a welcoming sign to the vast Irish diaspora; deliberately – there was no lack of steel in her campaign, and she quickly showed a willingness to exploit the gaffes of often incompetent rivals – she made herself less private and austere, acquiring suits by Irish designers, trying, above all, to be more open and approachable, more, she told Byrne, like her own warm, gregarious mother. "And the more I did that, the more I got back an extraordinary response." Her approval ratings climbed to 90% and stayed there.

What she quickly realised then, and has honed carefully, ever since, is that there is a real need for a moral authority outside the compromise and horse-trading of conventional politics; she knows, too, that it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to get right.

Furthermore, when Nelson Mandela asked her to join the Elders, a group of 12 eminent leaders chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who, rather sweetly, they call "the Arch") she says she felt it was "quite an arrogant idea". But when "we went to our first planning meeting in South Africa, and Nelson Mandela – Madiba – joined us – that put an end to my doubts, because he was so strong, and he looked around and said, 'It's your task to listen very carefully, be humble. Don't go into a place thinking you know more than the people there.'"

Finding a way to empower civil society is all the more important, she thinks, because the world's largest democracy seems, at the moment, so fragile. "Obama's trying to provide [leadership], but I think that the American political system is becoming dysfunctional, and that's really, really worrying." (Also wobbly, though without quite the same impact on the rest of the world, is Northern Ireland: delicate power-sharing between arch-rivals like the DUP and Sinn Féin is a great achievement, she says, but it makes it "difficult to position those who want to hold that to account … it's not a straightforward democratic process at the moment. It's a tentative post-conflict process.")

She is very aware that something like moral authority was claimed by the neo-con project and its bid to export democracy by force, and that "moral authority" is what is claimed by systems, such as religion, that subjugate women in the developing world. "We made a very strong statement on that," she says.

Finally, she knows that know it is an ever-changing, delicate thing. "When I was president it was two kinds of things – one was to change the role of the office, to develop its potential under the constitution, and then try to exert it. And when I was serving as high commissioner, it was another kind of moral authority, because of the absence of an enforcement mechanism. It was going to where the victims were suffering violations and speaking from their perspective. And now I find it again with the Elders. And the reason why I'm so honoured and passionate to do it is because I feel a terrible sense of urgency. I really do."

• Ireland
• Human rights
• Nelson Mandela
• Climate change
• Poverty

Aida Edemariam
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Will global empathy save us from the catch-22 of climate change? John Gray is sceptical

Whoever hacked into the emails at the University of East Anglia fired the opening salvo in a new kind of dirty war. The Copenhagen conference met on the basis that dealing with global warming was in everyone's interest. The idea that nearly 200 countries could reach meaningful decisions was always unreal, but the meeting's collapse reflected a more fundamental reality.

Environmentalists have always assumed that the threat of disaster will bring about an era of global cooperation. In reality, climate change is triggering another round of geopolitical conflict. Limiting the use of fossil fuels may be essential if disaster is to be avoided, but countries that in different ways rely heavily on these fuels for their prosperity – such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, China and the US – were never going to accept the strict carbon curbs that the EU and others demanded. How much the leaked emails contributed to the breakdown of the summit is unclear, but the effect has been to let those countries, along with the rest of the world, off the hook. The undermining effect on climate science looks like being long-lasting and profound.

"Climategate" was an exercise in postmodern cyber-warfare – a move in a larger conflict that environmentalists show little sign of understanding. In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin suggests that the whole of history is a struggle between the polar forces of empathy and entropy. "There is, I believe, a grand paradox to human history. At the heart of the human saga is a catch-22 – a contradiction of extraordinary significance – that has accompanied our species, if not from the very beginning, then at least from the time our ancestors began their slow metamorphosis from archaic to civilised beings thousands of years before Christ."

The catch-22 is that, as civilisation has extended the reach of empathy beyond the family and the tribe until it covers all of humankind, the expanding infrastructure of industry and transport has needed ever larger inputs of energy, increasing entropy and wrecking the planet.

Moving from hunting and gathering to farming, and then to industrial production, enabled humans to interact with one another as never before, but this increasing interconnection involved depleting the planet, a process that is reaching a climax just as civilisation is becoming planet-wide for the first time. "Our rush to universal empathic connectivity," Rifkin writes, "is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

How can this deadly collision be averted? The answer appears to be straightforward: by developing "biosphere consciousness". "Only by concerted action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere will we have a chance to ensure our future." In other words, a transformation of consciousness can save humanity from self-destruction.

It is hardly a new story. How often have we heard environmentalists exclaim that the alternatives facing the world are radical transformation or total catastrophe? The trouble is that their analysis of the environmental crisis is extremely shallow. Climate change is not mainly the work of sinister corporate interests and weak-kneed or corrupt politicians. It is a direct result of the energy-intensive civilisation in which the affluent part of humankind lives, and which the rest very much wants to join. While humans are more interdependent than ever before, they are at the same time destabilising the planet. Reining in corporate interests and chivvying politicians to be greener do nothing to resolve this fundamental contradiction.

Where Rifkin departs from the standard green line is in grasping that all of humanity is caught in a trap, but he seems convinced that, provided human empathy continues to expand, the trap can be sprung without too much difficulty. Rifkin's difficulties start with the claim – in itself quite plausible – that the environmental crisis is a catch-22. Joseph Heller's darkly brilliant satire derives its power from the insight that there are dilemmas from which there is no escape: if you are sane enough to ask to be declared unfit to fly on dangerous missions, then you are fit to fly.

The essence of any catch-22 is that there is no way out, but Rifkin shrinks from this cruel logic, with the result that his argument verges on incoherence. How could human empathy possibly defeat the force of entropy, an irreversible physical process? Does Rifkin believe an increase in altruism can lead to the repeal of the second law of thermodynamics?

His practical proposals for dealing with the climate crisis are disappointingly conventional – massive investment in renewable energy and the like – and, in line with standard green thinking, he never explains how a human population of 7 billion, rising to 9 or 10 billion over the next 50 years, can be supported by a mixture of solar panels and hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Stewart Brand's recent Whole Earth Discipline, which argues that coping with environmental breakdown will necessitate making the most of demonised technologies such as nuclear energy and GM food, is more realistic as well as more visionary.

Most of The Empathic Civilization is not in fact concerned with the practical task of coping with the mess humans have made of the planet. Instead it is devoted to defending Rifkin's view that humans are essentially empathic animals, whose benign qualities have not been fully manifested throughout most of their history. "Wanton widespread violence has not been the norm in human history," Rifkin writes, looking back wistfully on the "tranquil agricultural life that existed for thousands of years" before the "mega-machine" of property and government disrupted humankind's natural innocence. One need not be a hardened cynic to find this Rousseauesque tale implausible. Humans may be more moved by empathy than is sometimes allowed, but empathy for the feelings of others is not only expressed in compassion. It is equally the basis of cruelty, a trait that is also distinctively human.

For all its inordinate length, The Empathic Civilization fails to substantiate its central thesis. The innate sociability of human beings is a fact, but it does not follow that they are likely to cooperate in dealing with environmental crisis. The impact of climate change is rather to intensify human conflict. As global warming accelerates, natural resources such as arable land and water become scarcer, and competition to control them will be acute and pervasive. At the same time, those whose power and wealth come from fossil fuels will do anything they can to promote "climate scepticism".

This is where the leaked emails come in. With global warming fuelling a resurgence of geopolitical tensions, climate science has become a weapon in a war of disinformation. Whatever lapses in intellectual probity they might reveal, the messages are being used to obscure a mass of evidence showing that anthropogenic climate change is real, and may be occurring more rapidly than previously believed. It is still possible to frame an intelligent response to the threat, but first we need to recognise that the climate has become a battleground. Empathy won't save us.

John Gray's Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings is published by Penguin.

• Climate change
• Climate change

John Gray
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The US says polar bears should be granted the highest level of protection. Tell us which animal you'd most like to save

The United States is lobbying for the polar bear to be granted the highest level of protection as a species. The move would make all international trade in polar bear products illegal. The Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species is also considering applying its appendix 1 status to elephants, tigers, rhinos and bluefin tuna.

If you're an animal-lover, what species would you like to see protected? From the cute and cuddly, to the downright bizarre, which animals would have first place in your personal Noah's ark?

• Animal welfare
• Animals
• Climate change
• Polar regions
• Wildlife

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It has taken a perfect storm of snow, scientific doubt and political failure to dent public acceptance of the reality of global warming - but these factors will pass

Is the world warming and are we causing it? The number of people confidently saying yes to that question has slipped sharply over recent weeks, if opinion polls on both sides of the Atlantic are to be believed. That looks like bad news for those arguing that major changes to how we travel, power our homes and feed ourselves are needed to avoid catastrophe.

Yet a longer-term take on the data shows that interpreting the results as a collapse in confidence in climate science due to the release of the University of East Anglia emails or mistakes by the UN's climate body is not sustainable – or at least a long way from the full story. The data shows just how overwhelmingly British people accept climate change is happening and how resolute those views have been – at least until now. And even in the more sceptical US 63% of people believe that global warming has already begun or will do so in their lifetime.

First, the US Gallup poll released yesterday shows the proportion of Americans who think the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated has risen seven percentage points in a year to 48%. What's more interesting is that it is the fourth year in a row the figure has risen, from 30% in 2006, suggesting recent events are not the sole cause of shifting attitudes. Gallup, like all pollsters, can only speculate on the reasons for the shift, but does say intriguingly that the issue is becoming increasingly bipartisan.

An Ipsos-Mori poll in the UK released in February showed those thinking climate change is "definitely" happening had fallen from 44% to 31% in the year to the middle of January. A Populus poll for the BBC conducted on 3-4 February revealed that 25% of people didn't think global warming was happening, up from 15% in November.

Look at that the other way round and the Ipsos-Mori poll showed 91% of people accepted climate change was happening, and the Populus poll 75%. The difference is probably due to the former poll not including people over 65, who are significantly more sceptical, while the latter was conducted at the peak of negative news coverage about climate science. As ever with polls, the different phrasing of questions matters too.

Nonetheless, confidence has fallen. Why? An obvious factor is the recent public relations disaster suffered by climate scientists, including both the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia and the false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, which was included in the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But this is unlikely to be the whole story, as only 57% of those polled by Populus had heard these stories. Far more – 83% – had heard about, and were experiencing, an exceptionally cold winter. That's a pretty tangible opinion former, even if it is wrong, given the crucial difference between week-to-week weather and decade-to decade climate.

However, even chilly weather can only be part of the story. Unpublished polling by the Guardian/Observer in February 2009 – another very cold snap – showed no shift in opinions on global warming at all, compared to previous years back to 2005, with the vast majority thinking it was happening.

A last factor to consider is the farce at Copenhagen, when over 115 world leaders gathered and failed to deliver the global deal they had said was essential, perhaps suggesting to people that fears over warming were overblown. The Populus poll found 61% of people had seen the Copenhagen summit in the news.

So it seems it took a perfect storm of snow, scientific doubt and political failure to dent public acceptance of the reality of global warming by about 10%.

For greens that could be encouraging, as all those factors will fade. For sceptics, it's more likely to be worrying, as they have never had it so good in recent years. And people still rate the environment and climate change above some other headline-grabbing issues. The Ipsos-Mori poll indicates that, as "issues facing you and your family", environment rates higher than education and roughly level with crime and immigration.

Looking forward, the critical category will be those people who accept climate change is occurring but think natural cycles – not humans - are more likely the cause. That position allows people to reject green measures as futile. The size of that group is large, perhaps 30-50%, but varies a lot between polls, probably due to different questions. The IPcC's landmark 2007 report concluded that it was 90% certain that we are causing warming. Whether people can be persuaded of that may be the key to whether meaningful action on climate change actually happens.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• United States

Damian Carrington
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Today, many parents will be putting their children on to buses, cars or bikes and seeing them on their way to school. Sadly for the parents of 72 million children around the world, they do not have this choice. Today the prime minister of Britain and the president of France have the chance to change this when they meet in London. This year provides us with an opportunity to get all children through the school gates. In 2005, musicians took to the stage to perform in the name of Make Poverty History and helped secure an additional $50bn in aid for poor countries. In 2010, footballers will be taking to the pitch and playing in the name of the 1Goal campaign to secure funding for every child to go to school (South Africa ready to host World Cup, says Zuma, 5 March).

Backed by millions of campaigners, hundreds of companies and some of the biggest stars in football, this year's World Cup has the opportunity to leave a unique legacy never seen before through a sporting occasion. The South Africans recently agreed to host an extraordinary high-level summit on education to deliver this. We look to both the UK and France, which pride themselves on the quality of their domestic education, to deliver such opportunities to the rest of the world.

Adrian Lovett

Chair, 1Goal campaign committee

• As healthcare professionals, we are very aware that the impact of climate change on maternal and child health in developing countries will be enormous. Climate change will greatly increase deaths of the most vulnerable through water and food scarcity, increased infectious disease and forced migration. There will be no possibility of meeting the UN millennium development goals of reducing maternal and child deaths without serious action by the rich countries of the world, and there are real connections between poverty, inequalities, conflict and climate change which add to the urgency of our efforts.

We urge leaders in both politics and healthcare to show an example in moving to a low-carbon future, and to build on the innovative work in the health service through the NHS Sustainable Development Unit to reduce the carbon footprint of the NHS. If we do not tackle this problem ourselves, we must be held responsible for causing thousands of mother and child deaths in most of the poor countries of the world.

Professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran President, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists

Dr Peter Carter General secretary and chief executive, Royal College of Nursing

Professor Ian Gilmore President, Royal College of Physicians

Professor Alan Maryon-Davis

President, Faculty of Public Health

Professor Terence Stephenson President, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health

Professor Cathy Warwick General secretary, Royal College of Midwives

• International aid and development
• Schools
• World Cup 2010
• Climate change
• NHS

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In holding that the aim of science is truth alone, they misrepresent its real aims

George Monbiot is surely right to bemoan the profoundly unsatisfactory state of affairs that exists between science and the public (With complex science, we must take much on trust. The trouble is we can't, 9 March).

Many members of the public instinctively and irrationally distrust, even fear, science. Thus, for climate sceptics, "No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us". And scientists don't help by producing specialised "gobbledegook" so incomprehensible that even scientists "studying neighbouring subjects within the same discipline can no longer understand each other".

The situation might be helped if scientists stopped deceiving us, and themselves, about the nature of science itself, and adopted a more truthful view. At present most of them take for granted the view that the intellectual aim of science is to acquire knowledge of truth, the basic method being to assess, impartially, claims to knowledge with respect to evidence – nothing being accepted permanently as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. But this is nonsense. Physics only ever accepts theories that are unified – that attribute the same laws to all the phenomena to which the theory in question applies – even though many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted.

This means that physics persistently accepts a substantial thesis about the universe independent of evidence: there is some kind of underlying unity in nature, to the extent at least that all seriously disunified theories are false. This substantial, influential and highly problematic assumption needs to be acknowledged within science, so that it can be criticised and, we may hope, improved. The aim of science is not truth per se, but rather truth presupposed to be unified, or explanatory.

And it goes further. The aim of seeking explanatory truth is a special case of the more general aim of seeking truth that is, in some way or other, important or of value. Values, of one kind or another, are inherent in the aims of science. But values are, if anything, even more problematic than untestable assumptions concerning an underlying unity in nature. Values implicit in the aims of science need to be acknowledged, so that they can be criticised and, we may hope, improved.

Finally, knowledge of valuable truth is sought so that it may be used by people, ideally to enhance the quality of human life. There is a humanitarian or political dimension. But this, again, needs to be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved.

In short, in holding that the intellectual aim of science is truth alone, scientists seriously misrepresent its real, problematic aims, and thus prevent urgently needed critical assessment by scientists and non-scientists alike. More honesty about the nature of science might improve science, and public attitudes towards it – and might even encourage scientists to produce less gobbledegook.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Hacked climate science emails
• Philosophy
• Climate change

Nicholas Maxwell
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Saved permits can be used to meet future targets to cut emissions without reducing pollution

Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal.

The surplus credits have been amassed from over-allocation of permits to pollute from the European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits from carbon-cutting projects in developing countries and holding on to their more expensive official EU allowances.

The saved permits can be used to meet future targets to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming and climate change without actually reducing pollution, or sold for a profit in the future.

Campaigners for tougher emissions reductions said the saved-up allowances discredited the argument of some industries that much deeper cuts in future would be "fatal" because they could no longer afford to compete against rivals outside the EU.

However, companies involved said the banked credits would help them pay to develop new emission-cutting technology, and to meet emissions targets until that became widely available.

Industry also warned it faced "death by a thousand cuts" as a result of the next phase of the scheme, from 2013 and 2020, and other costly environmental legislation planned by government. Business leaders accused the government of being prepared to sacrifice industry to enable other sectors such as aviation to keep polluting and meet the UK's carbon budgets.

One steelmaker told the Guardian: "Officials see us as acceptable collateral in the fight against climate change. If we don't make anything in this country any more, it means people could still fly to Tenerife once a year and the UK will keep within the carbon budget."

He said meeting targets would require vast amounts of steel to build windfarms, nuclear reactors and electric cars. This would have to be imported from more-polluting steelmakers outside Europe if the industry disappeared in the UK.

The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the centrepiece of the EU's pledge to cut greenhouse gases, has already been criticised for giving many companies allowances to emit more emissions than they need, leaving little incentive to reduce pollution, and for lax regulation.

The latest concern about "banking" credits involves companies also buying cheap allowances from "offset" schemes which reduce emissions in other countries, often China and India, and using these to cover their emissions while keeping their official allowances – which are worth more because projects in other countries could in future be banned.

Analysis for the Guardian by campaign group Sandbag of the figures for 2008, the most recent available, looked at the extra allowances accrued by four big sectors: iron and steel, coke ovens, metal ore processing, and cement, which together have 800 installations covered by the trading scheme, and include big names like ArcelorMittal, Thyssenkrupp, Corus, Holcim and Cemex.

Sandbag calculated the four sectors received permits to emit 66m tonnes more carbon dioxide than they needed in 2008, partly because predicted growth did not happen and partly because of the recession towards the end of the year. In addition they bought cheap offsets for a further 18m tonnes plus, which would then free up more EU allowances. In total the surplus allowances would have been worth nearly €1.2bn (£1.1bn) in 2008, or just over €1.1bn at today's closing price of €12.99. Based on the forecast average price of €30 a tonne for the third phase of the ETS from 2013-2016 by analysts Point Carbon they would be worth more than double that in future.

If the companies stockpiled over-allocated surpluses for the whole of this phase of the ETS, from 2008-2012 they could be worth as much as €3.2bn at today's prices, said Sandbag. Any more credits released by buying offsets would be on top of that.

"If they [companies] want cashflow, which in the current climate they may, then they'll cash in the allowances," said Bryony Worthington, Sandbag's founder and director. "But if they are thinking long-term then they'll be thinking 'I should probably hold on to them and insulate myself for the future'."

ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steel producer, has pledged to use profits to invest in future energy savings to reduce pollution, but there were no guarantees they or any other company would have to do this, said Worthington. "How do we police it, they could be using it for dividends or anything," she added.

Ian Rodgers, director of UK Steel, said: "The climate change agenda won't affect the amount of steel consumed, but it will determine where it's produced."

According to industry estimates, the third phase could cost heavy industry – including steelmakers such as Corus, the chemicals industry and the ceramics industry – €1bn a year.

Sandbag will tomorrow publish in-depth analysis for 2008, including the biggest buyers of offsets from developing countries, and a map linking every offset scheme with their European customers.

• Emissions trading
• Carbon emissions
• European Union
• Pollution
• Manufacturing sector
• Climate change

Juliette JowitTim Webb
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US belief in climate science lowest since polling began 13 years ago

Public belief in climate science has seen a precipitous slide in the US, according to new polling that suggests fewer Americans are concerned about the threat posed by global warming.

Nearly half of Americans – 48% – now believe the threat of global warming has been exaggerated, the highest level since polling began 13 years ago, the poll published today by Gallup said.

It directly linked the decline in concern to the controversies about media coverage of stolen emails from the University of East Anglia climate research unit and a mistake about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 in the UN's authoritative report on global warming.

"These news reports may well have caused some Americans to re-evaluate the scientific consensus on global warming," Gallup said.

Half of Americans now believe there is a scientific consensus on climate change. Some 46% believe scientists are unsure about global warming, or that it is not occurring. A UK poll last month showed adults who believe climate change is "definitely" a reality had dropped from 44% to 31% over the past year.

"The last two years have marked a general reversal in the trend of Americans' attitudes about global warming," Gallup said. "It may be that the continuing doubts about global warming put forth by conservatives and others are having an effect."

The poll feeds into fears among some environmentalists that the furore over the hacked emails has given new fuel to opponents of action on climate change, and stopped short the momentum in Congress for passage of a clean energy law.

A troika of Senators trying to draft a compromise climate bill that could get broad support said this week they may not be able to produce a draft until after the Easter recess, further reducing the chances of enacting legislation in 2010.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration faces lawsuits from Virginia, Texas, Alabama and a dozen business lobbies challenging its authority to act on greenhouse gas emissions through the Environmental Protection Agency.

Tim Wirth, a former Colorado senator who led the campaign against acid rain, told a conference call the science squabbles resembled a re-run of efforts to discredit that earlier effort for an environmental clean-up.

He said the scientists who worked on the IPCC report were woefully outmanoeuvred in PR by business groups which have the funds to employ legions of lobbyists and communications experts. "It's not a fair fight," he said. "The IPCC is just a tiny secretariat next to this giant denier machine."

A majority of Americans continues to believe that climate change is real, but they are less convinced of its urgency. Only 32% believe they will be directly affected by the consequences of a warming atmosphere, despite a major report by the Obama administration last year that climate change could bring flooding, heat waves, drought and loss of wildlife to the US.

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Hacked climate science emails
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• United States

Suzanne Goldenberg
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Moves aims to restore public confidence in science of global warming after mistake over melting rates of glaciers

The UN called in the world's top scientists today to review a report by its climate body, four months after public confidence in the science of global warming was shaken by the discovery of a mistake about the melting rates of Himalayan glaciers.

In an announcement at the UN in New York Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and Rajendra Pachauri, the much-criticised head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the InterAcademy Council, which represents 15 national academies of science, would conduct the independent review.

The announcement follows months of controversy which, while not altering the scientific consensus on climate change, has given fresh ammunition to opponents of action on global warming.

Pachauri has faced calls for his resignation, a controversy he acknowledged obliquely today. "We have received some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that and we are doing something about it," he said.

The review, which is to complete its work by August, will not undertake a dissection of the 2007 report, which has been pored over by climate sceptics, or re-examine the scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change, said Robert Dijksgraaf, the head of the InterAcademy Council.

"It will definitely not go over vast amounts of data," he told reporters. "Our goal will be to assure nations around the world that they will receive sound scientific advice on climate science."

Instead, he said it would focus on putting in place better quality control procedures for the next report, which is due in 2014.

These would include guidelines for dealing with material that has not undergone peer review such as the item on Himalayan glaciers.

One focus of the review would be the role played by Pachauri who has been criticised for his handling of the error when it first came to light.

Djiksgraaf also said the panel, likely to be made up of 10 experts, would also look at procedures for making corrections in a timely and transparent manner.

The report has been pored over by climate sceptics for errors since last November when it emerged that the IPCC had stated, wrongly, that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. As Pachauri and Ban noted today, the solid body of the 3,000 page report remained unchallenged.

The discovery of the error goes to the core of criticism of Pachauri whose first response to questions about the accuracy of the IPCC's prediction on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers was to dismiss it as "voodoo science".

Pachauri had also rankled critics by refusing to apologise for the mistakes.

But a spokesman for Pachauri today said the IPCC had initiated the independent review, and had pressed the UN to call in the scientists.

In his brief comments, Pachauri said the work of the IPCC, which shared a Nobel prize with Al Gore in 2007, remained the gold standard of climate science. "We believe the conclusions of that report are really beyond any reasonable doubt," Pachauri said.

Environmental and science organisations supported the UN's decision.

"This is the right move," said Peter Frumhoff, the science director for the Union of Concerned Scientist and a lead author on the IPCC report.

"If this independent review is carried out with rigour and transparency, it will help strengthen the IPCC's commitment to robust scientific assessments and restore public confidence that has been shaken by an aggressive campaign to sow confusion about climate science."

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Climate change
• Rajendra Pachauri
• Climate change
• United Nations

Suzanne Goldenberg
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As global warming and habitat degradation accelerates, people indigenous to the Arctic circle say they have much to teach the world about how to adapt, survive, and thrive

Elina Helander-Renvall comes from Utsjoki, a place so obscure that even many Finns have little idea where it is. Utsjoki, or Ochejohka, Uccjuuha, and Uccjokk, depending on which local language you are speaking, is Finland's northern-most municipality. Straddling the border with Norway, it shivers, unregarded, deep inside the Arctic circle, a few icy miles from the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

Utsjoki, population 1,034, is home to Finland's largest concentration of Sami speakers, the indigenous people once loosely known as Lapps who have eked out an itinerant existence herding reindeer across the frozen wastes of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and western Russia since the last Ice Age. Nearly 50% of Utsjoki's population are Sami. In Finnish terms, it's the closest this eternal minority has got to being the majority.

Born and raised on the margin though she was, Helander-Renvall's message these days is strictly mainstream. As accelerating climate change and other man-made environmental degradations create growing alarm across the planet, the Sami people have much to teach the world about how to adapt, survive, and thrive, she says.

"There is a lot to learn from the Sami, they have the traditional ecological knowledge, they really know about nature," said Helander-Renvall, head of the Arctic Indigenous Peoples Office at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi. "They have the most precise knowledge about the weather conditions, about the plants, the diet, the resources. The Sami people have an ethical relationship with nature; a respect for nature that also has a spiritual side."

The Arctic region is uniquely vulnerable to global warming, but if it is to weather the storm, it would do well to adopt Sami methods of land and resource management, communal co-operation and communication, local knowledge and best practice, she said.

In order to keep a reindeer herd out of trouble, for example, a knowledge of different types of snow could be decisive, Helander-Renvall said. Muohta (ordinary snow) or oppas (untouched snow) might be safe. But the presence of sievla (wet snow), skarta (thin, ice-like snow layers) or ceavvi (a hard layer that the reindeer cannot penetrate in search of lichen) could dictate a life-saving change of route or decision to move camp.

Local knowledge will also be vital to the large-scale industrial development on the fast-expanding oil and gas fields of western Russia's Yamal peninsula, and for the burdgeoning commercial and tourism industries in the Scandinavian north. Knowing where it is safe to build, how to site the foundations for a new road, airstrip or pipeline, what terrain to avoid, and how to do so responsibly while protecting biological diversity will all be increasingly important. "We need to preserve and transfer indigenous knowledge to future generations," Helander-Renvall said.

Professor Monica Tennberg of the Arctic Research Centre in Rovaniemi said the Sami had shown notable ability to adapt to changing climate conditions. "We've seen how the community adapts, for example finding new ways to deal with floods. We've seen better co-operation, better municipal leadership, better communications, better early warning systems," she said. Adverse effects of climate change on pasture and traditional herding trails had been met with new rotation and migration patterns and also by a tighter communal discipline.

The Arctic as a whole faces enormous challenges. Broadly speaking the region is warming at double the rate of the rest of the world, said Paula Kankaanpaa, director of the Research Centre, with local "hotspots" that fare even worse.

Symptoms include reduced sea ice; the opening of blue-water sea passages both east and west in summer, north of Canada and Russia; increased levels of carbon-carrying organic waste in the Arctic Ocean caused by melting tundra; coastal erosion due to increased wave activity; loss of habitat for large mammals such as seals and polar bears and growing disruption of indigenous human communities.

Governments still resist the idea that Arctic indigenous peoples have something unique to contribute. Canada announced this month that it will convene a foreign ministers' meeting of the five Arctic Ocean states (Canada, Russia, the US, Norway and Denmark/Greenland) in March "to encourage new thinking on responsible development" and "reinforce ongoing collaboration in the region".

To their dismay, Arctic indigenous people's organisations, including the Sami, Inuit and Inuvialuit, were not invited.

• Climate change
• Polar regions
• Finland
• Arctic

Simon Tisdall
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Doomsaying precludes the possibility of ingenious solutions – and indicates a morbid vanity that we must be the saviours

Isn't it welcome to have Ian McEwan as an advocate for a little optimism in the climate change debate? His hope, expressed in his new novel Solar, that humanity will prove ingenious enough to solve the problem through the skill of coming generations is a welcome change from those who portray our descendants as helpless victims of our "excess".

Their injunctions to "save the world for our children and grandchildren" fly in the face of history, which repeatedly shows how progress – from the wheel to the internet – transforms the world picture as time marches on. The doom brigade has its moments, such as the collapse of the classical world in Europe, the Black Death and the first world war, but they are exceptions to learn from. And we have learned.

Not to the extent of mastering clairvoyancy, however. Like miserabilism, a constant in human behaviour is the inability of Today to successfully imagine Tomorrow. The archive of prophecy and science fiction contains some good guesses, but in general the seers get it wrong. Which of my grandparents, addressing me in the 1950s, could possibly have foreseen today's IT? Which of my grandparents' grandparents had a notion of the bicycle or national parks?

This is true of scientists as much as of the more general type of wise person. Science is too often mistakenly treated in the way that history was by those 19th-century Germans who thought that one day the whole truth could be set down. Certainty is not absolute. Scientists are ambushed by novelty – see Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein – as often as the rest of us.

None of this is to argue against the risks of global warming or prudence in facing them. It is to warn against vanity, in the form of the exaggerated belief that it is all down to our generation: here, now, hurry, rush. It's also an appeal against pessimism, because of the limitations glumness places on the very potential which, odds-on, will prove the planet's salvation.

A writer in the Economist's most recent green supplement made this point neatly by questioning assumptions (rather reminiscent of Catholic dogma in Galileo's day) that spending the world's limited resources on Tomorrow rather than Today is necessarily morally right. The Economist's writer said: "Since future generations will probably be much richer than we are, it makes no more sense for us to sacrifice our wellbeing for them than it would to expect 18th-century peasants to go without gruel so we can buy more computers."

That is the sort of sally that deserves a wide hearing. If we stall Today's wonderful spread of international knowledge, travel and general prosperity, we risk a future like Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where unknown Miltons remain mute and inglorious and village Darwins never get further than their shacks.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

Martin Wainwright
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China and India formally endorse the last-minute climate agreement struck at the Copenhagen summit

China and India wrote to the UN's climate secretariat today agreeing to be "listed" as a parties to the Copenhagen accord, the last-minute agreement that emerged from the chaos of the UN's summit in Copenhagen.

The action falls short of full "association" and highlights the gulf between the US – the strongest backer of the accord – and the other key nations on how to deliver a global deal to combat climate change.

Since Copenhagen, there has been confusion over how a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved. All observers, including the UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer, are now clear that no such deal will be signed in 2010, with a meeting in South Africa in December 2011 now seen as the earliest date.

At the heart of the disagreement is whether a new global treaty, like the existing Kyoto protocol, must be agreed unanimously by all 192 members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and be a continuation of Kyoto, which enshrines bindings carbon cuts on industrialised nations but not on developing ones.

In a letter to de Boer, Trigg Valley, the director of the US office of global climate change, did move back from earlier suggestions that the US wanted to ditch the UN process, seen as cumbersome by some, and negotiate climate change in a smaller group like the G20 or Major Economies Forum. But he has proposed to set aside some of the existing UN texts, which had been laboriously negotiated over several years, and replace them with passages from the Copenhagen accord.

In the letter from India, Rajani Ranjan Rashmi, environment and forests minister, states baldly the unacceptability of this approach: "The accord is not a new track of negotiations or a template for outcomes."

China's submissions are also unequivocal. The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, strongly backs the UN process and its consensus-based approach to reaching agreement. "It is neither viable nor acceptable to start a new negotiation process outside the [UNFCCC] and the [Kyoto] protocol", he said.

The US now appears isolated as China, India and many other countries, firmly support the idea of continuing with the two existing UN negotiating tracks to try to achieve a consensus.

The battle of the texts was fought for much of last year with the US backed by Britain and the rest of Europe. Today, the European Commission's first formal statement since Copenhagen offered some support for the US: "The political guidance in the Copenhagen Accord – which was not formally adopted as a UN decision – needs to be integrated into the UN negotiating texts that contain the basis of the future global climate agreement."

But some rich country governments now accept privately that they had "crossed a red line" and failed to recognise that developing countries had not been prepared to abandon the Kyoto protocol without a new legal agreement in place to ensure developed countries reduced emissions.

"The US wants to appear to be leading the world on climate change but it is in a very, very difficult position," said Tom Burke, founder of the consultancy E3G, citing the difficulty President Obama faces in getting a climate change bill through a reluctant senate.

In an recent interview with the Guardian, Yvo de Boer,, played down talk of radical change to the way to the UN process demands unanimous decisions, which some, including Gordon Brown, blamed for a lack of progress in climate talks. He said a major stumbling block to an agreement remained mistrust between the developing and developed countries over the finance needed to help countries adapt to the impacts of global warming.

Rich countries had offered "recycled contributions from the past" he said, while the build-up to the Copenhagen summit had focused too much on the issue of binding emission reduction targets. De Boer has announced he will step down from the UNFCCC in July. Yesterday, the South African tourism minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was nominated by President Jacob Zuma as a candidate. But other candidates, including from India and possibly Indonesia, are expected to make the private shortlist from which the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, will make his choice.

• Copenhagen climate change conference 2009
• Climate change
• Kyoto protocol
• United Nations
• India
• China

John VidalDavid AdamDamian Carrington
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The Global Warming Policy Foundation calls for transparency among climate scientists but refuses to make public its donors. Maybe its new employee can help us

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the thinktank set up last November "to bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant", goes from strength to strength, it would seem.

Just a few days after its chairman, Nigel Lawson, and director, Benny Peiser, appeared before the science and technology select committee to answer questions about the inquiry into the climate science emails hacked from the University of East Anglia, a job advert for a new assistant director has appeared on the House of Commons internal jobs listings website.

We are looking for a highly motivated, young man or woman with strong verbal and written communication skills. Strong grounding in economics is highly desirable but not essential. The assistant director plans, organises, and co-directs the day-to-day operations of the GWPF. He or she assists the director in maintaining good communications with the media, the GWPF's academic advisors, trustees and members, and will be working closely with Lord Lawson, former chancellor of the exchequer, former secretary of state for energy, and chairman of the GWPF. The role of assistant director is an outstanding opportunity for a young graduate to help shape the discussion on current and future climate policies and to develop more cost-effective climate policies.

Essential requirements of the position:

• Good research skills and academic ability;
• Good understanding of economics;
• Good knowledge and skills in organisational management;
• Good written and spoken English;
• Strong commitment to the GWPF's mission and goals;
• Good verbal communication, presentation and networking skills;
• Good skills in planning, analysing and coordinating activities and establishing priorities.

I have two thoughts on this job ad. I'm no HR expert, but might it not have benefited from an extra criterion? Something along the lines of: "Good understanding of climate science." Peiser is clearly a very busy man these days, what with being near-omnipresent in the broadcast studios as the GWPF director and keeping up with his day job as a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, so one can perhaps understand his delay in responding to Bob Ward's reasonable request for clarification over why the GWPF's website is still displaying a somewhat wonky temperature graph on its masthead. Perhaps this is a task for his new assistant?

The other thought I had was that if the GWPF is as keen on "maintaining good communications with the media" as it says it is, perhaps it could start by answering the one burning question that has been asked of it since the very first day it opened its door for business? Who is funding it? I asked Nigel Lawson this very question myself last November and received much the same response as he gave to the science and technology committee last week:

Q15 Graham Stringer: Can you tell us how your organisation is funded? We have had an email this morning saying that you have not been transparent in the funding of your organisation.

Lord Lawson of Blaby: I do not think that is within your terms of reference. I am happy to answer it, but we have got quite a lot to do which is within the terms of reference.

Q16 Chairman: Could you just answer it very briefly?

Lord Lawson of Blaby: We have donations from private individuals and private charitable trusts. That is how we are financed. We have one absolutely strict rule: we will not accept any money at all from the energy industry or anyone who has any significant interest in the energy industry.

Q17 Graham Stringer: In one sense you are right, it is not within our terms of reference, but this is a very fraught and vexed question and there is distrust on both sides, so it is better to be clear. Is there a list of your donors available?

Lord Lawson of Blaby: No, like most thinktanks, not all but like most, we do not publish a list, because if donors wish to remain anonymous, for whatever reasons, perfectly good reasons, then it is their privilege. I am very happy for them to be published.

Q18 Dr Evan Harris: That is strange, because Sense about Science, which is an organisation we hear from a lot, publish all their donors, because they are often accused of being partisan. Would it not be a good idea for you to adopt that rule; otherwise people might have concerns?

Lord Lawson of Blaby: We are absolutely clean. I would be very happy to see the names of all our donors published, I can assure you, it would be very, very good, but if they wish to remain anonymous, for whatever reason, maybe they have other family members who take a different view and they do not want to have a row within the family, maybe they do not want a whole lot of other people asking them for money -

Q19 Chairman: The short answer is you are not giving us the names.

Lord Lawson of Blaby: This is the one in football. It is called playing the man and not the ball. You get a yellow card for that.

Q20 Chairman: Lord Lawson, you are not going to give us those.

Lord Lawson of Blaby: No, when the annual report comes we will ask our donors if they wish to be named. Some may; some may not.

This important question is clearly going to hang over the GWPF and raise doubts about its agenda until it chooses to answer it in detail. Slippery, undefined statements such as "we do not accept gifts from anyone with a significant interest in an energy company" will always lead to suspicion when operating in such a distrustful environment. What, say, does the GWPF mean exactly by vague terms such as "significant"? It would seem from the exchange above that Nigel Lawson accepts the point that full transparency is the only way to achieve the trust of its critics and the wider public. The GWPF is asking no less of climate scientists, of course. So why not nip this all in the bud right now by saying the GWPF will only accept donations from those who are willing to have their names listed publicly?

Meanwhile, anyone interested in applying for the post should send a covering letter and CV to info@thegwpf.org.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism

Leo Hickman
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Cape, £18.99

2000 He belonged to that Salman class of short, fat, ugly, clever men who were unaccountably attractive to women. But Michael Beard was anhedonic; his fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave as his philandering had ended the previous four. This time, though, it was his wife, Patrice, who was having an affair with Tarpin, a horny-handed Essex builder who knew nothing about cavity-wall insulation.

Beard waited for Aldous to collect him. Gosh, how he hated the polar bear rug in the hall. Still, everyone would soon have one, he supposed, if the polar ice-cap continued to melt. Not that Beard was yet wholly committed to the climate- change agenda, but having won the Nobel prize for his Beard-Einstein Conflation on Photovoltaics, an idea he was very thankful he was never asked to fully explain, he had been happy to head the New Labour Climate Change Laboratory.

"I'm afraid it's not a Prius," Aldous said. "I'm not surprised, as they were only sold outside Japan in 2001," Beard replied. Aldous was one of his pony-tailed post-docs who was being forced into working on the New Labour cul-de sac of wind turbine energy. Beard nodded off. He was very familiar with the McEwan Conflation of cramming loads of dull facts about climate change into a book and calling it fiction.

"Tarpin hit me," said Patrice. "He hit me too," Beard replied as he went off to visit an endangered glacier in the Arctic for 30 pages. He returned to find Aldous in his flat. "I admit I'm having an affair with your wife," said Aldous, "but I've worked out that your Conflation can satisfy the world's energy needs." At which, Aldous slipped on the polar bear rug and died, a victim of climate change.

"I could make it look like Tarpin did it," McEwan thought. He had no real experience of writing comedy and the gags creaked as much as the plot. But it was an improvement on his previous books, so the judge mercifully sent Tarpin to prison.

2005 As his plane stacked over New Mexico, Beard passed the time unnecessarily recalling his childhood before patting his gut. He had put on 35lb. He couldn't stop consuming; it was almost as if his size was a metaphor for the world's greed for natural resources. Still, there had been something in Aldous's calculations after all, and he was looking forward to seeing the photovoltaic laboratory the Americans had built for him.

Back in England, Beard looked angrily at the man who was helping himself to his crisps and snatched them away. Only later did he realise they were actually the other man's crisps! "That's the oldest comedy plot twist in the repertoire," said Melissa, his new girlfriend. "I know," Beard shrugged, "But Ian thinks that, like climate change, it may be old but it doesn't mean it can't happen." "Really," Melissa yawned.

Beard reckoned it was time to move to the safer ground of rehashing large chunks of climate-change data and inventing an unlikely intellectual disagreement. "I don't think the serious climate-change sceptics are fighting over feminism and postmodern relativism," Melissa said. "By the way, I'm pregnant."

2009 Beard had put on another 90lb and his belly was as over-extended as the metaphor. Worse still, the plot was falling to pieces. One of his American lovers, Darlene, had rung Melissa to say they were getting married, and Tarpin had been let out of jail.

"I took the rap for Patrice," Tarpin said. "I know she killed Aldous because he was beating her up." Beard looked quizzically at McEwan. "I'm sorry," Ian said. "I'm OK on the climate-change stuff, but I don't really understand human psychology or comedy. Do you mind if Tarpin smashes up all your solar panels?"

"We've had enough," said the New Mexicans. "We don't mind you being sued for stealing Aldous's ideas, it's just we think David Lodge does this kind of story so much better."

"Oh dear," Beard said. "Maybe I should go back to climate change. Perhaps nuclear power is the answer. Or how about a bit of pathos with my daughter?" "Enough trees have died for this already," Melissa sighed.

Digested read, digested: Solar Power: No Thanks.

• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

John Crace
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There is no simple way to battle public hostility to climate research. As the psychologists show, facts barely sway us anyway

There is one question that no one who denies manmade climate change wants to answer: what would it take to persuade you? In most cases the answer seems to be nothing. No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us. The new study by the Met Office, which paints an even grimmer picture than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will do nothing to change this view.

The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as "white-coated prima donnas and narcissists … pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks … The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more."

Views like this can be explained partly as the revenge of the humanities students. There is scarcely an editor or executive in any major media company – and precious few journalists – with a science degree, yet everyone knows that the anoraks are taking over the world. But the problem is compounded by complexity. Arthur C Clarke remarked that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". He might have added that any sufficiently advanced expertise is indistinguishable from gobbledegook. Scientific specialisation is now so extreme that even people studying neighbouring subjects within the same discipline can no longer understand each other. The detail of modern science is incomprehensible to almost everyone, which means that we have to take what scientists say on trust. Yet science tells us to trust nothing, to believe only what can be demonstrated. This contradiction is fatal to public confidence.

Distrust has been multiplied by the publishers of scientific journals, whose monopolistic practices make the supermarkets look like angels, and which are long overdue for a referral to the Competition Commission. They pay nothing for most of the material they publish, yet, unless you are attached to an academic institute, they'll charge you £20 or more for access to a single article. In some cases they charge libraries tens of thousands for an annual subscription. If scientists want people at least to try to understand their work, they should raise a full-scale revolt against the journals that publish them. It is no longer acceptable for the guardians of knowledge to behave like 19th-century gamekeepers, chasing the proles out of the grand estates.

But there's a deeper suspicion here as well. Popular mythology – from Faust through Frankenstein to Dr No – casts scientists as sinister schemers, harnessing the dark arts to further their diabolical powers. Sometimes this isn't far from the truth. Some use their genius to weaponise anthrax for the US and Russian governments. Some isolate terminator genes for biotech companies, to prevent farmers from saving their own seed. Some lend their names to articles ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies, which mislead doctors about the drugs they sell. Until there is a global code of practice or a Hippocratic oath binding scientists to do no harm, the reputation of science will be dragged through the dirt by researchers who devise new means of hurting us.

Yesterday in the Guardian Peter Preston called for a prophet to lead us out of the wilderness. "We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince … We need to be taught to believe by a true believer." Would it work? No. Look at the hatred and derision the passionate and persuasive Al Gore attracts. The problem is not only that most climate scientists can speak no recognisable human language, but also the expectation that people are amenable to persuasion.

In 2008 the Washington Post summarised recent psychological research on misinformation. This shows that in some cases debunking a false story can increase the number of people who believe it. In one study, 34% of conservatives who were told about the Bush government's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were inclined to believe them. But among those who were shown that the government's claims were later comprehensively refuted by the Duelfer report, 64% ended up believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

There's a possible explanation in an article published by Nature in January. It shows that people tend to "take their cue about what they should feel, and hence believe, from the cheers and boos of the home crowd". Those who see themselves as individualists and those who respect authority, for instance, "tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire". Those with more egalitarian values are "more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted".

These divisions, researchers have found, are better at explaining different responses to information than any other factor. Our ideological filters encourage us to interpret new evidence in ways that reinforce our beliefs. "As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarised, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information." The conservatives in the Iraq experiment might have reacted against something they associated with the Duelfer report, rather than the information it contained.

While this analysis rings true, the description of where the dividing line lies isn't quite right. It doesn't describe the odd position in which I find myself. Despite my iconoclastic, anti-corporate instincts, I spend much of my time defending the scientific establishment from attacks by the kind of rabble-rousers with whom I usually associate. My heart rebels against this project: I would rather be pelting scientists with eggs than trying to understand their datasets. But my beliefs oblige me to try to make sense of the science and to explain its implications. This turns out to be the most divisive project I've ever engaged in. The more I stick to the facts, the more virulent the abuse becomes.

This doesn't bother me – I have a hide like a glyptodon – but it reinforces the disturbing possibility that nothing works. The research discussed in the Nature paper shows that when scientists dress soberly, shave off their beards and give their papers conservative titles, they can reach to the other side. But in doing so they will surely alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to trust them. As the MMR saga shows, people who mistrust authority are just as likely to kick against science as those who respect it.

Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don't want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life's work.

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Hacked climate science emails

George Monbiot
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