“According to Okaz sources, the bomber who detonated himself only a meter away from the Prince was part of a terrorist cell formed to target oil installations and public figures.
The sources said the bomber stayed in an apartment on Sari Street, northwest of Jeddah, Thursday.”

 

… “Okaz sources said the bomb was implanted in the attacker’s rectum, which could explain why he refused to drink coffee at the Prince’s Court”

Walking the Arctic ice rim today, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon got a first-hand view of the impact of climate change, with less than 100 days remaining before the start of the United Nations conference where nations are set to reach a new agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

What is the 10:10 campaign and why are 10% emission cuts in 2010 important?
Ian Katz
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 September 2009 00.05 BST
What is 10:10?
10:10 is an empowering climate change campaign with the aim of getting individuals, companies and institutions to reduce their carbon footprints by 10% during 2010.
Why 10% in 2010?
Although politicians argue about targets for 2050 and 2030, the scientists say world emissions must peak and begin to fall within the next few years. That means we need deep cuts in the developed world as quickly as possible. The longer we leave it, the smaller our chance of avoiding disastrous warming.
What does signing up entail?
For individuals it means what it says on the tin: pledging to cut your emissions by 10% by the end of 2010. We’ll be offering lots of advice on how to do it and 10:10 has teamed up with the major energy companies who will help by showing customers how much energy they are saving on their bills.
What about companies?
The pledge for companies is slightly more flexible to allow firms that have made deep cuts over the last few years to join. They will commit to getting as close to the 10% target as possible – and to encouraging customers, staff and suppliers to sign up too. There are also specially designed targets for schools and other institutions.
Who is backing it?
The campaign is backed by a broad coalition ranging from the Guardian and several major NGOs to major companies, leading political figures and the Carbon Trust.
Who has signed up so far?
A number of high-profile figures including artists, writers, chefs and sportsmen have agreed to sign up and support the campaign and we are in the process of recruiting more. Among the organisations that have already signed up are a Premiership football club, a major museum and several NHS trusts.
Will 10:10 have any effect on government policy?
The aim is to sign up a large number of individuals, companies and institutions as quickly as possible, and then challenge the government to match their commitment.
But isn’t getting a deal in Copenhagen the really important thing this year?
It’s crucial, but no one believes that any deal struck at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December will set targets to cut as many emissions as the scientists say are needed. We need to start cutting our emissions regardless. And those involved in negotiating the Copenhagen deal say the chances of getting developing countries to sign will be increased if they see the rich world leading by example.
Does signing up require a major change in your lifestyle?
No. Unless you’ve already slashed your emissions, the first 10% is the easiest. It’s all about saving energy at home and cutting down on unnecessary journeys. It will save you money.
Aren’t individual efforts just a pointless drop in the ocean?
Not if they’re part of a mass movement. 10:10 makes the efforts of individuals meaningful by ensuring that lots of people will be pledging to make the same cuts.
What’s the point of just getting people in the UK to sign up when the country accounts for only 2% of world emissions?
10:10 is being launched as a UK campaign but the scientists say it is the right target for the whole developed world. The hope is that the campaign will be cloned in other countries and we’ll be making it as easy as possible for that to happen.
Will there be a symbol like the Make Poverty History wristband?
10:10 is producing metal tags that can be worn around the wrist or neck (or anywhere else). They are made from scrap metal salvaged from old airliners. They will be on sale for £1.
Who is running 10:10?
It is the brainchild of Franny Armstrong, director of the Age of Stupid. It is being run by Franny’s team with help from the Guardian, Comic Relief and Freud Communications.
How is 10:10 different from other climate campaigns?
10:10 is unique because it asks people to take a simple but meaningful action that everyone can understand and contribute to. As a result, it is already receiving unparalleled support from media, business, NGOs and the public sector.
How will people sign up?
On 1 September there will be a mass sign-up event at Tate Modern in London. But individuals and organisations will be able to sign up on the 10:10 website at any time.

Published Date: 01 September 2009
By JOHN ROSS
A PIONEERING school in a remote part of the Highlands could give lessons to other areas in developing energy-efficient classes, it has been claimed.
Education secretary Fiona Hyslop visited Acharacle in Ardnamurchan to see Scotland’s first wholly sustainable school, which accommodates 48 English-speaking and Gaelic-speaking medium primary school pupils and 14 in the nursery.The school is so well insulated and draught-proofed that the heat from the children, staff and computers is enough to warm the building. All internal materials are natural, including untreated timber, linoleum, clay plaster and vegetable-based paints. Most of the school is made from wood and there is a wind turbine on the hill behind the school to provide hot water. Rainwater is collected from the copper roofs to flush the toilets. Electricity consumption is cut through the use of large, triple-glazed windows to increase daylight, and by using very energy-efficient appliances.Ms Hyslop said: “It is important that we have a low-carbon school estate, both for the environment and also to help authorities reduce rising fuel costs. “I am in no doubt that what we are seeing here at Acharacle is the future of school construction. It is important we learn lessons from this school for the rest of Scotland.”The community waited 22 years for a new school and it finally arrived in kit form on the back of a lorry from Austria last year. It replaced a building described by parents as “dreadful”, which included a “temporary” classroom that was used for 20 years.

How we intend to take the 10:10 challenge and cut our carbon emissions by 10% in 2010

Jo Confino and Claire Buckley
The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009
The Guardian often criticises politicians and business leaders for failing to do enough to combat climate change, but in recent years we have found that reducing our own carbon footprint is no easy task.
While we are justly proud of our new low-carbon offices in King’s Cross, London, behind the scenes we remain largely dependent on old-style heavy industry, and do not yet fully understand the impact of our increasing digital presence. We rely on trees being cut down and energy-intensive factories to turn wood pulp into paper. We use large-scale print sites to create our newspapers and magazines, and the road network to distribute our products.
Paper is by far our biggest concern, both in terms of the carbon footprint of its manufacture and ensuring we do not buy from unsustainable sources. In fact, 96% of the paper used in the Guardian and the Observer main sections is recycled, while 82.7% of the virgin fibre used in our magazines is certified as coming from sustainable sources. We also measure the carbon footprint of each of our paper suppliers, and use this to help inform our purchasing decisions.
Measures we are taking in other areas include reducing the amount of plastic in the polywrap used to hold together our multi-sectioned weekend papers (having failed to find a suitable biodegradable alternative), and improving the efficiency of our newspaper distribution network by increasing the number of shared routes with competitor titles.
Given that we have already taken steps to reduce our carbon emissions, reducing them by another 10% next year is going to be challenging. Our main concentration will be on our two newspaper print sites in Manchester and London, given that they accounted for nearly 60% of the 14,567 tonnes of CO2 we generated last year through energy use and travel. Next on our list is our head office, which accounts for the second largest slice of last year’s carbon emissions. Given that our new building has been awarded a B-rated energy performance certificate, further improvements are going to be tough. Another difficulty is that the building is multi-tenanted, so we will have to put our heads together with the building management and other tenants to see what more can be done.
In our own part of the building, we are reviewing the lighting systems and encouraging staff to be more conscious of the impact of their behaviour – although there are limits here too, as lighting and temperatures are all centrally controlled. In addition, given that we are increasingly a digitally based business, we are now looking to measure the footprint of our ICT infrastructure, including computers, servers and printers. We have also put in place a system for measuring our UK and overseas travel, and have greatly improved video- and audio-conferencing facilities over the last year, with plans to develop and promote use of these facilities.
It’s also worth making the point that while there will always be a cost to the planet of producing newspapers and websites, we can and do make a significant difference by informing and influencing our millions of readers, with this special issue of G2 just one example. Key to our editorial ambitions is the aim of creating the world’s leading environmental website, supported by what we believe is already the strongest specialist team of environmentally focused writers in any English-language media organisation.
As the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger says: “The role of government is infinitely harder in this area unless you have an informed citizenry, because politicians are not prepared to risk giving us unpopular and uncomfortable messages. At the same time, there is a role for individuals to put pressure on governments because they sometimes find it more comfortable not to act decisively. One of the roles of the media is to boil down intensely complex subjects and make them comprehensible. If these issues are not aired and placed on the public agenda and debated with facts that are reliable, then it lets everyone off the hook.”
For more details, go to our independently audited website guardian.co.uk/sustainability. For a free copy of the 2009 Living Our Values sustainability report, please email sustainability@guardian.co.uk with your name and postal address

‘We all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate’

Patrick Barkham at Sermilik fjord, Greenland
The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009
It is calving season in the Arctic. A flotilla of icebergs, some as jagged as fairytale castles and others as smooth as dinosaur eggs, calve from the ice sheet that smothers Greenland and sail down the fjords. The journey of these sculptures of ice from glaciers to ocean is eerily beautiful and utterly terrifying.
The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400km) from north to south and smothers 80% of this country. It has been frozen for 3m years. Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to combat our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappeared sea levels around the world would rise by seven metres, as 10% of the world’s fresh water is currently frozen here.
This is also the season for science in Greenland. Glaciologists, seismologists and climatologists from around the world are landing on the ice sheet in helicopters, taking ice-breakers up its inaccessible coastline and measuring glaciers in a race against time to discover why the ice in Greenland is vanishing so much faster than expected.
Gordon Hamilton, a Scottish-born glaciologist from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, is packing up equipment at his base camp in Tasiilaq, a tiny, remote east coast settlement only accessible by helicopter and where huskies howl all night.
With his spiky hair and ripped T-shirt, Hamilton could be a rugged glaciologist straight from central casting. Four years ago he hit upon the daring idea of landing on a moving glacier in a helicopter to measure its speed.
The glaciers of Greenland are the fat, restless fingers of its vast ice sheet, constantly moving, stretching down into fjords and pushing ice from the sheet into the ocean, in the form of melt water and icebergs.
Before their first expedition, Hamilton and his colleague Leigh Stearns, from the University of Kansas, used satellite data to plan exactly where they would land on a glacier.
“When we arrived there was no glacier to be seen. It was way up the fjord,” he says. “We thought we’d made some stupid goof with the co-ordinates, but we were where we were supposed to be.” It was the glacier that was in the wrong place. A vast expanse had melted away.
When Hamilton and Stearns processed their first measurements of the glacier’s speed, they thought they had made another mistake. They found it was marching forwards at a greater pace than a glacier had ever been observed to flow before. “We were blown away because we realised that the glaciers had accelerated not just by a little bit but by a lot,” he says. The three glaciers they studied had abruptly increased the speed by which they were transmitting ice from the ice sheet into the ocean.
Raw power
Standing before a glacier in Greenland as it calves icebergs into the dark waters of a cavernous fjord is to witness the raw power of a natural process we have accelerated but will now struggle to control.
Greenland’s glaciers make those in the Alps look like toys. Grubby white and blue crystal towers, cliffs and crevasses soar up from the water, dispatching millenniums of compacted snow in the shape of seals, water lilies and bishops’ mitres.
I take a small boat to see the calving with Dines Mikaelsen, an Inuit guide, who in the winter will cross the ice sheet in his five-metre sled pulled by 16 huskies.
It is not freezing but even in summer the wind is bitingly cold and we can smell the bad breath of a humpback whale as it groans past our bows on Sermilik Fjord. Above its heavy breathing, all you can hear in this wilderness is the drip-drip of melting ice and a crash as icebergs cleave into even smaller lumps, called growlers.
Mikaelsen stops his boat beside Hann glacier and points out how it was twice as wide and stretched 300 metres further into the fjord just 10 years ago. He also shows off a spectacular electric blue iceberg.
Locals have nicknamed it “blue diamond”; its colour comes from being cleaved from centuries-old compressed ice at the ancient heart of the glacier. Bobbing in warming waters, this ancient ice fossil will be gone in a couple of weeks.
The blue diamond is one vivid pointer to the antiquity of the Greenland ice sheet. A relic of the last Ice Age, this is one of three great ice sheets in the world. Up to two miles thick, the other two lie in Antarctica.
While similar melting effects are being measured in the southern hemisphere, the Greenland sheet may be uniquely vulnerable, lying much further from the chill of the pole than Antarctica’s sheets. The southern end of the Greenland sheet is almost on the same latitude as the Shetlands and stroked by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.
Driven by the loss of ice, Arctic temperatures are warming more quickly than other parts of the world: last autumn air temperatures in the Arctic stood at a record 5C above normal. For centuries, the ice sheets maintained an equilibrium: glaciers calved off icebergs and sent melt water into the oceans every summer; in winter, the ice sheet was then replenished with more frozen snow. Scientists believe the world’s great ice sheets will not completely disappear for many more centuries, but the Greenland ice sheet is now shedding more ice than it is accumulating.
The melting has been recorded since 1979; scientists put the annual net loss of ice and water from the ice sheet at 300-400 gigatonnes (equivalent to a billion elephants being dropped in the ocean), which could hasten a sea level rise of catastrophic proportions.
As Hamilton has found, Greenland’s glaciers have increased the speed at which they shift ice from the sheet into the ocean. Helheim, an enormous tower of ice that calves into Sermilik Fjord, used to move at 7km (4.4 miles) a year. In 2005, in less than a year, it speeded up to nearly 12km a year. Kangerdlugssuaq, another glacier that Hamilton measured, tripled its speed between 1988 and 2005. Its movement – an inch every minute – could be seen with the naked eye.
The three glaciers that Hamilton and Stearns measured account for about a fifth of the discharge from the entire Greenland ice sheet. The implications of their acceleration are profound: “If they all start to speed up, you could have quite a large rise in sea level in the near term, much larger than the official estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would project,” says Hamilton.
The scientific labours in the chill winds and high seas of the Arctic summer seem wrapped in an unusual sense of urgency this year. The scientists working in Greenland are keen to communicate their new, emerging understanding of the dynamics of the declining ice sheet to the wider world. Several point out that any international agreement forged at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December will be based on the IPCC’s fourth assessment report from 2007. Its estimates of climate change and sea-level rise were based on scientific research submitted up to 2005; the scientists say this is already significantly out of date.
The 2007 report predicted a sea level rise of 30cm-60cm by 2100, but did not account for the impact of glaciers breaking into the sea from areas such as the Greenland ice sheet. Most scientists working at the poles predict a one metre rise by 2100. The US Geological Survey has predicted a 1.5 metre rise. As Hamilton points out: “It is only the first metre that matters”.
Record temperatures
A one metre rise – with the risk of higher storm surges – would require new defences for New York, London, Mumbai and Shanghai, and imperil swaths of low-lying land from Bangladesh to Florida. Vulnerable areas accommodate 10%of the world’s population – 600 million.
The Greenland ice sheet is not merely being melted from above by warmer air temperatures. As the oceans of the Arctic waters reach record high temperatures, the role of warmer water lapping against these great glaciers is one of several factors shaping the loss of the ice sheet that has been overlooked until recently.
Fiamma Straneo, an Italian-born oceanographer, is laboriously winding recording equipment the size of a fire extinguisher from the deck of a small Greenpeace icebreaker caught in huge swells at the mouth of Sermilik fjord.
In previous decades the Arctic Sunrise has been used in taking direct action against whalers; now it offers itself as a floating research station for independent scientists to reach remote parts of the ice sheet. It is tough work for the multinational crew of 30 in this rough-and-ready little boat, prettified below deck with posters of orang-utans and sunflowers painted in the toilets.
Before I succumb to vomiting below deck – another journalist is so seasick they are airlifted off the boat – I examine the navigational charts used by the captain, Pete Willcox, a survivor of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. He shows how they are dotted with measurements showing the depth of the ocean but here, close to the east coast of Greenland, the map is blank: this part of the North Atlantic was once covered by sea ice for so much of the year that its waters are still uncharted.
Earlier in the expedition, the crew believe, they became the first boat to travel through the Nares Strait west of Greenland to the Arctic Ocean in June, once impassable because of sea ice at that time of year. The predicted year when summers in the Arctic would be free of sea ice has fallen from 2100 to 2050 to 2030 in a couple of years.
Jay Zwally, a Nasa scientist, recently suggested it could be virtually ice-free by late summer 2012. Between 2004 and 2008 the area of “multiyear” Arctic sea ice (ice that has formed over more than one winter and survived the summer melt) shrank by 595,000 sq miles, an area larger than France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined.
Undaunted by the sickening swell of the ocean and wrapped up against the chilly wind, Straneo, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, one of the world’s leading oceanographic research centres, continues to take measurements from the waters as the long Arctic dusk falls.
According to Straneo, the rapid changes to the ice sheet have taken glaciologists by surprise. “One of the possible mechanisms which we think may have triggered these changes is melting driven by changing ocean temperatures and currents at the margins of the ice sheet.”
She has been surprised by early results measuring sea water close to the melting glaciers: one probe recovered from last year recorded a relatively balmy 2C at 60 metres in the fjord in the middle of winter. Straneo said: “This warm and salty water is of subtropical origin – it’s carried by the Gulf Stream. In recent years a lot more of this warm water has been found around the coastal region of Greenland. We think this is one of the mechanisms that has caused these glaciers to accelerate and shed more ice.”
Straneo’s research is looking at what scientists call the “dynamic effects” of the Greenland ice sheet. It is not simply that the ice sheet is melting steadily as global temperatures rise. Rather, the melting triggers dynamic new effects, which in turn accelerate the melt.
“It’s quite likely that these dynamic effects are more important in generating a near-term rapid rise in sea level than the traditional melt,” says Hamilton. Another example of these dynamic effects is when the ice sheet melts to expose dirty layers of old snow laced with black carbon from forest fires and even cosmic dust. These dark particles absorb more heat and so further speed up the melt.
After Straneo gathers her final measurements, the Arctic Sunrise heads for the tranquillity of the sole berth at Tasiilaq, which has a population of fewer than 3,000 but is still the largest settlement on Greenland’s vast east coast. Here another scientist is gathering her final provisions before taking her team camping on a remote glacier.
Invisible earthquakes
Several years ago Meredith Nettles, a seismologist from Colombia University, and two colleagues made a remarkable discovery: they identified a new kind of earthquake. These quakes were substantial – measuring magnitude five – but had been invisible because they did not show up on seismographs. (While orthodox tremors registered for a couple of seconds, these occurred rather more slowly, over a minute.)
The new earthquakes were traced almost exclusively to Greenland, where they were found to be specifically associated with large, fast-flowing outlet glaciers. There have been 200 of them in the last dozen years; in 2005 there were six times as many as in 1993.
Nettles nimbly explains the science as she heaves bags of equipment on to a helicopter, which will fly her to study Kangerdlugssuaq glacier. “It’s quite a dramatic increase, and that increase happened at the same time as we were seeing dramatic retreats in the location of the calving fronts of the glaciers, and an increase in their flow speed,” she says. “The earthquakes are very closely associated with large-scale ice loss events.”
In other words, the huge chunks of ice breaking off from the glaciers and entering the oceans are large enough to generate a seismic signal that is sent through the Earth. They are happening more regularly and, when they occur, it appears that the glacier speeds up even more.
The scientists rightly wrap their latest observations in caution. Their studies are still in their infancy. Some of the effects they are observing may be short-term.
The Greenland ice sheet has survived natural warmer periods in history, the last about 120,000 years ago, although it was much smaller then than it is now. Those still sceptical of the scientific consensus over climate change should perhaps listen to the voices of those who could not be accused of having anything to gain from talking up climate change.
Inuit warnings
Arne Sorensen, a specialist ice navigator on Arctic Sunrise, began sailing the Arctic in the 1970s. Journeys around Greenland’s coast that would take three weeks in the 1970s because of sea ice now take a day. He pays heed to the observations of the Inuit. “If you talk to people who live close to nature and they tell you this is unusual and this is not something they have noticed before, then I really put emphasis on that,” he says. Paakkanna Ignatiussen, 52, has been hunting seals since he was 13. His grandparents travelled less than a mile to hunt; he must go more than 60 miles because the sea ice disappears earlier – and with it the seals. “It’s hard to see the ice go back. In the old days when we got ice it was only ice. Today it is more like slush,” he says. “In 10 years there will be no traditional hunting. The weather is the reason.”
The stench of rotting seal flesh wafts from a bag in the porch of his house in Tasiilaq as Ignatiussen’s wife, Ane, remarks that, “the seasons are upside down”.
Local people are acutely aware of how the weather is changing animal behaviour. Browsing the guns for sale in the supermarket in Tasiilaq (you don’t need a licence for a gun here), Axel Hansen says more hungry polar bears prowl around the town these days. Like the hunters, the bears can’t find seals when there is so little sea ice. And the fjords are filled with so many icebergs that local people find it hard to hunt whales there.
Westerners may shrug at the decline of traditional hunting but, in a sense, we all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate. The scientists swarming over this ancient mass of ice, trying to understand how it will be transformed in a warming world, and how it will transform us, are wary of making political comments about how our leaders should plan for one metre of sea level rise, and what drastic steps must be taken to cut carbon emissions. But some scientists are so astounded by the changes they are recording that they are moved to speak out.
What, I ask Hamilton, would he say to Barack Obama if he could spend 10 minutes with the US president standing on Helheim glacier?
“Without knowing anything about what is going on, you just have to look at the glacier to know something huge is happening here,” says the glaciologist. “We can’t as a scientific community keep up with the pace of changes, let alone explain why they are happening.
“If I was, God forbid, the leader of the free world, I would implement some changes to deal with the maximum risk that we might reasonably expect to encounter, rather than always planning for the minimum. We won’t know the consequences of not doing that until it’s way too late. Even as a politician on a four-year elected cycle, you can’t morally leave someone with that problem.”

Cruise ships docking in Vancouver, a popular hub for tourists bound for Alaska, can now plug into the city’s electricity grid — cutting their engines and their diesel air emissions.

Port Metro Vancouver, Canada’s biggest port, on Monday unveiled a shore power facility for cruise ships while in harbor, a first in Canada and only the third of its kind in the world.

Cruise ships can now plug into the electrical grid of the provincial utility, BC Hydro, which says that its mostly hydroelectric-generated power is 90 percent nonpolluting.

“This project will significantly improve local air quality by reducing air emissions from cruise ships in downtown Vancouver throughout the cruise ship season,” said Andrew Saxton, a member of Parliament for North Vancouver.

Long-term exposure to diesel engine exhaust likely causes lung cancer in humans and can trigger other lung and respiratory ailments, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.Princess Cruises and Holland America Line have outfitted several of their fleet with onboard shore power equipment. Four Princess ships and one Holland America ship will use shore power in Vancouver during the 2009 Alaska season, which runs from May to September.

Source:
Reuters, “Vancouver cruise ships to plug in to cut pollution“, accessed August 31, 2009

Live in Small Bitescopyright Annie Kate2008

David Adam, environment correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009
An unprecedented coalition of scientists, companies, celebrities and organisations spanning the cultural and political spectrum will today commit to slashing their carbon emissions as part of an ambitious campaign to tackle global warming.
The 10:10 campaign, which will be launched at London’s Tate Modern this afternoon, aims to bolster grassroots support for tough action against global warming ahead of the key global summit in Copenhagen in December.
Those signing up for the campaign, which is supported by the Guardian, pledge to make efforts to reduce their carbon footprints by 10% during the year 2010.
Groups committed to the 10:10 cause range from Tottenham Hotspur football club, online grocer Ocado, the Tate galleries and the Women’s Institute to dozens of schools, universities and NHS trusts. Four of the major energy companies, British Gas owner Centrica, E.ON, EDF and Scottish and Southern, have promised to help customers hit their 10:10 targets by providing information on how their energy use compares with past consumption.
The campaign is backed by public figures ranging from the climate change expert Lord Stern to Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox, chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Delia Smith, screenwriter Richard Curtis, directors Richard Eyre and Mike Figgis, designers Nicole Farhi and Vivienne Westwood, TV presenter Kevin McCloud and actors including Samantha Morton, Jason Isaacs, Pete Postlethwaite, Colin Firth and Tamsin Greig.
A clutch of Britain’s most eminent artists including Anish Kapoor, who has produced a special cover for today’s G2, Anthony Gormley and Gillian Wearing, have pledged to cut their emissions as have several literary heavyweights including Ian McEwan, Sarah Waters, Irvine Welsh, Anthony Horowitz, Antony Beevor, Ali Smith, Carol Ann Duffy and Andrew Motion.
The campaign organisers, led by Franny Armstrong, the film-maker behind The Age of Stupid, hope 10:10 could replicate the way the 2005 Make Poverty History (MPH) movement captured the public imagination and helped to drive political change on debt relief. The 10:10 campaigners will distribute signature metal tags made from melted-down aircraft.
Armstrong said: “After every screening of The Age of Stupid people came up to me and asked what they could do. I was saying very generic stuff and I thought we needed a better ‘here’s what you can do’. Hence 10:10.”
She said the campaign aimed to convince Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, to take the significant step of committing Britain to slash its emissions by as close to 10% as possible by the end of next year. The campaign will be officially launched with a massive sign-up event and free concert at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
Armstrong said: “Once we’ve got a critical mass of support we will go to the government and say the people of Britain are ready to cut by 10%, now we need you to move. If Ed Miliband could go to Copenhagen and say Britain is going to step forward and start cutting as quickly as the science demands, that could potentially break the deadlock in the international negotiations.”
The December talks in Copenhagen aim to agree a successor to the Kyoto protocol and are widely viewed as the last chance for humanity to get to grips with soaring greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists warn that temperatures could soar across the globe by a catastrophic 6C or more by the end of the century.
Kevin Anderson, the head of the Tyndall Centre on Climate Change Research, one of the leading scientists backing the campaign said: “A widespread acknowledgment of the scale of the challenge coupled with meaningful actions will provide a political mandate for effective low-carbon polices that it is difficult for decision-makers to ignore.”
Chris Rapley, the head of the Science Museum in London, said: “What’s unprecedented about this is that it’s an attempt at an harmonious coalition between people, politicians and organisations. We know Copenhagen is going to be really, really tough and we can’t leave this all to the politicians.”
Some experts warned it was not realistic for Britain to aim for a 10% emissions cut by 2010.
Brian Hoskins, the head of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, who sits on the government’s climate change committee, said: “This is a good idea for individuals, but 10% cuts by next year would be very difficult for Britain and could be problematic. It could encourage short-term measures rather than proper long-term planning.”
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, said: “The Guardian is backing 10:10 because it offers us a way to take small actions that together add up to something meaningful and significant.”

New floodlights for Tottenham Hotspur, long johns for Delia Smith and Thames riverwater for the Tate
Interviews by Alok Jha, Leo Hickman and David Adam
The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009
Compared with other working days at the White Hart Lane stadium, match days are in another league of energy use. Which makes things a bit tricky for Tottenham Hotspur as it tries to work out whether it will make its 10:10 target. While executive director Donna-Maria Cullen is keen to make her club a green beacon, she’s also keeping her fingers crossed for a run of FA Cup matches this season. In football, success can be a real hindrance to being green.
But Cullen has already got the club working on cutting its carbon footprint. One of the most energy-hungry parts of a stadium is its lighting: sun lamps must be trained on the pitch all winter to keep the grass in pristine condition and, for evening matches, floodlights are a necessity. Last year the club spent more than £100,000 replacing the 136 floodlamps, each 2KW, with more efficient 1.5KW lamps.
The carbon footprint of fans on match days has also been reduced by dissuading them from arriving in cars (around a quarter now arrive by car, down from a peak of 36%). For 10:10, Cullen wants to focus on the day-to-day business side: everything from making sure kettles are not over-filled in the offices to turning down temperatures in the constantly-running laundry at the training ground.
And the players? Will any give up their Land Rovers and Jaguars? “We’ll be asking them to buy into it and do their bit,” says Cullen. The team captain, Ledley King, is due to make an appearance at the 10:10 launch, and Cullen is confident he won’t be the only player there.
She says the club signed up to 10:10 because it’s a climate campaign that can really achieve something. “We have millions of supporters so, apart from addressing our own footprint, we’re an excellent conduit for getting the message out. Any business that isn’t taking cognisance of the fact that this is probably the biggest challenge facing us all is being very short-sighted.”
Delia Smith
Last year Delia Smith, the cookery writer and broadcaster, decided to conduct a little experiment. She popped down to her local Marks & Spencer, bought herself some long johns and thermal vests, then headed back home to her cottage set deep in the Suffolk countryside. Smith was intrigued to see how much energy – and money — she could save by wearing extra layers of clothing.
“We pay our electricity bills via direct debit so the same amount goes out each month,” she says. “So I was really pleased when my electricity company sent me a cheque for £300 this spring because I’d managed to cut down so much on our energy use.”
Despite the success of this experiment, Smith is frustrated by the lack of information on offer for people wanting to reduce their carbon footprint. “I’ve bought several books and I’ll look up, say, smokeless coal versus conventional coal in terms of carbon emissions and it won’t tell me anything. I’m trying to do my best, but I know there’s lots more I could do.”
Smith’s house has no central heating; it relies on electric heaters, a fireplace in the sitting room, underfloor heating in the conservatory and an oil-fired Aga in the kitchen. “I know there are questions over the efficiency of Agas,” she says. “But, again, where do we get this information? I’m totally willing to not have the Aga if someone educates me about its impact.”
For heating hot water, Smith and her husband, the publisher Michael Wynn-Jones, have an electric immersion heater. As a complete package, it’s among the most inefficient ways to heat space and water in a home. Huge savings in emissions could be achieved by installing a modern condensing gas-fired boiler. Or better still, a boiler fired on wood pellets.
Smith has already improved the insulation of their six-room cottage. “I’ve been trying very hard since last year. Everything is insulated now – as much as you can with an old cottage. We’ve got double glazing and a thatched roof, which is fantastic: cool in the summer and warm in winter. We have more to do but, because we’re both over 60, we can now get it done for free.”
Smith is particularly proud of what they have done outside, including a pond given over to wildlife and the planting of 300 trees. But it’s the two cars parked outside the cottage that leads to my next line of inquiry. Smith has a Renault Clio “to pop down to the local shops”; Wynn-Jones has a Jaguar.
“We’re not on a bus route so we have to use the car,” she says. “When it’s time for me to change, though, I will get a greener one. And although I’d be happy not to have the Jaguar, we’ve both found we are able to work in it – you can read and write comfortably. So it’s for longer distances.”
As directors of Norwich football club, Smith and Wynn-Jones travel to all the team’s away matches. It is here that perhaps their greatest emissions vice is revealed: “We go to away matches on an eight-seater propellor plane. But how,” she asks, “does that compare, in terms of emissions, to four cars going with two people in each?” Smith promises to find out the model of the aircraft so I can make that calculation.
She also admits to taking around two flights a year on holiday. “We don’t actually like flying for holidays. We hate the whole airport experience, and have recently had several holidays in the car, going through the tunnel or on the ferry into Europe.”
But it is over food, as you might expect, that Smith displays the greatest passion. She quickly interrupts my suggestion that meat and dairy both carry a significant emission burden. “If you put Britain under siege conditions, it wouldn’t be able to feed itself without meat because we are mostly hill country. Yes I’d like to have less intensively reared meat, but there is a lot of meat that isn’t and it’s the same with dairy.”
Instead, Smith steers the blame on to processed foods. “I don’t know how many emissions are produced making a million and one different types of chocolate bar – it’s totally superfluous to what we need. I’m not a killjoy, but people are knocking meat and dairy and not talking about all the processed junk food.”
Smith accepts there are many areas of her life where impressive reductions could be made to her carbon footprint, and says she’s ready and keen to take up the 10:10 challenge. But what, I wonder, will she find hardest to cut back on? “I could easily do without ever going to an airport again. That would probably be the easiest thing to give up if I had to.”
The Tate group
The giant turbine hall at Tate Modern in central London hums with electricity. In its former life this hall was a cathedral to fossil fuels; now it is the centrepiece of the 10:10 campaign that aims to undo some of the damage those fuels have caused to the atmosphere. The campaign’s official launch party is hosted here tonight.
The turbine hall looks like it should have a gigantic carbon footprint. Just how much must it cost to heat this cavernous space? Not a penny, as it turns out: the hall is left unheated in winter and uncooled in summer. Staff on duty in the colder months work shorter shifts and are encouraged to wrap up.
But sensitive paintings in the rest of the museum must be kept under precisely controlled conditions, and this is where the building’s carbon footprint starts to mount. The relative humidity is kept within 40% and 60%, and the temperature must not exceed 24C. The same goes for the rest of the Tate galleries around the country. Judith Nesbitt, chief curator at Tate Britain, says: “Our biggest energy load is electricity for climate control of the galleries, and we are looking at how to reduce that burden.”
Outside Tate Modern, at the top of the long ramp leading from the turbine hall, an industrial looking pipe has been crudely wedged into the ground, as part of an experiment into whether water from the Thames gravel beds below could be used to help cool the museum’s sensitive artworks. Museum experts are also looking so see if waste heat from the transformer next door could be tapped. The trials aren’t just about improving the energy efficiency of the iconic building; the museum plans to build a £215m extension next door for 2012, which it says will use 54% less energy and emit 44% less carbon than building regulations demand.
The organisation is taking other steps to curb electricity use. Away from the public spaces, lights have been made motion sensitive, and the gallery lights at Tate Britain now switch off automatically in the evening. But Nesbitt says they are less able to tackle the group’s emissions from air travel. “We borrow and lend each others’ works. This is what we do.”
Helen Beeckmans, head of communications at Tate, says the group was already working to reduce its environmental impact before it got involved in 10:10. “Part of the reason we are participating is that we want to communicate outside the museum sector on this subject. The cultural sector has seen enormous growth over recent years, bringing it a high profile – and with that, the responsibility to take a lead in wider issues of society.”

Editorial
The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009
All great causes involve a tension between collective belief and individual action. A shared agreement that something must be done is not enough to win the battle if people do nothing. This is especially true of the fight against climate change, which must involve all of humanity over many decades, working together to achieve something that none can see or touch and that can only be measured by scientists: an end to the rapid increase of climate change gases in the atmosphere. Faced with this, even the most generous-spirited of people could be forgiven for feeling daunted – surrendering, perhaps, to the hope that someone else will solve the problem.
Urged to do their bit, individuals may wait instead for governments to act, or engineers to come up with technical fixes, or just give in to the comforting but scientifically-unsupported gamble that calamity may be avoided if things go on as they are. Today, the Guardian lends its support to a new movement that aims to defy such fatalism. The 10:10 campaign does not claim that climate change can be wished away through a series of small personal measures taken in Britain alone; it fully supports the need for a deal at the Copenhagen summit in December and for great economies such as the US and China to change too. But if the international agreement is to mean anything, the way people live in this country must change. The 10:10 campaign – named after its target of helping people reduce their individual carbon emissions by 10% in 2010 – will put pressure on government to meet its promises, but it will also have an immediate effect. Climate change gases, once in the atmosphere, stay there. The faster emissions fall now, the less will have to be done later.
All calls for individual environmental responsibility tread a tricky path. On the one hand there is a large and committed green movement, represented this week by the climate camp now in place where the Peasants’ Revolt once gathered in Blackheath in south-east London. Many of its supporters, for the best of reasons, want human life to change radically and immediately: an end to the global free market, to meat-eating, to air travel, to all coal-produced electricity. They disapprove of mechanisms to bring down carbon emissions such as the European Union’s carbon trading scheme; some dislike technological solutions such as carbon capture and storage. The trouble with these ambitions is that they are never likely to be supported by the majority of the population, who, if told that such things are essential to stop climate change, may simply give up trying altogether. But at the other extreme lies an even more unrealistic response: to pretend that all that individuals need to do is make tiny adjustments to their lives – change a light bulb and save the world – while government sorts out the rest at very little cost. The fight is going to be much harder than that. And even if it eventually repays its costs, as Lord Stern has argued, the bills will arrive first and the savings later.
The new campaign hopes to avoid both pitfalls. As writers explain in the Guardian today and through the next year, individuals have a moral obligation to act which can be met without abandoning the good things about life as it is lived today. Houses can still be heated, but must be insulated too. All sorts of food can still be eaten, but perhaps less meat and less often, and where possible that food should have travelled less far. Walk more, drive less – such things are so obvious that they can seem petty, and yet if enough people and organisations in Britain do them regularly, the effect can be immense. Britain’s emissions have fallen since 1990. They must keep on falling sharply: current emissions of over 10 tonnes per capita must drop to two tonnes by 2050. This new campaign will not be enough to achieve that. But it is more than a start; it is the direction Britain must take, if the world as we know it is to survive.