Climate Change is in everyone’s lips

Looking for the number of searches on Google on “climate change” through the last years, we can see that these days are the second period when the term is being more consulted.

(Click the image for high-quality and full-size)

I truthfully believe that when Copenhagen’s meeting on climate change starts, so many people will talk about it that we will reach a new peak: “climate change” will be more in fashion than ever.

Finally, if we have a look to the news volume line (the smaller one), it can easily be seen that the news volume was bigger than ever in the third quarter of this year. Will it reach a new peak in a few days’ time? We hope so, and we hope that it is for good. As someone said recently, failure in Copenhagen is not an option.

8 days

Only 8 days.

United Nations work on environmental issues

The Earth Summit was a United Nations conference that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the conference’s official name, took place during 12 days and was attended by 172 countries.

Given the importance of the summit, a parallel “Global Forum” was organized by several non-governmental organizations 2,400 representatives of such organizations. It was considered a consultative organ by the United Nations.

Apart from creating the well-known Agenda 21, several documents were the result of the conference’s work, such us the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Forest Principles and specially the Framework Convention on Climate Change that will meet for 15th time next December in Copenhagen.

A second Earth Summit took place 10 years later, in 2002. Held in South Africa, it had the (logical) pseudoname of Rio+10. The most important declaration that resulted from it was the Johannesburg Declaration.

According to Wikipedia, Greenpeace representative Annette Cotter resumed the outside atmosphere with those words:

If the people who were marching today were inside the meeting room representing our planet, there’d be laughter, fun, dancing, and real action.

Eleven days

There are only eleven days until one of the most important meetings in History – Copenhagen’s Climate Change summit.

Although last news say that a binding deal is not expected hope is never lost. Today tcktcktck’s website is showing a real shocking datum: almost 10 million citizens have join the platform coordinating the organizations and individuals’ actions to reach an agreement in Copenhagen.

Few days and lots of expectation. Stay connected – be informed.

Saying it singing

Sometimes you think that people are insane, that problems are caused because nothing works as it should. But there are other times when you realise that our greatness is not that everyone is good – but that some people do really amazing things.

People from the Global Humanitarian Forum, concretely their campaign Time For Climate Justice included in the tcktcktck alliance, made this incredible song to remind our leaders (and ourselves) that we have to reach an agreement in Copenhagen.

No more words, just see (or better said, listen) it:

Convention on Rights of the Children: 20 years

20 years ago the Convention on Rights of the Children was born.

I just give you a link to a news – you can find lots of information searching in Google (they even made a special logo).

What we’ve been talking about

The other day I was asked “what is this blog about?”.

After thinking for a few seconds, I had three possible answers in my head.

The first thought was: okay, this is a blog which follows the social movement that is taking… bla, bla, bla… This is, our great presentation post was in my mind.

My second answer was simply: “read it”. If you really want to know something, you should read it. Directly. With no middleman.

And finally, I chose to answer with this post. More concretely, with the graph you can see below (you can click to see it full-sized).

This picture was created using a fantastic online and free tool, which takes all the words that appear in our main page, discards common english words (such as “then”, “a”…) and in the end it shows the most frequent words that appear in the page, being the biggest words the ones which appear most frequently. Therefore, in just three seconds, a person can realise not what we say but what we talk about, which is also very important.

16 days to Copenhagen

Copenhagen is going to arrive. It’s only 16 days, and it will be technically less than 16 in about an hour.

The world is ready. But our leaders don’t seem to believe the same.

tcktcktck, coordinating the action that dozens of organizations are doing in this field, are planning the next global “wake up call” for December 12, in the middle of the negotiations.

We don’t have too much information by the moment, but we are sure that, with the world watching, something really big is being planned after the International Day of Climate Action that motivated this blog.

Information will be published as soon as we have it.

No binding deal is expected from Barcelona’s meeting

Negotiations before Copenhagen’s summit took place last week in a meeting in Barcelona.

We need a “fair, ambitious and binding” deal. However, no such binding deal is expected. It seems that a “politically binding” deal will replace a “legally binding” one.

Word here in the halls at the negotiations is that a politically binding deal amounts to nothing more than greenwashing – a deal that looks good, but does not get us where we need to be if we want to avoid the worst predicted effects of climate change.

Such deal would mean terrifying consequences for our Planet.

I encourage you to read more information on the tcktcktck website.

P.S.: I know that I am writting a lot about climate change and the UN’s conference, but the thing is too important. We will continue informing you of everything related to this apart from our typical topics.

Barcelona’s meeting starts with activists’ actions

The meeting taking place this week in Barcelona is an important one. It is the last chance for the United Nations’ representatives to come to an agreement that will end in a “fair, ambitious and binding deal” in Copenhagen.

Yesterday the talks started. And activists’ protests did the same.

Some people from Greenpeace took down a banner asking “WORLD LEADERS MAKE THE CLIMATE CALL” at the Sacred Family, the most emblematic building in the city. It was not the only one but the most impressive.