Geoffrey Lean

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It all feels a bit familiar as, five years after the Copenhagen debacle, world leaders gather in New York on Tuesday to talk about reaching a global agreement on tacking climate change. The summit is expected to launch another long trek towards a treaty at the end of next year.

But this time almost everything is different from 2009, when the talks failed. Economics are figuring larger than ecology this year. Some of the most obstructive countries in Copenhagen are now pushing hardest for a treaty, while some of the keenest back then look like they’re dragging now. And – though environmentalists don’t like admitting it – the world is making progress through adopting a suggestion from the much-reviled George W Bush.…  Seguir leyendo »

Here we go again. On Monday the world’s governments and top climate scientists will publish the most devastating assessment yet of what global warming threatens to do to the planet. And that, in turn, will intensify a new bid to forge an international agreement to tackle it.

World leaders will meet in New York in September to address climate change for the first time since the ill-fated 2009 Copenhagen summit. Then they assemble again in Paris in December next year to try once more to conclude a pact to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases. But they are approaching it in a very different atmosphere from five years ago.…  Seguir leyendo »

Few places on the planet so catch the imagination as the North West Passage. For 400 years, many of history’s greatest sailors – Cabot, Frobisher, Drake and Cook among them – failed to find a way through the 900-mile route, threading past icy Canadian islands 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Ships disappeared. Crews froze solid, to be discovered years later. In the 1840s, the biggest expedition of them all – two ships commanded by Sir John Franklin – ended with the vessels ice-bound and all 129 men dead.

Another, sent to find out what had happened, had to abandon ship itself after being locked in the ice for three years – and it was not until 1906 that the great Roald Amundsen finally conquered it in a sloop that could sail in coastal waters 3ft deep.…  Seguir leyendo »