Johann Hari

Thank god man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia’s vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world’s storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.

The world’s ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shriveled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 percent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass.

This all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It’s hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring “with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity” as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Center puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree celcius of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.

Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel – tar sands – that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has been opposed to meaningful action on global warming, until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable.

Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: “It snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming then, eh?” But scientific theories are based on patterns, not individual events. You might know a 90-year old woman who has smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of her life, and is totally healthy. (I do.) It doesn’t disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. In the same way, one heavy snow-fall doesn’t prove anything if it is part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow provably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places – making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline proof that warming isn’t happening?

But the broader public mood, smeared like sun-screen over us all, isn’t active denial. No – it’s the desire to endlessly postpone this issue for another day. In 1848, a 25 year old man called Phineas Gage was working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay explosives to clear rocks out of the way – but one day his explosive went off too soon, and a huge metal rod through into his skull and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived – but his personality changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an eternal present. As a civilization, we are beginning to look like Phineas Gage on a planetary scale.

Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most environmentally destructive sites in Britain, and taken direct action to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: they played a crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a big new coal power station at Kingsnorth.

That’s how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). You own this bank: 84 percent of it belongs to the taxpayer after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you, by funding the most environmentally destructive behavior on earth, like burning the tar sands. The protestors chose to come here democratically – everything at the climate camps is done by discussion and consensus – because they have a better idea. Why not turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity?

So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS’ offices because they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, explains: “My great fear is that within the next few decades – it could be next year, or it could be in fifty years, we don’t know exactly when – we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf… I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you’ll hear it in Sydney… Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don’t know how much it would rise. It could be ten centimeters, or a metre. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts… Once you have started that process, we wouldn’t know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don’t know whether sea level will stabilize. There’s no point of retreat where you can safely go back to… I doubt whether our global civilization could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring.”

Nature doesn’t follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot today, but the planet is – hotter than ever. When you stare out over the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks crazy – the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them?

An excellent source of clear, accessible videos debunking denialist claims can be found here.

 and why they're so bad here.

Back when David Cameron was first trying to rebrand the Conservative Party, he touched down on the melting Arctic tundra to be photographed looking pensive and hugging huskies. He promised to lead "the greenest government ever. "Vote blue, go green," his posters cried. Some of us were skeptical, because the only time he had ever publicly discussed global warming before was in a statement where he mocked wind farms as "giant bird blenders." Now, two years later, he was building one onto his house.

But I hoped I was wrong. Preventing the biosphere from unraveling shouldn't be a left/right issue: rising sea levels and super-charged hurricanes will displace lefties and Tories just the same. So what happened?

Deep breath: Cameron has put the man most to blame for the worst environmental disaster in living memory in charge of his cuts agenda, and appointed a man who has faced accusations of wriggling out of cleaning up a environmental atrocity to run his party's finances. He has slashed programmes to prevent global warming first and hardest. He has decreed that the Department of Transport will take the hardest cuts, which will shutter much of our public transport network and force far more people onto smoggier roads. And he has appointed an oilman to ensure we begin deep-water drilling, Gulf of Mexico-style, off the coast of Britain - just as every newscast in the world is showing how well that turns out.

Let's start with the personnel. The Prime Minister thought the best person to be his 'Cuts Tsar' was John Browne. You might remember him - he was the head of BP, until he was forced to resign in 2007 because he was shown to have lied in court testimony. He does indeed have experience with cutting. Browne arrived at BP promising to do exactly what Cameron is promising to do to the British state - "produce more for less." He said you could slice out great chunks of staff and provide the same standard of service.

The workers he sacked included BP's specialist engineers. As the investigative reporter Tom Bower has written: "Hundreds were fired and replaced by subcontractors... Browne ditch[ed] BP's in-house expertise, which could second-guess every technical operation on land and under the sea."

The consequences were soon clear. BP's Texas City refinery blew up, killing 15 workers, and the official investigation found that BP "tolerat[ed] serious deviations from safe operating practices, and [showed] apparent complacency toward serious safety process risks at each refinery." Browne carried cutting on anyway, in a process Bower argues "led directly to the current catastrophe."

So the Prime Minister believes the best person to oversee his cuts agenda is an oilman whose last cuts job destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, possibly forever. It's an inspiring model to apply to our schools, hospitals, and transport.

At the same time, Cameron has appointed a reclusive tycoon called David Rowland, who has a history of being severely condemned by environmentalists, to run his Party's finances. In 1989, he bought a US company that had several years before built a smelting plant in Idaho that poisoned the local waters and caused acute breathing problems among the local children, until it was forcibly shut by the US government.

Rowland bought it as they were ordering the company to pay for the $100m clean-up - and he was accused of moving the company's assets overseas and engaging in a fiscal tango to get out of paying. Rowland denies the allegations, saying they are "unsubstantiated and false" and there is "no evidence" for them and "the case was settled with no payment being made by David Rowland nor by any company connected with him." But clearly, for Cameron, being reviled by environmentalists is no deal-breaker when making senior appointments.

This approach to the environment has seeped, like a slick, over Cameron's policies. He commissioned another oil man, Tim Eggar, to go and ask the world's oil companies what they want from his government. They won't let me see the findings. But we know oil companies received big tax cuts in the budget, and the government's subsequent energy policy paper (to read it, you can follow the link from here) says life needs to be made "simpler [and] clearer" for oil companies to drill in British waters. Even though it is our addiction to oil that is causing and worsening global warming, the paper says: "We need policies designed for hunting [oil]... We need policies that offer the right incentives to explore for and extract the remaining reserves of oil and gas, and to keep existing fields open for as long as possible."

It pledges to open the oceans off the Shetland Islands to deep-sea drilling. Yes - that's the deep-sea drilling you've seen in every newscast for the past month. Cameron is promising Big Oil tax breaks to drill, baby, drill.

At the same time, projects designed to provide alternatives to oil are being axed. The Financial Times headline put it bluntly: "Climate projects face axe from Cable." (Remember: Saint Vince is a former oilman himself, who worked for Shell through its worst atrocities, including working intimately with the Nigerian military as they were murdering democracy activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.) Some of the very best programmes are expected to go. For example, Mitsubishi and Siemens pledged to come to Britain to make offshore wind turbines if the government made a £60m upgrade to our ports to make it possible - but Whitehall whispers are that it will be abandoned. Britain will miss out on a head-start in one of the great growth industries of the twenty-first century.

Under Cameron, many more people will have no choice but to engage in more environmentally destructive behavior: if 40 percent of our spending on trains and buses goes, much of the system will sputter to a halt, and the roads will jam. He promised to require all power plants to meet the standards of a modern gas plant - which would condemn monsters like Kingsnorth - but now civil servants say no such pledge will be in any legislation. Even Cameron's one green measure so far, opposing the new terminal at Heathrow, turns out to be a trick: his close ally, London mayor Boris Johnson, simply wants to build another airport just as big nearby. Vote blue, turn oil-black.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. A survey of Conservative parliamentary candidates before the last election found that 91 percent did not believe anthropogenic global warming is even happening. Tim Montgomerie, the voice of the Tory grassroots, bragged back then: "I'm confident the sceptics are going to win. [Cameron has] lost the battle already." But was Cameron's "conversion" ever more than a PR stunt? Yes, it helped to detoxify the Conservative brand - yet, given power, he is choosing to retoxify the real atmosphere.

I'm sorry - I know lots of people in the US want to argue that the British right shows it is possible to be a right-wing party that also cares about global warming. It should be. But this party ain't it.

Cameron is making these dark decisions just as an important new book, 'Turned Out Nice' by the science writer Marek Kohn, lays out the best evidence for how global warming will affect Britain this century if we let it rip. It's a picture of a shrinking, sweltering malaria-plagued island inundated by climate refugees from the parched parts of the world that have been rendered increasingly uninhabitable. They will look back at this period - and the preceding years, when New Labour's record was almost as bad - and curse us, unless we build a mass movement to change the country's direction.

The evidence is plain. Yes, David Cameron hugged the huskies in opposition. But as soon as he got into government, he walked them into the Downing Street garden, and shot them in the head.

Has our crude awakening begun, at last? It’s not just the pelicans of Louisiana that are flapping and flailing in an oil slick – it’s all of us. We live permanently doused in petrol. Every time we move further than our feet can carry us, or eat food we didn’t grow, or go shopping, we burn more barrels. Petrol pours off each of us like an invisible sweat. The twentieth century was propelled into the stratosphere on a great gushing geyser of oil, and in the adrenaline-frenzy, nobody wanted to ask where it was coming from, or what it would cost us in the end.

But in this decade, the true costs of oil – the ones that have been steadily accumulating since 1901, when it began to spurt from a hilltop in Texas – have begun to finally distract our gaze from the speed-dial. They silently dominate almost every long-term question we face.

Extracting oil from the ground has almost always been disastrous for the people who live nearby. The only thing that is unusual about this morphing of “Drill, Baby, Drill” into “Spill, Baby, Spill” is that, this time, the world noticed the victims. From the Niger Delta to Azerbaijan, the world is littered with places poisoned by the petroleum industry.

To pluck one random example, Ecuador’s oil pipeline – fuelling California – is located above ground, next to roads. It leaks constantly. The oil companies have to pump water into the Amazonian oil fields in order to extract it, which leaves behind a toxic soup of mercury, benzene and chromium 6. For decades, they simply pumped it into the local rivers – causing an epidemic of cancers and severely deformed babies. A US court calculated that the unpaid liabilities for destroying so many lives total more than $27bn. Who has heard of it?

Big Oil is occasionally, fleetingly honest about how it works. Sadad al-Husseini was vice president for exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, and he said of the industry: "If your tanker is old and you ought to retire it, you keep it working. If you have an offshore platform that is beyond the boundaries of a certain country and you can dump chemicals into the sea, you do. If you have to abandon a facility that is a pollutant, you abandon it without cleaning it up. If you’ve hired people and you can work them in unhealthy environments where you’ve got sulphur dioxide, you do it. All these are ways in which you say, it’s not my problem. It’s not my cost.”

This will only metastasize from here on in, because we have already burned up all the easy-to-access oil. The last year in which humans found more oil than we burned was when I was born: 1979. The sources that remain are in hard-to-reach places: far beneath the oceans, or the Arctic, or beneath conflict-zones, where protections are more lax, and accidents are more likely and even harder to staunch.

But it is now clear that oil does not only trash local environments. That was only a taster before the main course. It turns out oil spills so many warming gases into the atmosphere when it burns that it is radically altering the biosphere. The Arctic just hit its lowest level of sea ice for this time of year since records began. NASA says we could be on course for the hottest year yet known. The International Energy Agency warns that if we can extract and burn the remaining oil left, we will be on course for 6 degrees of global warming – a level that hasn’t been seen for 251 million years, when it triggered one of the biggest mass extinctions in the fossil record.

The people who say we shouldn’t worry about global warming because we’ll find a way to adapt further down the line should look again at the Gulf. The most powerful country on earth can’t stop a single leaking pipe. How will they – or the rest – deal with rapidly rising sea levels, the drying up of agricultural land, and super-charged hurricanes?

It doesn’t stop there. Oil-fever has driven the other great stories of this century. The demand for petrol is massively increasing, just as supply gets harder to meet – a virtual guarantee that we will fight for what remains. The invasion of Iraq, which has caused a million deaths, was a down-payment on this dystopia. It also leads our governments to support some of the world’s worst dictators in return for easy access to their ol’ black magic: we pay the Saudi dictatorship, and they use the cash to whip women who dare to sit behind the wheel of a car and to promote vile fundamentalist hatred of us.

As our addiction to oil goes on longer and our supply becomes more squeezed, we will become even more like junkies who are prepared to suck up to any dealer or rob anyone to get our next fix. In the film ‘Three Days of the Condor’, Robert Redford says free people will never back wars for oil. His CIA boss replies: “Ask ‘em when they’re running out. Ask ‘em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ‘em when their engines stop. Ask ‘em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ‘em. They’ll just want us to get it for ‘em.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can stop this SUV. We can get out. It wouldn’t even be that hard, compared to the challenges faced by previous generations. The technologies exist to replace oil now. For example, if we lined just 0.3 percent of the Sahara – the area of Belgium - with solar technology, it would meet all of Europe’s energy needs indefinitely.

Yes, it’s expensive, but we are already spending that money on making the dirtiest fuels cheaper. Oil Change International have shown that $250-400bn is currently spent every year subsidizing the use of fossil fuels, while renewable energy sources get less than $12bn. Switch the money and you’re almost there – and you have a massive jobs program to rebuild our infrastructure thrown in for free.

We will have to make this switch in the end, because the oil will run out. The only question is – do we do it now, skipping all the wars and all the warming, or do we wait to do it on a trashed and unraveling globe?

As long ago as 1979, Jimmy Carter gave a devastating speech saying the need for the West to wean itself off oil was “the moral equivalent of war.” Nothing happened. Barack Obama’s Oval Office address last week had more detail about the prayers we should offer to shrimp farmers than how his words about moving beyond oil could be made real. The stimulus cash didn’t go towards building green energy: when Obama last week wanted to boast about the fiscal stimulus, where did he go? To the 10,000th road that has been built.

Why? The clue to the biggest cause lies in the current Gulf disaster, where the crudest forces can be seen in microcosm. The oil companies gave so many “gifts” to the safety inspectors that, by this year, they were often just handed the inspection forms and told to fill them in themselves. On the national stage in the US, politicians on all sides (including Barack Obama) are sprayed with petro-money at election time. Gradually, they become an oiligarchy that sees moving beyond petrol as irrational: turning off the spigot would turn off their election funds. A more subtle but just as certain process happens here in Europe. To protect the profits of a very rich minority, the public interest is lost in a broken pipeline.

And so we are all left slithering in the global oil slick. Yet the anger of the sane citizenry – those of us who don’t want to engage in collective self-destruction – has been weirdly muted. Most of us know instinctively that we can’t carry on like this. Most of us know Big Oil is a swelling tumour. But it is still much more common to see protests for cheap oil than to see protests to build a world beyond it. We wait passively for a rational politician to emerge through the corruption, when we should be relentlessly pressuring them all.

The oilman John Paul Getty once joked: “The meek will inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.” If the sane proponents of a post-oil world stay so meek and mild, we may not inherit much worth having at all.

In addition to the debate about environmentalism I'm doing at 4pm, I'll also be at the Literary Festival arguing for the arrest of the Pope at 9.45pm. Come along...

There are details and tickets here. Come along...

For this year's Green Awards, I picked the Best UK politician, and best international politician.

Best UK politician: Caroline Lucas

Since 1997, Britain's emissions of warming gases have actually risen – and if you factor in the emissions from goods now manufactured for us in China, they have risen dramatically. Very few politicians have been honest about the crisis we face, or demanded the swift transition to an economy powered by the power of the sun, the wind and the waves. Working on the inside, the Environment Secretary Ed Miliband has a strong claim to this award, often trying to drag other government departments towards radical low- carbon approaches. But he is, in the end, too tainted by ineffective compromises, and by his sometime promotion of false solutions like the myth of "clean coal", to clinch it.

The politician who has most inspiringly proposed solutions to the climate crisis is in another party and another parliament altogether. Caroline Lucas joined the Green Party 20 years ago when it had a shabby office and almost no full-time staff. She has played a key role in leading it now to the brink of a historic breakthrough – her probable election in Brighton Pavilion next month as the first Green to the British Parliament.

In the European Parliament, without playing down the potential catastrophe of global warming for a second, Lucas has always proposed an optimistic and inspiring vision of how dealing with this crisis can also solve our other sicknesses. She has pioneered policies that can make Britain a more equal and fulfilled society, where instead of maniacally consuming ever more meaningless stuff, we find meaning in each other, and in the common cause of saving the biosphere. In a properly democratic electoral system, this vision could spurt ahead: in France, the Green party beat the Socialist party – the equivalent to Labour – at the last European elections.

If nothing else, there should be one great moment in the 2010 election: were you up for Lucas's win?

Best international politician: Mohammed Nasheed

In a catastrophic year for the climate crisis, were there any heroes? At Copenhagen, world leaders gathered to peer at the swelling evidence that we are close to irreparably trashing the planet's biosphere – and they offered a glib shrug. From the US to the EU to China, nobody offered to cut carbon emissions by the levels scientists say are necessary to stay this side of the climate's Point of No Return. Since then, there has been a regression into denialism across the world. The search for wise leaders in this is difficult, but a handful of politicians will be remembered for trying to do the right thing.

The most inspiring leader was Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. He has bled and nearly died for his island nation in the Indian Ocean. In his peaceful resistance against the islands' dictatorship, he was jailed and tortured – only to become its first democratic president in 2008. Yet it looked like it could become a sunken victory: the low-lying Maldives are drowning as sea-levels rise. By the end of this century, at current rates, they will be an Atlantis. "We are on the world's front line," he says. "And, in a sense, its only hope." To alert the world, he even staged a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear.

Nasheed has not only offered a warning, however; he has offered an alternative. Within 10 years, his country will become the first ever carbon-free country, running entirely on renewable energy sources. He warns that we all have to make this transition – and fast. "The last generation of humans went to the moon," he says. "This generation of humans needs to decide if it wants to stay alive on planet earth."

At last! The controversy is over. It turns out the "scientific" claims promoted for decades by whiny self-righteous liberals were a lie, a fraud, a con--and we don't need to change after all. The left is humiliated; the conservatives are triumphant and exultant.

The year is 1954, and the "science" that has been exposed as a "sham" by conservatives is the link between smoking and lung cancer. Welcome to Tobaccogate, as Fox News would call it. The conservatives are championing professor Clarence Cook Little, who says he has discovered insurmountable flaws in the use of statistics and clinical data by "anti-tobacco" (and quasi-commie) scientists. The press reports the "controversy," usually without mentioning that Cook Little is being paid by the tobacco industry. A relieved nation lights up--and so, over the next few decades, millions of them die.

It is happening again. The tide of global warming denial is now rising as fast as global sea levels--and with as much credibility as Cook Little. Look at the deniers' greatest moment, Climategate, hailed by them as "the final nail in the coffin" of "the theory of global warming." A patient study by the British House of Commons has pored over every e-mail from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and interviewed everyone involved. Its findings? The "evidence patently fails to support" the idea of a fraud; the scientists have "no case to answer"; and all their findings "have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified" by other scientists. That's British for "it was a crock."

Yet a startling amount of denialism now, like Climategate, travels across the Atlantic from my country--Britain--to the United States. Yes, I know our accents make us sound instantly plausible, but it's time Americans knew who these Brideshead bull-scientists really are.

To read the rest of this article over at The Nation, the best-selling political weekly in the US, click here.

 You can listen here.

The conservation groups have come back with some extraordinarily lame responses to my expose of their financial dependency on the world's worst polluters. (Click on the second page of the forum for my response.)

...discussing my article about the real Climategate. I think Democracy Now is the best newscast in the world - if you don't listen every day, you should.

Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

To read my cover story for The Nation, America's best-selling political magazine, click here.

Come along.

I started reading James Hansen's new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, at the edge of a vanishing Arctic. I sat on a bare brown Greenland hillside listening to the ferocious crack and crash of the dying glaciers in the distance. As I watched the corpse of the ice sheet float by, broken into a thousand icebergs, it seemed the right place to begin the leading NASA scientist's explanation for what I was seeing. Since the year I was born, 1979, 40 percent of the Arctic sea ice has vanished. If we don't change our behavior fast, Hansen says I will live to see the day when it is all gone, and the North Pole is a point in the open ocean, reachable by boat. He stresses these are only the starting symptoms of a planetary fever that will remake the map of the world—and the capacity of human beings to survive on it. I finished reading the book at the Copenhagen climate summit, where the world's leaders gathered to offer a giant shrug.

Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower's account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It's hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President's Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you've got this riveting, disorienting book.

How did such an implausible American story come to pass?

To read the rest of this article at Slate magazine, click here.

Buried deep in our subconscious, there still lays the belief that our political leaders are collective Daddies and Mummies who will – in the last instance – guarantee our safety. Sure, they might screw us over when it comes to hospital waiting lists, or public transport, or taxing the rich, but when it comes to resisting a raw existential threat, they will keep us from harm. Last week in Copenhagen, the conviction was disproved. Every leader there had been told by their scientists – plainly, bluntly, and for years – that there is a bare minimum we must all do now if we are going to prevent a catastrophe. And they all refused to do it.

To understand the gravity of what just happened, you need to know a few facts about global warming that, at first, sound odd. The world's climate scientists have shown that man-made global warming must not exceed 2 degrees Celcius. When you hear this, a natural reaction is – that's not much; how bad can it be if we overshoot? If I go out for a picnic and the temperature rises or falls by 2C, I don't much notice. But this is the wrong analogy. If your body temperature rises by 2C, you become feverish and feeble. If it doesn't go back down again, you die. The climate isn't like a picnic; it's more like your body.

Two degrees is bad: 2C means we lose much of the world's low-lying land, from the island-states of the South Pacific to much of Bangladesh to swathes of Florida. But at every step up to and including 2C, if we reduce our emissions, we can stabilise the climate at this new higher level. If we go beyond 2C, though, the situation changes. The earth's natural processes begin to break down – and cause more warming. There are massive amounts of warming gases stored in the Siberian permafrost; at 2C, they melt and are released into the atmosphere. The world's humid rainforests store huge amounts of warming gases in their trees. Beyond 2C, they lose their humidity and begin to burn down – releasing them too into the atmosphere.

These are called "tipping points". Because of them, the world gets warmer and warmer beyond 2C. They stand at the climate's Point of No Return, beyond which there lies only warming. We are only 6C away from the last ice age; we are setting ourselves on course to go that far in the opposite direction.

So what do we need to do to stay this side of 2C? There is a very broad, rock-solid scientific consensus that we need a cut of 40 per cent in the most polluting countries' emissions by 2020 if we are going to have even a 50-50 chance of doing so. Then, by 2050 we need an 80 per cent cut from everyone. The fact we are only aiming for a 50 per cent goal of avoiding calamity is a sign of how far we have already made a terrible compromise with fossil fuels – but our leaders are refusing to aim even for those odds.

There was plenty of disgrace to go around in Copenhagen. The world's worst per capita warmer is the US, yet its President turned up offering a pathetic 4 per cent cut by 2020 – and once you factor in all the loopholes his negotiators demanded, he was actually demanding the right to a significant increase in US emissions. He caved to the oil and gas lobbies who virtually own the Senate. It was – apart from anything else – a terrible betrayal of his own country's national security. In 2004, a leaked Pentagon report warned that unchecked global warming would ensure "disruption and conflict will be endemic ... [and] once again, warfare would define human life."

Similarly, the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao behaved appallingly. His country is the single largest overall emitter of gases, albeit with a far larger population, and much more need for development. Yet he vetoed the 80 per cent target by 2050, and refused to allow other countries to carry out basic checks to ensure China was carrying out the smaller cuts they were committed to. Again, he is betraying his own people: most of China's population depend on rivers that flow down from the Himalayan glaciers, yet they are rapidly disappearing. His name will be cursed in the Chinese history books.

The European Union was hardly better. They sat inert, refusing to make any larger offer to get the ball rolling. Only President Lula da Silva of Brazil came out boldly with an ahead-of-the-curve offer – but his heroism was met with awkward silence and avoided glances from the other leaders.

So here's the situation. There is no deal. The world's leaders refused to agree to limit our emissions of warming gases. The most they could agree was to officially "note" the scientific evidence about C – with no roadmap to keep us this side of it. You get a sense of how valuable this "noting" is when you look at the things the conference also "noted": the hard work of the airport security staff, and the quality of the catering in the Bella Centre. It seems impossible, but our leaders really did give the stability of our climate the same status as their praise for Danish sandwiches.

I am normally somebody who supports incremental change. Most progress happens by inches. But with this problem, we can't wait patiently knowing we'll prevail in the next generation. The tipping points will make that too late. You can't defuse a ticking bomb slowly year after year. You either defuse it fast, or it blows up in your face.

Our leaders were given the scientific facts, and they have responded by trying to haggle with the facts about the atmosphere. Imagine a 50-a-day smoker who goes to his doctor and is told he must stop immediately or he will develop lung cancer. He says: "I'll tell you what, doc – I'll cut down to 40-a-day, I'll eat a salad every lunchtime, and I'll slap on a few nicotine patches. How does that sound?" That's the official response to global warming.

Where does this leave us all? At least we know now: scientific evidence and rationality are not going to be enough to persuade our leaders. The Good Daddy isn't in charge. Nobody is going to sort this out – unless we, the populations of the warming-gas countries, make them. Politicians respond to the pressure put on them, and every single politician at Copenhagen knew they would get more flak at home – from their corporate paymasters and their petrol-hungry populations – for signing a deal than for walking away.

There is only one way to change that dynamic: a mass movement of ordinary democratic citizens. They have made the impossible happen before. Our economies used to be built on slave labour, just as surely as they are built on fossil fuels today. It seemed permanent and unchangeable, and its critics were regarded as deranged – until ordinary citizens refused to tolerate it any more, and they organised to demand its abolition.

The time for changing your light-bulbs and hoping for the best is over. It is time to take collective action. For some people, that will mean joining Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or the Campaign Against Climate Change and helping them pile on the pressure. But those who can go further – by taking non-violent direct action – should do so. Every coal train should be ringed with people refusing to let it pass. Every new runway should be blockaded. The cost of trashing the climate needs to be raised.

It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.

There need to be parallel movements to this in every country on earth (and a much bigger one in Britain). Copenhagen had one value, and one value alone. It has shown us that if we don't act in our own self-defence now, nobody else will.

You can read some of my articles about Copenhagen in French here and here and here. You can read them in Spanish here, or in German here.

...and why it was a disaster. Click here.

So that's it. The world's worst polluters - the people who are drastically altering the climate - gathered here in Copenhagen to announce they were going to carry on cooking, in defiance of all the scientific warnings. They didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives.



Those of us who watched this conference with open eyes aren't suprized. Every day, practical, intelligent solutions that would cut our emissions of warming gases have been offered by scientists, developing countries, and protesters - and they have been systematically vetoed by the governments of North America and Europe.



It's worth recounting a few of the ideas that were summarily dismissed - because when the world resolves to find a real solution, we will have to revive them.



Discarded Idea One: The International Environmental Court. Any cuts proposed at Copenhagen were purely voluntary. If a government decides not to follow them, nothing will happen, except a mild blush, and disastrous warming. After all, Canada signed up to cut its emissions at Kyoto, and then increased them by 26 percent - and there were no consequences. Copenhagen could unleash a hundred Canadas.



The brave, articulate Bolivian delegation - who have seen their glaciers melt at a terrifying pace - objected. They said if countries are serious about reducing emissions, their cuts need to be policed by an International Environmental Court that has the power to punish people who endanger our shared stable climate. This is hardly impractical. When our leaders and their corporate lobbies really care about an issue - say, on trade - they pool their sovereignty this way in a second. The World Trade Organization fines and sanctions nations severely if (say) they don't follow strict copyright laws. Is a safe climate less important than a trade-mark?



Discarded Idea Two: Leave the fossil fuels in the ground. At meetings here, an extraordinary piece of hypocrisy has been pointed out by the new international chair of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey and the environmental writer George Monbiot. The governments of the world say they want to drastically cut their use of fossil fuels, yet at the same time they are enthusiastically digging up any fossil fuels they can find, and hunting for more. They are holding a fire extinguisher in one hand and a flame-thrower in the other.



Only one of these instincts can prevail. A study published earlier this year in the journal Nature showed that we can only use - at an absolute maximum - 60 percent of all the oil, coal and gas we have already discovered if we are going to stay the right side of catastrophic runaway warming. So the first step in any rational climate deal would be an immediate moratorium on searching for more fossil fuels, and fair plans for how to decide which of the existing stock we will leave unused. As Bassey put it: "Keep the coal in the hole. Keep the oil in the soil. Keep the tar sand in the land." This option wasn't even discussed by our leaders.



Discarded Idea Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 percent of the warming gases pumped into the atmosphere - yet 70 percent of the effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter doesn't pay.



So we have racked up a climate debt. We broke it, they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that the  compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins." The cliche that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: "At this summit, the pole of environmentalism has moved South."



When we are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realize that we are badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain themselves when the rich refuse to?



A deal based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world - carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture - won't. They are a global placebo.  The critics who say the real solutions are "unrealistic" don't seem to realize that their alternative is more implausible still: civilization continuing on a planet whose natural processes are rapidly breaking down.



Throughout the negotiations here, the world's low-lying island states have clung to the real ideas as a life-raft, because they are the only way to save their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch their representatives - quiet, sombre people with sad eyes - as they were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were ignored.



Yet their discarded ideas - and dozens more like them - show once again that man-made global warming can be stopped. The intellectual blueprints exist just as surely as the technological blueprints. There would be sacrifices, yes - but they are considerably less than the sacrifices made by our grandparents in their greatest fight. We will have to pay higher taxes and fly less to make the leap to a renewably-powered world - but we will still be able to live an abundant life where we are warm and free and well-fed. The only real losers will be the fossil fuel corporations and the petro-dictatorships.



But our politicians have not chosen this sane path. No: they have chosen inertia and low taxes and oil money today over survival tomorrow. The true face of our current system - and of Copenhagen - can be seen in the life-saving ideas it has so casually tossed into the bin.

 here. I co-starred on this edition of The Stupid Show with Daryl Hannah and John Prescott - a threesome every young man dreams of.

At first glance, the Copenhagen climate summit seems like a Salvador Dali dreamscape. I just saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu being followed by a swarm of Japanese students who were dressed as aliens and carrying signs saying "Take Me To Your Leader" and "Is Your Species Crazy?". Before that, a group of angry black-clad teenage protesters who were carrying spray cans started quoting statistics to me about how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can safely absorb. (It's 350 parts per million they pointed out, before sucking their teeth.) Before that, I saw a couple in a pantomime cow costume being attacked by the police, who accused them of throwing stones with their hooves.

But the surrealism runs deeper and darker than this. Inside the Bella Centre, the rich world's leaders are defiantly ignoring their scientists and refusing to sign a deal that will prevent our climate from being dramatically destabilised. The scientific consensus shows the rich world needs to cut 40 per cent of our emissions of warming gases from 1990 levels by 2020 if we're going to have even a 50-50 chance of staying this side of the Point of No Return, when the Earth's natural processes start to break down and warming becomes unstoppable. Yet the scientists at Climate Analytics calculate our governments are offering a dismal 8-12 per cent cut – and once you factor in all the loopholes and accounting tricks, it becomes a net increase of four per cent.

Privately, government negotiators admit there's no way the negotiations will end with the deal scientists say is necessary for our safety. Indeed, it looks possible that this conference won't deepen and broaden the Kyoto framework, but cripple it. Kyoto established a legally binding international framework to measure and reduce emissions. The cuts it required were too small, and the sanctions for breaking it were pitifully weak – but it was a start. Kyoto's current phase expires in 2012, but the treaty's authors believed its architecture would be retained and intensified after that. The developing countries assumed that's what they were here to do. But the US is proposing to simply ditch the Kyoto infrastructure – won over decades of long negotiations – and replace it with an even weaker voluntary deal. In their proposal, every country will announce cuts and stick to them out of the goodness of their hearts. No penalties, no enforcement.

So at the centre of this summit is a proposition stranger than any number of arrested cows or Nasa-quoting hoodies: we're playing Russian roulette with the climate, and our most powerful governments are filling the barrels with extra bullets, one by one.

Yet this conflagration here in Copenhagen is heartbreaking and heartwarming all at once. Our governments are showing their moral bankruptcy – but a genuinely global democratic movement is swelling to make them change course. Mass democratic agitation is the only force that has ever made governments moral before; it will have to do it again.

An army of dedicated campaigners is gathering here, and they are prepared to take real risks to oppose this sham-deal. The protest march on Saturday here must have been the most genuinely global demonstration in history. Under banners saying "There Is No Planet B", "Nature Doesn't Do Bailouts" and "Change the Politics, Not the Climate", there seemed to be people from every nation on earth. Lawrence Muli from Kenya's youth delegation told me: "We are having the worst drought in memory in Kenya. The seasons have changed in ways we don't understand. My family can't grow crops any more, so they are going hungry. I am here to say we won't die quietly."

Next to him was Bhuwan Sambhu from Nepal, who has seen his glaciers retreat dramatically in his short lifetime. Just behind them was Manuel Wiechers from Mexico City, who said his hometown has been devastated by the worst rains on record. At his side was Utte Richter, a 76-year-old German woman who said: "It would be immoral to stay at home when these decisions were being made, with everything they mean for the world. This system is near the end of the road, and we must change to a new way."

The same arguments are heard in the corridors of the Bella Centre, where the representatives of the poor countries are refusing to sign up to a deal that will dry out or drown much of their land. The government of Tuvalu – the low-lying island that is already being drowned by rising seas – has calmly, with great dignity, interrupted meetings that presume we can carry on emitting carbon, pointing out this means "we will die". Lumumba Di-Aping, the chief negotiator for the G77 block of developing countries, wept as he explained: "The more you defer action, the more you condemn millions of people to immeasurable suffering." He said our governments are acting "like climate sceptics. If they really believed global warming was happening, how could they do this?"

Today, these two strands of protest – inside the conference, and outside – will combine. Some of the delegates are expected to walk out of the Bella Centre talks in disgust. At the same time, brave young protesters supporting their message will be trying to break in, to express their revulsion at the betrayal of us all going on there. Of course, the parts of the global media that serve the interests of the polluting rich will be keen to shift the story on to "vandals" and "violent protest". There may be a minuscule minority of protesters who behave unacceptably. But in reality, there are two forms of vandalism about to happen in this city. There is the cutting of a few fences as part of an act of mass civil disobedience. It is an attempt to symbolically resist the much bigger act of vandalism – the trashing of our own habitat, by leaders too short-sighted and too money-addled to listen to the science.

Isn't it violent to knowingly condemn whole countries to drown? Isn't it vandalism to knowingly let the world's most crucial farming land crust over, its most precious rivers run dry, and its hurricanes become super-charged? Isn't that immeasurably worse than breaking a fence and cutting a cordon? Couldn't resistance to this destruction-machine justify this tiny act of destruction? The young protesters who will do this have proved themselves, so far, the sanest force in town. They have ensured that the corporate lobbyists punching holes in the deal are followed and shamed wherever they meet. They chant: "It's not your business – it's our climate."

When I hear the activists, I remember something Farley Mowat, the Canadian conservationist, wrote in the 1990s: "The last three decades of this century have witnessed the ignition of the most significant internal conflict ever to engage the human species. It is not the struggle between capitalism and communism or between any other set of 'isms'. It is the conflict between those who possess the means and will to exploit the living world to destruction, and those who are banding together in a desperate and last-ditch attempt to prevent the New Juggernaut from trashing our small planet."

This week, the small band of the sane got a little bit bigger and a lot more global. For today, it is vastly outgunned by the forces of ecological destruction, and it will certainly not be able to ensure a sane deal in Copenhagen. But think of all the other movements that were small at first and held up impossible dreams. They called him "Martin Loser King"; they said civil rights would never come; now everyone says he was right and there's a black President (although alas not a green one).

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu pointed out here, they said the Berlin Wall would never fall, and they said apartheid would never die; now they say we cannot make the transition from an economy powered by coal and oil to one powered by the sun, the wind and the waves. But unlike previous protest movements, we can't wait for it to accumulate speed over generations. Each tonne of carbon brings us closer to climatic – and climactic – tipping points. This is a leap human beings must make in one generation.

We know it can be done. We have the knowledge and the science. If we refuse to do it – out of inertia and denial and so a few fossil fuel corporations can carrying on raking in profit and bribing our politicians – that will be this summit's most surreal scene of all.

Every delegate to the Copenhagen summit is being greeted by the sight of a vast fake planet dominating the city’s central square. This swirling globe is covered with corporate logos - the Coke brand is stamped over Africa, while Carlsberg appears to own Asia, and McDonald’s announces “I’m loving it!” in great red letters above. “Welcome to Hopenhagen!” it cries. It is kept in the sky by endless blasts of hot air.



This plastic planet is the perfect symbol for this summit. The world is being told that this is an emergency meeting to solve the climate crisis – but here inside the Bela Centre where our leaders are gathering, you can find only a corrupt shuffling of words, designed to allow countries to wriggle out of the bare minimum necessary to prevent the unraveling of the biosphere.



Staggering across the fringes of the summit are the people who will see their countries live or die on the basis of its deliberations. Leah Wickham, a young woman from Fiji, broke down as she told the conference she will see her homeland disappear beneath the waves if we do not act now. “All the hopes of my generation rest on Copenhagen,” she pleaded. Dazed Chinese and Indian NGOs explain how the Himalayan ice is rapidly vanishing and will be gone by 2035 – so the great rivers of Asia that are born there will shrivel and cease. They provide water for a quarter of humanity.



Mohammed Nasheed, the President of the drowning Maldives, said simply: “The last generation of humans went to the moon. This generation of humans needs to decide if it wants to stay alive on planet earth.”



We know what has to happen to give us a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophe. We need carbon emissions in rich countries to be 40 percent lower than they were in 1990 - by 2020. We can haggle with each other over how to get there but we can’t haggle with atmospheric physics over the end-goal: the earth’s atmosphere has put this limit on what it can absorb, and we can respect it, or suffer.



Yet the first week of this summit is being dominated by the representatives of the rich countries trying to lace the deal with Enron-style accounting tricks that will give the impression of cuts, without the reality. It’s essential to understand these shenanigans this week, so we can understand the reality of the deal that will be announced with great razzamataz next week.



Most of the tricks centre around a quirk in the system: a rich country can ‘cut’ its emissions without actually releasing fewer greenhouse gases. How? It can simply pay a poor country to emit less than it otherwise would have. In theory it sounds okay: we all have the same atmosphere, so who cares where the cuts come from?



But a system where emissions cuts can be sold among countries introduces extreme complexity into the system. It quickly (and deliberately) becomes so technical that nobody can follow it - no concerned citizen, no journalist, and barely even full-time environmental groups. You can see if your government is building more coal power stations, or airports, or motorways. You can’t see if the cuts they have “bought” halfway round the world are happening – especially when they are based on projections of increases that would have happened, in theory, if your government hadn’t stumped up the cash.



A study by the University of Stanford found that most of the projects that are being funded as “cuts” either don’t exist, don’t work, or would have happened anyway. Yet this isn’t a small side-dish to the deal: it’s the main course. For example, under proposals from the US, the country with by far the highest per capita emissions in the world wouldn't need to cut its own gas by a single exhaust pipe until 2026, insisting it’ll simply pay for these shadow-projects instead.



It gets worse still. A highly complex system operating in the dark is a gift to corporate lobbyists, who can pressure or bribe governments into rigging the system in their favour, rather than the atmosphere’s. It’s worth going through some of the scams that are bleeding the system of any meaning. They may sound dull or technical - but they are life or death to countries like Leah’s.



Trick One: Hot Air. The nations of the world were allocated permits to release greenhouse gases back in 1990, when the Soviet Union was still a vast industrial power - so it was given a huge allocation. But the following year, it collapsed, and its industrial base went into freefall – along with its carbon emissions. It was never going to release those gases after all. But Russia and the Eastern European countries have held onto them in all negotiations as “theirs”. Now, they are selling them to rich countries who want to purchase “cuts.” Under the current system, the US can buy them from Romania and say they have cut emissions - even though they are nothing but a legal fiction.



We aren’t talking about climatic small change. This hot air represents ten gigatonnes of CO2. By comparison, if the entire developed world cuts its emissions by 40 percent by 2020, that will only take six gigatonnes out of the atmosphere.



Trick Two: Double-counting. This is best understood through an example. If Britain pays China to abandon a coal power station and construct a hydro-electric dam instead, Britain pockets the reduction in carbon emissions as part of our overall national cuts. In return, we are allowed to keep a coal power station open at home. But at the same time, China also counts this change as part of its overall cuts. So one ton of carbon cuts is counted twice. This means the whole system is riddled with exaggeration – and the figure for overall global cuts is a con.



Trick Three: The Fake Forests -  or what the process opaquely dubs 'LULUCF' . Forests soak up warming gases and store them away from the atmosphere - so, perfectly sensibly, countries get credit under the new system for preserving them. It is an essential measure to stop global warming. But the Canadian, Swedish and Finnish logging companies have successfully pressured their governments into inserting an absurd clause into the rules. The new rules say you can, in the name of “sustainable forest management”, cut down almost all the trees – without losing credits. It’s Kafkaesque: a felled forest doesn't increase your official emissions... even though it increases your actual emissions.



Trick Four: Picking a fake baseline. All the scientific recommendations take 1990 as the dangerously high baseline we need to cut from. So when we talk about a 40 percent cut, we mean 40 percent less than 1990. But the Americans have – in a stroke of advertising genius – shifted to taking 2005 as their baseline. Everybody else is talking about 1990 levels, except them. So when the US promises a 17 percent cut on 2005 levels, they are in fact offering a 4 percent cut on 1990 levels – far less than other rich countries.



There are dozens more examples like this, but you and I would lapse into a coma if I listed them. This is deliberate. This system has been made incomprehensible because if we understood, ordinary citizens would be outraged. If these were good faith negotiations, such loopholes would be dismissed in seconds. And the rich countries are flatly refusing to make even these enfeebled, leaky cuts legally binding. You can toss them in the bin the moment you leave the conference center, and nobody will have any comeback. On the most important issue in the world – the stability of our biosphere – we are being scammed.



Our leaders are aren’t giving us Hopenhagen - they’re giving us Cokenhagen, a sugary feelgood hit filled with sickly additives and no nutrition. Their behaviour here – where the bare minimum described as safe by scientists isn’t even being considered - indicates they are more scared of the corporate lobbyists that fund their campaigns, or the denialist streak in their own country, than of rising seas and falling civilizations.



But there is one reason why I am still – despite everything – defiantly hopeful. Converging on this city now are thousands of ordinary citizens who aren’t going to take it any more. They aren’t going to watch passively while our ecosystems are vandalized. They are demanding only what the cold, hard science demands – real and rapid cuts, enforced by a global environmental court that will punish any nation that endangers us all. This movement will not go away. Copenhagen has soured into a con – but from the wreckage, there could arise a stronger demand for a true solution.



If we don't raise the political temperature very fast, the physical temperature will rise - and we can say goodbye to Leah, and to the only safe climate we have ever known.

<p><em>Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click <a href="http://www.johannhari.com/">here</a>. For an archive of his writings on global warming, click <a href="http://www.johannhari.com/category/Environmentalism">here</a>.</em> </p>

When I was a child in the 1980s, the threat of nuclear war pervaded the culture. It was there in movies, in novels, even in pop songs: I still feel a little pre-adolescent shiver when I hear "99 Red Balloons". The mushroom cloud haunted every classroom. By comparison, the danger of a disrupted climate – which is not hypothetical; it has already begun – has been only nudged by our artists. There have been a few terrific novels, like JG Ballard's eco-haunted oeuvre, or Will Self's The Book of Dave, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But they are the exceptions. The vision of a world that is six degrees warmer – a gap as big as that between us and the last ice age – has so far been described only by scientists.

Yet human beings need to process information twice; once as fact, and then as imaginary narratives that tease out its implications. It's why we dream, and why we compulsively tell each other stories.

The swelling evidence of man-made global warming is now finally compelling artists into creation. The terrific new exhibition at the Royal Academy "Earth: Art of a Changing World" brings together dozens of the greatest visual artists in the world to respond to the climate crisis – and what it reveals about us.

The theme that pervades the exhibition is the slow realisation that our existence here is arbitrary and contingent. Life on this rock in space developed by fluke, and it can be ended by a series of man-made flukes – like releasing massive amounts of a colourless, odourless warming gas into the atmosphere.

The first exhibit is called Semiconductor. The artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have used the raw visual data from one of Nasa's space observatories to track the solar winds that wash across the universe. As you stare at them – and the utterly alien sounds of space are blasted all around you – it's hard to escape a sudden sense of being an object in a void, with nowhere else to go if we render this rock uninhabitable. Its images and soundscape dissolve – here, at your first step – our human-centred view of the universe. We think we're so important, so central to existence, that we can't be destroyed. But here we are; nothing but a speck in a celestial storm that would barely register our self-annihilation.

Nature Paintings by Keith Tyson underlines this point. Tyson had an accident in his studio where chemicals mixed with pigment, and they independently formed gorgeously painterly patterns. Like our world, it looks like it has so much meaning, and is the product of so much planning – but it is an accident. Nothing more. It could be undone in a moment.

In the corner of one part of the gallery there sits a small steel orb that will explode in precisely a hundred years from now. It was designed by Kris Martin, and it is called 100 Years. It stares at you, silently. Where will it be when the explosion comes? Will this part of London be underwater? Will it be forgotten in some dusty archive and end up destroying all the artwork around it? Will everyone ignore the problem it poses, until the detonation comes?

Some of the artists at the Royal Academy have taken a more literal look at the crisis. Antti Laitinen, in It's My Island I, films himself trying to build an island out of rocks in the open ocean, and we watch it being swallowed by the sea – a fate that awaits many nations. Lucy and Jorge Orta have built a makeshift refugee camp Antarctic Village, stitched from the flags of all the nations that would be crippled by runaway warming.

Shiro Takatani shows an ice core that has been drilled out from the depths of the Arctic, revealing the carbon dioxide levels at every point in history. There is the snow that fell during the Battle of Hastings; there is the snow that fell during the American Civil War; and there we are, changing the fossil record with a massive blast of warming gases.

The exhibition probes some of our darker impulses towards the ecosystem. With Doomed, Tracey Moffatt splices together shots of the end of the world from a great ream of old movies – and it is entrancing. Everybody stops and stares, open-mouthed, smiling. Is there some strange vandalistic impulse in human beings that makes us almost will the end? If we're honest, wasn't the most beautiful sight of the year Sydney shrouded in apocalyptic red dust, blown in from the dried-out centre of the country?

The only exhibit that doesn't work – that plays to the dumbest sliver of environmentalism – is Tracey Emin's I Loved You like the Sky. It is a (bad) drawing of several cute animals, with scrawled romanticised bursts of guff: "Your heart is like the wind," she announces, meaninglessly. You can't slop together any old sub-Michael Jackson ramblings and call it a green statement. Even if your heart was like the wind, what would it have to do with the climate crisis?

The exhibit that slapped me hardest was The Russian Ending by Tacita Dean. It is a series of stills from old industrial accidents; trashed ships and exploding mines and mangled men in graves. We are all, it hints, caught up in a giant industrial accident now. Just as the owners of these mines and ships didn't put in basic safety measures, we aren't putting in basic safety measures to regulate the vast belching, warming gases that are rupturing the climate. These pictures are becoming our story.

Dean's title comes from the fact that movies made for international distribution often shoot an extra "Hollywood ending" – a happy resolution for an American market that doesn't want to leave the cinema downcast. But they also used to shoot a "Russian ending" – a tragic and bleak conclusion to the story, for Russians who expected no less. Dean leaves us with a strange irony: American vandalism of a climate deal may leave us all with a Russian ending.

These visual artists are not alone. The Road, for example, is a parable about what would happen to humanity if we are stripped of a stable ecosystem. In the novel and in the new film version, something – we are not told what – causes nature to implode. Nothing grows; a thin layer of ash lies across the world. Almost everything dies. A man and his son stagger across this landscape, finding nothing, being nothing.

Utter collapse certainly won't happen overnight, as it does in The Road. But by accelerating the process so dramatically, McCarthy shows us what we are risking in the space of just a few lifetimes. Joseph Conrad said in 1896: "Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings." If you take away the web of life around us, we are reduced almost immediately to dying scavengers, feeding off rubbish, and each other.

We are in the process of dramatically destabilising the stable ecosystem that stands between us and The Road. To comprehend the gamble we are taking, and why we are responding so sluggishly, we need scientists first, for sure. But following closely behind, we need artists. Now, at last, they are coming in on the rising tide.

When I was a child in the 1980s, the threat of nuclear war pervaded the culture. It was there in movies, in novels, even in pop songs: I still feel a little pre-adolescent shiver when I hear "99 Red Balloons". The mushroom cloud haunted every classroom. By comparison, the danger of a disrupted climate – which is not hypothetical; it has already begun – has been only nudged by our artists. There have been a few terrific novels, like JG Ballard's eco-haunted oeuvre, or Will Self's The Book of Dave, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But they are the exceptions. The vision of a world that is six degrees warmer – a gap as big as that between us and the last ice age – has so far been described only by scientists.

Yet human beings need to process information twice; once as fact, and then as imaginary narratives that tease out its implications. It's why we dream, and why we compulsively tell each other stories.

The swelling evidence of man-made global warming is now finally compelling artists into creation. The terrific new exhibition at the Royal Academy "Earth: Art of a Changing World" brings together dozens of the greatest visual artists in the world to respond to the climate crisis – and what it reveals about us.

The theme that pervades the exhibition is the slow realisation that our existence here is arbitrary and contingent. Life on this rock in space developed by fluke, and it can be ended by a series of man-made flukes – like releasing massive amounts of a colourless, odourless warming gas into the atmosphere.

The first exhibit is called Semiconductor. The artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have used the raw visual data from one of Nasa's space observatories to track the solar winds that wash across the universe. As you stare at them – and the utterly alien sounds of space are blasted all around you – it's hard to escape a sudden sense of being an object in a void, with nowhere else to go if we render this rock uninhabitable. Its images and soundscape dissolve – here, at your first step – our human-centred view of the universe. We think we're so important, so central to existence, that we can't be destroyed. But here we are; nothing but a speck in a celestial storm that would barely register our self-annihilation.

Nature Paintings by Keith Tyson underlines this point. Tyson had an accident in his studio where chemicals mixed with pigment, and they independently formed gorgeously painterly patterns. Like our world, it looks like it has so much meaning, and is the product of so much planning – but it is an accident. Nothing more. It could be undone in a moment.

In the corner of one part of the gallery there sits a small steel orb that will explode in precisely a hundred years from now. It was designed by Kris Martin, and it is called 100 Years. It stares at you, silently. Where will it be when the explosion comes? Will this part of London be underwater? Will it be forgotten in some dusty archive and end up destroying all the artwork around it? Will everyone ignore the problem it poses, until the detonation comes?

Some of the artists at the Royal Academy have taken a more literal look at the crisis. Antti Laitinen, in It's My Island I, films himself trying to build an island out of rocks in the open ocean, and we watch it being swallowed by the sea – a fate that awaits many nations. Lucy and Jorge Orta have built a makeshift refugee camp Antarctic Village, stitched from the flags of all the nations that would be crippled by runaway warming.

Shiro Takatani shows an ice core that has been drilled out from the depths of the Arctic, revealing the carbon dioxide levels at every point in history. There is the snow that fell during the Battle of Hastings; there is the snow that fell during the American Civil War; and there we are, changing the fossil record with a massive blast of warming gases.

The exhibition probes some of our darker impulses towards the ecosystem. With Doomed, Tracey Moffatt splices together shots of the end of the world from a great ream of old movies – and it is entrancing. Everybody stops and stares, open-mouthed, smiling. Is there some strange vandalistic impulse in human beings that makes us almost will the end? If we're honest, wasn't the most beautiful sight of the year Sydney shrouded in apocalyptic red dust, blown in from the dried-out centre of the country?

The only exhibit that doesn't work – that plays to the dumbest sliver of environmentalism – is Tracey Emin's I Loved You like the Sky. It is a (bad) drawing of several cute animals, with scrawled romanticised bursts of guff: "Your heart is like the wind," she announces, meaninglessly. You can't slop together any old sub-Michael Jackson ramblings and call it a green statement. Even if your heart was like the wind, what would it have to do with the climate crisis?

The exhibit that slapped me hardest was The Russian Ending by Tacita Dean. It is a series of stills from old industrial accidents; trashed ships and exploding mines and mangled men in graves. We are all, it hints, caught up in a giant industrial accident now. Just as the owners of these mines and ships didn't put in basic safety measures, we aren't putting in basic safety measures to regulate the vast belching, warming gases that are rupturing the climate. These pictures are becoming our story.

Dean's title comes from the fact that movies made for international distribution often shoot an extra "Hollywood ending" – a happy resolution for an American market that doesn't want to leave the cinema downcast. But they also used to shoot a "Russian ending" – a tragic and bleak conclusion to the story, for Russians who expected no less. Dean leaves us with a strange irony: American vandalism of a climate deal may leave us all with a Russian ending.

These visual artists are not alone. The Road, for example, is a parable about what would happen to humanity if we are stripped of a stable ecosystem. In the novel and in the new film version, something – we are not told what – causes nature to implode. Nothing grows; a thin layer of ash lies across the world. Almost everything dies. A man and his son stagger across this landscape, finding nothing, being nothing.

Utter collapse certainly won't happen overnight, as it does in The Road. But by accelerating the process so dramatically, McCarthy shows us what we are risking in the space of just a few lifetimes. Joseph Conrad said in 1896: "Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings." If you take away the web of life around us, we are reduced almost immediately to dying scavengers, feeding off rubbish, and each other.

We are in the process of dramatically destabilising the stable ecosystem that stands between us and The Road. To comprehend the gamble we are taking, and why we are responding so sluggishly, we need scientists first, for sure. But following closely behind, we need artists. Now, at last, they are coming in on the rising tide.

Every day, I pine for the global warming deniers to be proved right. I loved the old world – of flying to beaches wherever we want, growing to the skies, and burning whatever source of energy came our way. I hate the world to come that I've seen in my reporting from continent after continent - of falling Arctic ice shelves, of countries being swallowed by the sea, of vicious wars for the water and land that remains. When I read the works of global warming deniers like Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer, I feel a sense of calm washing over me. The nightmare is gone; nothing has to change; the world can stay as it was.

But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable. Nobody disputes that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, like a blanket holding in the Sun's rays. Nobody disputes that we are increasing the amount of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. (If you disagree with any of these statements, you'd fail a geography GCSE).

Yet half our fellow citizens are choosing to believe the deniers who say there must be gaps between these statements big enough to fit an excuse for carrying on as we are. Shrieking at them is not going to succeed.

Our first response has to be to accept that this denial is an entirely natural phenomenon. The facts of global warming are inherently weird, and they run contrary to our evolved instincts. If you burn an odourless, colourless gas in Europe, it will cause the Arctic to melt and Bangladesh to drown and the American Mid-West to dry up? By living our normal lives, doing all the things we have been brought up doing, we can make great swathes of the planet uninhabitable? If your first response is incredulity, then you're a normal human being.

It's tempting to allow this first response to harden into a dogma, and use it to cover your eyes. The oil and gas industries have been spending billions to encourage us to stay stuck there, because their profits will plummet when we make the transition to a low-carbon society. But the basic science isn't actually very complicated, or hard to grasp. As more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, the world gets warmer. Every single year since 1917 has been hotter than 1917. Every single year since 1956 has been hotter than 1956. Every single year since 1992 has been hotter than 1992. And on, and on. If we dramatically increase the carbon dioxide even more – as we are – we will dramatically increase the warming. Many parts of the world will dry up or flood or burn.

This is such an uncomfortable claim that I too I have tried to grasp at any straw that suggests it is wrong. One of the most tempting has come in the past few weeks, when the emails of the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia were hacked into, and seem on an initial reading to show that a few of their scientists were misrepresenting their research to suggest the problem is slightly worse than it is. Some people have seized on it as a fatal blow – a Pentagon Papers for global warming.

But then I looked at the facts. It was discovered more than a century ago that burning fossil fuels would release warming gases and therefore increase global temperatures, and since then, hundreds of thousands of scientists have independently reached the conclusion that it will have terrible consequences. It would be very surprising if, somewhere among them, there wasn't a charlatan or two who over-hyped their work. Such people exist in every single field of science (and they are deplorable).

So let's knock out the Hadley Centre's evidence. Here are just a fraction of the major scientific organisations that have independently verified the evidence that man-made global warming is real, and dangerous: Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, L'Academie des Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the UK's Royal Society, the Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the US Environmental Protection Agency... I could fill this entire article with these names.

And they haven't only used one method to study the evidence. They've used satellite data, sea level measurements, borehole analysis, sea ice melt, permafrost melt, glacial melt, drought analysis, and on and on. All of this evidence from all of these scientists using all these methods has pointed in one direction. As the conservative journalist Hugo Rifkind put it, the Hadley Centre no more discredits climate science than Harold Shipman discredits GPs.

A study for the journal Science randomly sampled 928 published peer-reviewed scientific papers that used the words "climate change". It found that 100 per cent – every single one – agreed it is being fuelled by human activity. There is no debate among climate scientists. There are a few scientists who don't conduct research into the climate who disagree, but going to them to find out how global warming works is a bit like going to a chiropodist and asking her to look at your ears.

Part of the confusion in the public mind seems to stem from the failure to understand that two things are happening at once. There has always been – and always will be – natural variation in the climate. The ebb from hot to cold is part of Planet Earth. But on top of that, we are adding a large human blast of warming – and it is disrupting the natural rhythm. So when, in opinion polls, people say warming is "natural", they are right, but it's only one part of the story.

Once you have grasped this, it's easy to see through the claim that global warming stopped in 1998 and the world has been cooling ever since. In 1998, two things came together: the natural warming process of El Nino was at its peak, and our human emissions of warming gases were also rising – so we got the hottest year ever recorded. Then El Nino abated, but the carbon emissions kept up. That's why the world has remained far warmer than before – eight of the 10 hottest years on record have happened in the past decade – without quite reaching the same peak. Again: if we carry on pumping out warming gases, we will carry on getting warmer.

That's why I won't use the word "sceptic" to describe the people who deny the link between releasing warming gases and the planet getting warmer. I am a sceptic. I have looked at the evidence highly critically, desperate for flaws. The overwhelming majority of scientists are sceptics: the whole nature of scientific endeavour is to check and check and check again for a flaw in your theory or your evidence. Any properly sceptical analysis leads to the conclusion that man-made global warming is real. Denial is something different: it is when no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, could convince you. It is a faith-based position.

So let's – for the sake of argument – make an extraordinary and unjustified concession to the deniers. Let's imagine there was only a 50 per cent chance that virtually all the world's climate scientists are wrong. Would that be a risk worth taking? Are you prepared to take a 50-50 gamble on the habitability of the planet? Is the prospect of getting our energy from the wind and the waves and the sun so terrible that's not worth it on even these wildly optimistic odds?

Imagine you are about to get on a plane with your family. A huge group of qualified airline mechanics approach you on the tarmac and explain they've studied the engine for many years and they're sure it will crash if you get on board. They show you their previous predictions of plane crashes, which have overwhelmingly been proven right. Then a group of vets, journalists, and plumbers tell they have looked at the diagrams and it's perfectly obvious to them the plane is safe and that airplane mechanics – all of them, everywhere – are scamming you. Would you get on the plane? That is our choice at Copenhagen.

...can be read here, at the wesbite of Intelligent Life.

Mohammed Nasheed knows what global warming means, because he sees it every day. He survived years of imprisonment and torture to lead his country – the Maldives – to democracy. But now, as its President, he is being forced to watch as his homeland is wiped from the map. With each year that passes, the rising sea claims more land, and at the current rate it will claim everything.

He knows why. We know why. It is because we have released massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we aren't stopping. Unless we turn around – fast – the Maldives will be gone.

Today, he has a final plea. President Nasheed says: "Copenhagen can be one of two things. It can be an historic event where the world unites against carbon pollution in a collective spirit of co-operation and collaboration, or Copenhagen can be a suicide pact. The choice is that stark."

If we fail, the story of the Maldives will become our story. A ream of scientific studies now suggest we could be on course for 6°C of global warming this century. It doesn't sound like much at first. But the last time the world warmed by six degrees so fast was at the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago. The result? Almost everything on earth died.

The only survivors were a few shelled creatures in the oceans, and a pig-like creature that had the land to itself for millions of years. The earth was racked by "hypercanes" – hurricanes so strong they even left their mark on the ocean floor. Oxygen levels in the atmosphere plunged to 15 per cent; low enough to leave any fast-moving animal gasping for breath. These six degrees of separation stand between us and a planet we do not recognise and cannot live on.

The fever of denialism is natural. This is so far outside our experience that is seems intuitively untrue, wrong, or even mad. I desperately wish the deniers were right: I would jump on the next flight to Tahiti for a month-long party. But the scientific consensus is overwhelming – as strong as the consensus that smoking causes lung cancer, or HIV causes Aids. The deniers are a discredited fringe with virtually no scientists currently working in the field. If you release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere on an industrial scale year after year, the world will get much warmer, and many of us will die.

I have seen it happen. In the past few years, I have reported from three places where global warming is having a catastrophic effect – the Arctic, Bangladesh, and the borders of Darfur. I spoke to Inuit who are watching in disbelief as their historic hunting-lands disappear and the ice-sheets crumble into the sea. I stood on the drowning coast of Bangladesh as villagers pointed to a spot in the middle of the sea and said: "That is where my house was."

"When did you leave?" I asked.

"Last year," they said, shaking their heads.

But it was in Darfur that I got the plainest glimpse into a much warmer world. The settled farmers and the nomadic pastoralists had developed a peaceful way to share the water supplies of the area – but then, in the Nineties, the water started to vanish. As one refugee put it to me: "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left." (The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has said this is due to global warming, summarising the reports of his leading scientists.) When the things we require to survive vanish – water, food and land – we don't wait to die. We kill for them.

Whenever the scientific consensus is accurately described, the deniers cry that we are being "alarmist". There is a difference between being alarmist, and being alarmed by the facts. To know what we know and carry on pumping out warming gases wouldn't just be foolish. It would be a crime. Yet even politicians who understand the science don't believe there will be progress at Copenhagen, because we must adhere to "political reality". People aren't ready to make changes; there's still a sense this is a vague problem for future generations; the US Senate won't pass a bill; and on, and on. But in a conflict between political and physical reality, physical reality will win. You can't stand at the edge of a super-charged hurricane and shout: "The focus groups say I can't deal with you yet."

Others complain that we who want to prevent the catastrophe mustn't be negative or scare people; we should "stress the positive". Yes, there are positive opportunities to grab: it's a chance for us all to come together in a common cause and to be a great generation, remembered as heroes by history. But it would be patronising and bizarre to start there. In 1936, Winston Churchill and George Orwell warned about the rise of Nazism. They didn't sugar-coat it. They didn't wrap it in feel-good homilies. They treated people like adults. A terrible threat was rising, and it had to be stopped. This is our position today. This is our choice. We can make history – or we can commit suicide.

Traducido por Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi.

Los síntomas de nuestra fiebre del planeta se vuelven cada vez más evidentes cada año. Ahora un lugar que ha sido bloqueado en el hielo desde que nuestros antepasados se movían entre los árboles se convierte en líquido, mucho antes de las predilecciones científicas. Robert Corell, uno de los científicos principales estadounidenses del clima, advierte: ‘Si quieres ver qué pasará al resto del mundo, mira el Árctico. Pasa primero allí’.

Nuestro calor lo convierte en una tierra que no podemos reconocer más. Si los seres humanos continúan emitiendo los gases invernadero con velocidad actual, esto pasará en la mayoría de los lugares- con aumento del nivel de los mares, las tierras agrícolas sufrirán la sequía, y habrá desastres climáticos mucho más extremos.

La velocidad actual sugiere que no pasará sólo a nuestros nietos y a los osos polares que sigan invocando los políticos en sus discursos, sino nos pasará también. Los científicos climáticos del mundo advierten que es posible que, en mi vida, haya un calentamiento de cinco grados. Eso es una diferencia tan grande como la que existe entre el clima actual y el de la última edad de hielo. Convertirá nuestro planeta en algo que no entendemos, y que no podemos habitar con nuestra población actual.

Este año hay una oportunidad- a cinco minutos antes de medianoche ecológica- para que cambiemos de rumbo. Los líderes del mundo se reunirán en Copenhague para acordar un sucesor a Kioto. Si se deciden a introducir reducciones sustanciales y vinculantes, podemos prevenir que el ecosistema sufra un colapso. Pero hay que pasar ahora.

Cualquiera que hagas en los próximos meses para ejercer una presión sobre tus políticos- tales como protestar, realizar campañas y ofrecerte voluntariamente por Greenpeace o Amigos de la Tierra- puede ser lo más importante que hagas en tu vida.

Sin embargo, muchas personas preocupadas de este recalentamiento global catastrófico están encauzando mal sistemáticamente sus energías políticas. Para reducir sus preocupaciones, reducen solamente sus emisiones propias.

A lo más, es de valor muy limitado, y a lo menos es un placebo que previene que tomes la medicina verdadera. Lo único que preserve nuestro clima es la presión pública masiva sobre nuestros políticos para que acuerden las restricciones vinculantes que se apliquen a todos nosotros- no solamente al 10% simpático que reducirá de manera voluntaria sus emisiones.

Hay que ejercer ahora una presión. El Árctico fue el canario en la mina de carbón. Este canario está ya moribundo. Hay que gritar ahora.

When does planting a tree become a revolutionary act - and unleash an army of gunmen who want to shoot you dead? The answer to this question lies in the unlikely story of Wangari Maathai.

She was born on the floor of a mud hut with no water or electricity in the middle of rural Kenya, in the place where human beings took their first steps. There was no money but there was at least lush green rainforest and cool, clear drinking water. But Maathai watched as the life-preserving landscape of her childhood was hacked down. The forests were felled, the soils dried up, and the rivers died, so a corrupt and distant clique could profit. She started a movement to begin to make the land green again - and in the process she went to prison, nearly died, toppled a dictator, transformed how African women saw themselves, and won a Nobel Prize.

Now Maathai is travelling the world with a warning. As she told the United Nations climate summit last Tuesday, it is not just her beloved rainforest that is threatened now, but all rainforests. "As human beings, we are attacking our own life-support system," she says. "And if we carry on like this, we are digging our own grave."

Her story begins with one particular tree in the heart of Africa. In 1940, Maathai became the third of six children born to illiterate peasant farmers. Her father worked as a "glorified slave" for the British settlers who occupied Kenya. He was forced to do what he was told on their farms, and forbidden - like all black people - from growing his own food and selling it. The nearby town of Nakuru was strictly segregated, with Africans banned from the "European areas." As a child, Maathai escaped into the natural landscape. She studied the forests - how they absorbed water and turned them into streams, and how they were filled with life. She would sit for hours under one particular fig tree, which her mother told her was sacred and life-giving and should never be damaged.

"That tree inspired awe. It was protected. It was the place of God. But in the Sixties, after I had gone far away, I went back to where I grew up," she says, "and I found God had been relocated to a little stone building called a church. The tree was no longer sacred. It had been cut down. I mourned for that tree. And I knew the trees had to live. They have to live so we can live."

I. A Daughter of the Soil

I am meeting Maathai in a busy hotel in London. She approaches me in the lobby - a tall, broad woman with a bright blue headdress and a slight limp - looking frazzled. "I have a flight in a few hours and I have packed nothing! Ah, you know how it is," she says. "Let's have coffee." As soon as we sit, she begins to talk about the trees, and a calm settles over her unlined 69-year-old face. "I am a daughter of the soil, and trees have been my life," she says. She begins to talk reverentially about how trees store carbon, regulate rainfall, hold soil in place, and provide food.

"I can't live without the green trees, and nor can you. I'm humbled by the understanding that they could get along without me though! They sustain us, not the other way round. We don't really know where we came from, where we are going, and what the purpose of all this is. But we can look at the trees and the animals and each other, and realise we are part of a web we can't really control."

She was only able to learn the hard science of the forests because her parents made a bold decision. At a time when girls were not often educated, her mother resolved to send her girl to school, and give her all the opportunities she had never had. The British settler her father worked for was furious: who was going to pick his pyrethrum? But her mother insisted - a rare and risky act of defiance. Maathai soon shot to the top of the class, and was offered a place at a Catholic boarding school run by Irish nuns.

When she was 13, in her first year away at school, the rebellion against the British occupation broke out. The Mau Mau guerrilla fighters took on the British occupiers to drive them away, killing around 100 people. The British fought back with astonishing ferocity, killing around 100,000 Kenyans. "The Home Guards had a reputation for extreme cruelty and all manner of terror," she says. Her mother was forced out of her home at gunpoint and ordered to live in an "emergency village" - a glorified camp surrounded by trenches. Men were not allowed in.

"My mother and father didn't see each other for seven years," she says. "I carried messages between them. That's how I ended up imprisoned for the first time." When she was 16, she was caught by British soldiers, and thrown into a detention camp. "The conditions were horrible - designed to break people's spirits and self-confidence and instil sufficient fear that they would abandon their struggle." It stank. She slept on the floor and wept. After two days, she was released. She adds: "I will never forget the misery in that camp. There is terrible trauma for everyone from those times." What does she think of the British historians who lyrically laud the British Empire, and say what happened in Kenya was merely a blip? "Well, that is the propaganda we all give to our subjects! They have to do that for them to support these terrible crimes."

It was not only humans who were being cut down. Her forests began to be slashed by the British and replaced with vast commercial plantations growing tea for export. These plantations couldn't absorb and store water in the same way, so the groundwater levels fell to almost nothing, and the local streams dried up. After independence, Kenya's corrupt new ruling class continued the same policies, treating the forests as their private property to be pillaged.

But Maathai was offered a way out, to a place where she could ignore all this. After scoring extremely highly on the national exams, she was granted a place at an American university. It would be fully paid-for by the US Government, as part of a policy introduced by John Kennedy. She was one of thousands of young Africans - including Barack Obama Sr - who became part of "the Kennedy airlift" to study there. At first, "I felt like I had landed on the moon." She remembers getting into her first elevator: "I thought I was going to be pulled apart!" She was shocked to see men and women dancing pressed up against each other and women with relative freedom. She stayed for four years, majoring in biology in Kansas, and "America changed me in every way. I saw the civil rights movement. It changed what I knew about how to be a citizen, how to be a woman, how to live. But I always knew I would go back." Her forests were calling.

When she arrived back in Kenya, she soon became the first woman ever to get a PhD in East or Central Africa. She was a Professor by her mid-20s. But she was paid far less than men in the same position, and the entirely male student body at first refused to take lessons from her in anatomy. "But I showed them who was boss. A failing grade from me counted as much as from any man! That was a language they understood."

She met a young Kenyan politician called Mwangi Maathai, and adored him. She became swept up in his campaign to gain a seat in parliament, and quickly married him - but it soon started to go bad. "When Mwangi won the election, I was so happy for him. I said - what are we going to do now to get jobs for all the people we promised help for? He just said - oh, that was the campaign." She pauses, disgusted still. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He didn't intend to do anything."

She joined a group called the National Council of Women of Kenya, determined to give other people the opportunities she had been given. "Many of the girls I was at school with were back working in the fields and living in huts, and I wanted to help them," she says. When she went out into their areas, she saw the forests had been razed, and malnutrition was rife. She felt helpless and wondered what she could do. "Then it just came to me - why not plant trees? The trees would provide a supply of wood that would enable women to cook nutritious foods. They would also have wood for fencing, and fodder for cattle and goats. The trees would offer shade for humans and animals, protect watersheds and bind the soil, and if they were fruit trees, provide food. They would also heal the land by bringing back birds and small animals and regenerate the vitality of the earth."

She managed to persuade international aid organisations to pay women a very small sum - around 2p - for successfully planting each tree. At first, local men scoffed. What could women do? How could they make trees grow? What did this belong in our traditions? But women were soon organising themselves from village to village into independent committees. "We started by planting trees, but soon we were planting ideas! We were showing women could be an independent force. That they were strong."

But a scandal was waiting that threatened to leave Maathai broken - and broke.

II. Too strong

Mwangi Maathai was jealous of his wife's intellect and expected her to be submissive and obedient. "He wanted me to fake failure and deny my God-given talents. But I wouldn't do it," she says. One morning, he announced he was divorcing her - and it became a national news story. Divorce was, at that time, a huge scandal - and the woman was always blamed. When the case came to open court, it was filled with journalists eager to report on Mwangi's charges that she was an adulterous witch who had caused his high blood pressure and refused to submit to his will. She was, he announced, "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control." The men in the courtroom cheered.

"With every court proceeding, I felt stripped naked before my children, my family and friends. It was a cruel, cruel punishment," Maathai wrote in her autobiography, Unbowed. She adds: "I was being turned into a sacrificial lamb. Anybody who had a grudge against modern, educated and independent women was being given an opportunity to spit on me. I decided to hold my head high, put my shoulders back, and suffer with dignity: I would give every woman and girl reasons to be proud and never regret being educated, successful, and talented."

The judge found in her husband's favour, saying she had been a disgrace as a wife and deserved nothing. A few days later, she criticised the judge in an interview for his sexism - and he ordered she be tossed into prison for contempt of court. "So not only had I lost my husband but I lost my freedom," she says. The other women prisoners were very kind to her: they let her sleep in the middle of the huddle, so she wouldn't be so cold. "Far from beating me down, I felt stronger. I knew I'd done nothing wrong."

When she was released, she decided to run for parliament herself, to demand rights for women. She resigned from the university and announced her candidacy - only for another judge to declare she was ineligible to stand on the false grounds that she hadn't placed herself on the electoral register. The university - also under political pressure - refused to take her back.

Suddenly, "I was 41 years old and I had no job, no money, and I was about to be evicted from my house. I didn't have enough money to feed my children. I remember them wanting chips, and I just couldn't afford it. You never forget the sound of your child crying with hunger." She rubs her head-dress softly and says: "I thought about my mother. She had survived everything life put at her. She had been kept apart from my father for seven years in an emergency village. She always survived."

It was at this personal midnight that she returned to the small seeds she had begun to plant years before. She decided to urge women to plant whole forests. She wanted to see an entire new green belt across Kenya nurtured by women. A grant by the UN Development Programme and the Norwegian Government spurred it on, and she felt herself awakening again - along with the greening land.

Then one day she read about a threat to some of the country's most precious trees. Daniel Arap Moi, the thuggish dictator of Kenya, decided to build over Uhuru Park, the only green space in the capital of Nairobi. He wanted to replace it with a giant skyscraper, some luxury apartments, and a huge golden statue of himself. So she decided to do something you weren't supposed to do in Moi's Kenya: protest. She led large marches to the park, and wrote to the project's international funders, asking if they would happily pay to concrete over Hyde Park or Central Park.

"People said it would make no difference - that you can't make a dictator hear you, he's too strong," she says. "But I was in Japan a few years ago and I heard a story about a hummingbird. There's a huge fire in the forest and all the animals run out to escape. But the hummingbird stays, flying to and from a nearby river carrying water in its beak to put on the fire. The animals laugh and mock this little hummingbird. They say - the fire is so big, you can't do anything. But the hummingbird replies - I'm doing what I can. There is always something we can do. You can always carry a little water in your beak."

But the initial reaction to her protests was frightening. She began to receive anonymous phone calls telling her should shut up or face death. Moi called her a "madwoman," and announced: "According to African traditions, women should respect their men! She has crossed the line!" When she carried on, she was charged with treason - a crime which carried the death penalty - and was slammed away in prison. She had arthritis, and she says: "In that cold, wet cell my joints ached so much I thought I would die." But she would not apologise, or give in. "What other people see as fearlessness is really persistence. Because I am focused on the solution, I don't see the danger. If you only look at the solution, you can defy anyone and appear strong and fearless."

It was only after international protests began to gather - led by then-Senator Al Gore - that an embarrassed Moi had to let her go. She immediately started protesting again. After three years of campaigning against the developers and relentless death-threats, Moi finally relented. He dropped the project. The park was saved. A dictator defeated by a woman? Nothing like it had happened in Kenya before. It was the moment the Moi regime began to die. She says: "People began to think - if one little woman of no significance except her stubbornness can do this, surely the government can be changed."

A great green wave of trees was starting to grow across the country: some 35 million have been planted by her Green Belt Movement. But her confrontation with Moi was not over. As a symbol of resistance, Maathai was contacted by a group of mothers whose sons had disappeared into the prison system, simply for democratically opposing the regime. They believed their sons were being tortured. They were frantic with fear and grief. Maathai realised she could not refuse them. She told them to gather up blanket and mattresses, because they were going to go to Central Nairobi, plant themselves in Moi's vision, and refuse to leave until he released their sons.

On the first night, the police watched anxiously, unsure what to do. Hundreds of people gathered in solidarity. By the third day, there were thousands - and men started to publicly describe how they had been tortured by the police, and weep. "Nothing like it had happened in our country's history before," she says. But then the police swooped in with tear gas and batons. They beat the women hard, and Maathai hardest of all. She was carried away bleeding.

When she had to sign her name at the police station, she dipped her finger in her own blood, pouring from a crack in her head, and scrawled her name with it. The next morning, all the women went back. Maathai was there too, in a neck brace and bandages, insisting she would not be intimidated.

For a second time, Moi relented. There was a sense of shock in the country - the women had won against a Big Man again, using only peaceful political pressure. But there was a third confrontation coming. Moi announced he was going to raze most of the Karura Forest, one of the most precious green areas in Kenya. Again Maathai was there - this time facing down soldiers with machine guns, armed only with a small tree for her to plant. Again, she was beaten, and she nearly died. Again, she won in the end. Moi's rule was finally broken. Within a year, he was chased from office, and Kenya saw its first democratic elections in a generation. Maathai was elected to parliament in a landslide.

III. Death of the rainforests?

Are we in the rich world rendering these victories meaningless? As a scientist, Maathai is warning now that man-made global warming threatens to make the rainforests dry up and die, whatever she does in Kenya. She could save them from Moi - but can she save them from us?

"People don't realise how much they depend for their own survival on this ecosystem and how fragile it is," she says, almost pleading. "The world's forests are its lungs. Thick, healthy strands of indigenous trees absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide and keep them out of the atmosphere. If the Congolese rainforests were entirely destroyed, for example, 135 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would be released - equivalent to more than a decade of man-made emissions. So if we lose these forests, we lose the fight against climate change."

The rainforests can be killed from two directions - by the saws of men like Moi, or the warming gases of people like us. That is why she has left the land she loves, armed with the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 2004, and travelled so far: to try to persuade us to let the forests live. "There are moments in history when humans have to raise their consciousness and see the world anew. This is one of those moments. We are being called to assist the earth in healing her wounds, and in the process we can heal our own. We can revive our sense of belonging to a larger community of life. We can see who we really are."

When I tell her some people say environmentalism is a rich person's luxury without any relevance for the poor, she lets out a low scoff. "The exact opposite is the case! The people who are at greatest risk are poor. When the problems hit, it's them who are going to be hit worst. They have no money to adapt or flee. They still get their water from the rivers. Their agriculture is very dependent on rainfall. They will die first."

If man-made global warming continues at the current rate, she says there will be "catastrophe" in Africa. "First of all there will be a fast spread of the Sahara desert. It is spreading now. So events like what is happening in Darfur will get much worse. There will be violent competition over shrinking arable land, grazing land and water points as the desert spreads and dries up the land. Second, there will be crop failure because of changing rainfall patterns, and we will get massive starvation. What happens then? As we all know, people don't sit down and wait to die. They migrate. They will try to come here to Europe."

As she speaks, I remember the last time I saw the Congolese rainforest. Logging on a large scale had just begun, and the stumps of cut trees were visible everywhere, like stubble on a dry, cracking face. Maathai is a UN Goodwill Ambassador for this rainforest - and says saving it is an "urgent priority for us all. It covers 700,000 square miles. It is a quarter of all the tropical rainforest remaining on earth ... It affects weather patterns all over the world. It hasn't been cut a lot until now because the conflict there means it can't be accessed." But even the cutting down of trees in the Congo Basin that has already happened produced a 35 per cent drop in the amount of rain that falls in the Great Lakes Region of the United States in February.

Does she believe there is a choice between encouraging development and saving the environment? "Not at all," she says quickly. "You don't reduce poverty in a vacuum. You reduce it in an environment. In Kenya, one of our biggest exports is coffee. Where do you grow coffee? You grow coffee in the land. To be able to grow coffee you need rain, you need special kinds of soil that are found on the hillsides, and that means you need to protect that land from soil erosion. You need to make sure they can hold the rain so that it flows as rivers and streams. You need forests to regulate the rainfall. You can't grow anything in a wrecked environment." In reality, "poverty is both a cause and a symptom of environmental degradation. They have to be dealt with together. When you're poor, you will take whatever you can to stay alive today, which degrades the environment, and makes you ever poorer. It's a matter of breaking the cycle. Paying people to plant trees was the best idea I had to break the cycle and it is working."

But it is, she adds, not enough. For the forests - and a recognisable climate - to survive, there needs to be dramatic change on both sides. We in the West need to change our carbon emissions - and Africans, she says, need to change their culture, by rediscovering something that was smashed by colonialism. She says there is a "vacuum" at the heart of Africa - one that needs to be met by radically changing how the continent works.

IV. The Taboo

As she oversaw the mass planting of trees, Maathai steadily realised the ripping up and hacking down of the forests is only a symptom of a much-wider problem - one that was crippling Africa. "The disease remained. What made our leaders treat their own country like it was a colony, not something they were part of? It was the same disease that causes corruption and very bad leadership." There was something wrong in how African societies worked - something so deep and puzzling that she has just written a whole book trying to figure it out, called The Challenge For Africa. She touches on many problems, from global warming to unfair trade policies, but the most intriguing section is one that breaches a taboo about Africa - the fact that most Africans identify not with their country, but with their tribe.

"Colonialism destroyed Africans' cultural and spiritual heritage," she says. "Any culture is accumulated knowledge and wisdom, built up over millennia. It tells you how to live in your environment, how to understand life. All our accumulated knowledge was wiped out in just a few years. It wasn't written down, so it died with our elders. Now it is lost forever." This had many effects: "Before, there was something deep in our culture that made us respect the environment. We didn't look at trees and see timber. We didn't look at elephants and see ivory. It was in our culture to let them be. That was wiped out." Part of her work is trying to restore that lost sense of respect for the ecosystem - one that has been proved essential by science.

But this erasure of African culture also left another wound, one harder still to rectify. "It left us with a terrible lack of self-knowledge. Who are we? This is the most natural question for human beings. What group do I belong to? Where did I come from? We no longer had an answer." They were told to forget what came before. In Kenya when the British invaded, there were 42 different tribes - or "micro-nations", as she prefers to call them, because it removes the taint of "primitivism". These old identities were supposed to be abandoned for an identity that consisted of lines arbitrarily draw on a map by their European killers. "The modern African state is a superficial creation: a loose collection of ethnic communities brought together by the colonial powers," she says. "Most Africans didn't understand or relate to the nations created for them. They remained attached to their micronations."

The result has been "a kind of political schizophrenia. Africans have been obscured from ourselves. It is like we have looked at ourselves through another person's mirror - and seen only cracked reflections and distorted images." They have been told to adopt identities like "Kenyan" that make no sense to them. "It is impossible to speak meaningfully of a South African, Congolese, Kenyan or Zambian culture," she explains. "There are only micronations. But we are still living in denial. We are denying who we are."

The result is that when a leader comes to power, he doesn't try to govern on behalf of his people - and they don't expect him to. He delivers for his own tribe, at the expense of the others. "What they call 'the nation' is a veneer laid over a cultureless state - without values, identity, or character," she says. The mechanism of democratic accountability breaks down: the leader is not expected to serve his people, but only a small fraction of them. Elections consist of different tribes fighting to hijack the state to use in their own interests. The system of winner-takes-all democracy - where you need 50.5 per cent of the vote and get 100 per cent of the power - encourages this, and will never work in Africa, she says.

Maathai believes there is a way out of this - but it is absolutely not to pretend tribes don't exist, or to urge people to simply overcome these identities. "We have been telling people to transcend their micronations for so long, and it hasn't happened. They are urged to shed the identity of their micronations and become citizens of the new modern state, even though no African really knows what the character of that modern state might be beyond a passport and an identity card. It doesn't work." The tribal violence in Kenya last year after the election was, she says, even more proof.

She wants to find another route. Instead of a melting pot that pretends all identities will merge into one, she wants to create a salad bowl - one where every piece is different, but together they form a perfect whole. "Instead of all attempting the impossible task of being the same, we should learn to embrace our diversity," she writes in the book. "African children should be taught that the peoples of their country are different in some ways, but because of Africa's historical legacy, they need to work together ... The different micro-nations would be much more secure and likely to flourish if they accepted who they are and worked together. In my view, Africans have to re-embrace their micronational cultures, languages and values, and then bring the best of them to the table of the nation state."

In addition to conventional parliaments, she says that in each African nation there should be assemblies bringing together all the different tribal groups, modelled on the United Nations. There, they could find common ground, and negotiate areas of disagreement. "It is the only way to heal a psyche wounded by denial of who they really are," she says. Every African should rediscover and feel comfortable in their tribal identity, and feel it is properly represented in the political structures of the state. Only then can they share and live together, she believes. That way, everyone will feel they have a stake in the state all the time - not just when one of their men has managed to seize the reins.

She discovered this sense of calm when, in her forties, she rediscovered her Kikuyu roots. The Kikuyus had regarded the trees and Mount Kikuyu's glaciers as the closest thing they had to a sacred being, something worthy of respect. She too found value there, rather than in the dessicated texts left behind by the colonialists. "When they erased our culture, we were left with a vacuum, and it was filled with the values of the Bible - but that is not the coded values of our people."

But isn't there a danger that you are romanticising past cultures and the equally-irrational beliefs that went with them? Weren't these cultures also committed to keeping women separate and subordinate? Isn't your great achievement to break with the traditional subordination of women? She nods. "Culture is a double-edged sword," she says. "It can be used to strike a blow for empowerment, or to keep down somebody who wants to be different. There are negative aspects to any culture. We should only retain what is good. We were taught for so long that what came before colonialism was all bad. It wasn't. We were told our attachment to the land was primitive and a block on progress. It wasn't. We had a ritual - ituika - through which leaders were accountable to their people and could be changed. And people took what they needed but didn't accumulate or destroy in the process. Those are values we need to rebuild in Africa."

She suddenly leans forward and says: "That is the way we will save the rainforests, and prevent global warming!" She is going to follow this goal with the same feverish intensity that drove her from a mud-hut to the Nobel Prize, and enabled her to stand firm through beatings and imprisonments so she could knock down a dictator. Can will-power and a relentless focus on the solution pull us through the climate crisis as it pulled her through a tyranny?

Before I can ask this, she stands up. "Now I must finish packing. My flight is so soon, and my clothes are all over the room!" In a whirl of bright green, she laughs and limps off through the lobby. She has a slightly pained gait, the result of too many nights sleeping on the floor of damp jail cells. She turns back and waves with a strange bend in her back - as if she is still weighed down, after all this time, by the ghost of that single felled fig tree she failed to save.

"The Challenge For Africa" by Wangari Maathai is published by William Heinemann Limited. To order a copy at the special price of £18, including p&p, call Independent Books Direct on 00448430 600 030

To support or donate to the Green Belt Movement, go to www.greenbeltmovement.org

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read an archive of interviews by Johann Hari - with everyone from Hugo Chavez to Salman Rushdie to Dolly Parton - click here.

Nous sommes en ce moment à la fois tellement proches et cependant désespérément éloignés de pouvoir guérir cette fièvre dont souffre la terre. Les dirigeants du monde, rassemblés hier à New York pour discuter du réchauffement de la planète provoqué par l’homme, sont réunis dans un bâtiment des Nations Unies qui aura bientôt les pieds dans l’eau s’ils échouent. Ils savent tous ce qui va arriver : les scientifiques le leur ont dit clairement et de façon insistante.

Avec un réchauffement climatique atteignant jusqu’à 2,4°C, toutes sortes de choses terribles vont se produire - par exemple, des États iliens du Pacifique Sud seront submergés. Mais nous pouvons y mettre un terme. Si nous stoppons les émissions de gaz à effet de serre, la température se stabilisera. Mais si nous dépassons les 2,4°C, le réchauffement s’emballera, et nous n’aurons plus de bouton « Stop ». La forêt amazonienne va se dessécher et brûler, libérant ainsi tout le carbone stocké dans les arbres. Les énormes quantités de gaz à effet de serre emprisonnés en Arctique seront vomies dans l’atmosphère, et les 3°C se transformeront inéluctablement en 4°C, puis 5°C, et la planète deviendra rapidement un lieu que nous ne reconnaitrons plus.

Pour rester du bon côté de ce point de non retour climatique, les émissions mondiales doivent commencer à diminuer en 2015 - dans à peine six ans - et avoir baissé de 85% en 2050. Nos dirigeants doivent se mettre d’accord lors des pourparlers sur le climat qui auront lieu à Copenhague en décembre. Le débat scientifique est terminé. Les réponses sont connues. De fait, chacun des dirigeants rassemblés à New York pouvait hier ressentir de quoi serait fait cette solution : elle réside dans l’incroyable puissance du soleil.

Chaque jour, le soleil bombarde notre planète avec 9 000 fois plus de puissance que nous n’en avons besoin pour faire rouler toutes les voitures, chauffer toutes les maisons, et alimenter tous les appareils électriques sur la terre. Si nous parvenons à capter ne serait-ce qu’une fraction de 1% de celle-ci, nous pourrions nous débarrasser des combustibles fossiles et la fusion nucléaire appartiendrait à l’histoire. La technologie existe. Elle est là, elle nous attend. Le professeur Anthony Patt a calculé que tous les besoins énergétiques de l’Europe pourrait être couverts par la technologie de concentration de l’énergie solaire sur une surface équivalente à 0,3% du désert du Sahara - de la grandeur de la Belgique. Un consortium de sociétés allemandes est impatient de lancer cette opération. Elles ont juste besoin de fonds. Cela en nécessite beaucoup - 50 milliards de dollars - mais ce n’est rien en regard de ce que coûterait la chasse aux dernières gouttes de pétroles dans des zones ravagées par la guerre, ou ce qui serait nécessaire pour nous protéger d’une crise climatique planétaire.

Chaque continent est face au même choix. Les besoins en énergie de l’ensemble des Etats-Unis pourraient être satisfaits en couvrant 200 kilomètres carrés de ses déserts inhabités avec des installations solaires : le coût serait équivalent à environ 10 ans de facture pétrolière, et permettrait d’éviter les guerres, les tyrannies, ou la montée de l’islamisme. La Chine et l’Inde disposent de solutions similaires. Il est possible d’atteindre ce but, en déployant des efforts aussi grands que ceux qui nous avons accomplis pour vaincre le nazisme. Nous pourrions nous aussi être une grande génération - celle qui allait à sa perte, avant de se rassembler en un grand effort collectif afin de changer de cap. Nous laisserions alors derrière nous une civilisation verte, devenue plus légère, et qui pourra durer des millénaires.

Au lieu de quoi, nos dirigeants continuent de bricoler avec les vieilles technologies sales, trop enfermés et emplis de confusions pour inventer une issue par le haut. En Grande-Bretagne, nous retournons aujourd’hui au charbon, avec une exploitation minière en augmentation de 15% par rapport à l’an dernier. Le professeur Jim Hansen de la Nasa, qui est l’un des climatologues les plus réputés au monde, nomme les centrales au charbon des « usines de mort » qui condamnent des millions d’hommes à la noyade ou à la faim. Toute l’Europe laisse le secteur de l’énergie solaire dépérir : la plus grande entreprise allemande d’énergie solaire, Q-Cells, a vu le cours de son action passer 100 à 10 euros en une année. L’autre leader sur ce marché, l’Espagne, a connu un repli tout aussi désastreux.

La Banque mondiale, qui reçoit 400 millions de livres payés par vos impôts chaque année, assure la promotion de ce futur plein de suie dans le monde entier. Elle vient d’accorder 5 milliards de dollars d’aide aux pays pauvres pour construire les centrales qui provoqueront leur perte. Elle a même financé la principale source d’émissions de gaz à effet de serre sur terre - une centrale au charbon dans l’Etat du Gujarat, à l’ouest de l’Inde.

Comment peut-on décemment défendre une telle position ? Les gouvernements américain et européens ont développé ensemble le fantasme que le charbon pourrait être rendu « propre » en « épurant » le carbone émis par les cheminées, puis en le stockant définitivement quelque part. Dans le monde réel, l’une des plus grandes usines pilotes de « charbon propre » en activité est la centrale électrique d’Hazelwood, située dans la vallée de Latrobe. Les captures représentent seulement 0,05% de ses émissions de carbone. Le professeur Howard Herzog, expert de renom pour cette technologie, a été récemment interrogé sur ce qu’étaient les chances qu’elle permette d’obtenir les réductions dont nous avons besoin. Sa réponse a été : « Zéro ».

Un petit nombre de gens gagnent beaucoup d’argent avec le charbon, le pétrole et le gaz. Une réorientation vers l’énergie fournie par le soleil, le vent et les vagues réduirait à rien les fortunes qu’ils ont dépensé - de sorte qu’ils sont prêts à payer des hommes politiques pour maintenir un système qui est en leur faveur, et à financer somptueusement à coup de milliards des campagnes de désinformation destinées à entretenir la confusion.

C’est aux États-Unis que l’on peut observer le plus nettement ce processus. Barack Obama est un homme extrêmement intelligent, qui a nommé comme conseillers certains parmi les meilleurs scientifiques au monde, chargés de lui expliquer ce va se passer. Mais il est piégé par un système politique plongé dans le pétrole jusqu’au cou. La Chambre des représentants, remplie d’élus serviles, a adopté un projet de loi nommé « Cap and Trade » [1] terriblement inadéquat, qui - si il fonctionnait parfaitement - permettrait de réduire les émissions de six pour cent en dessous des niveaux de 1990. Mais cela n’arrivera pas : pour de nombreuses sociétés pétrolières, les permis d’émissions qu’elles étaient censées acheter, leurs seront désormais donné gratuitement, et ne produiront aucune réduction des émissions. Et il n’est même assuré que ce projet de loi minimaliste soit adopté par le Congrès.

Dans le même temps, la Chine a indiqué qu’elle serait d’accord pour que soient décidées des mesures de réduction plus substantielles à Copenhague si le monde riche - qui est responsable de 90% de tous les gaz à effet de serre répandus dans l’atmosphère jusqu’à présent - accepte de donner un pour cent de son PIB chaque année aux pays pauvres pour qu’ils puissent s’adapter aux combustibles propres. On peut critiquer la dictature chinoise pour de nombreuses choses, mais pas dans ce cas. C’est une demande de simple justice et qui est raisonnable. Les pays pauvres n’ont que très peu de responsabilité dans cette crise, mais ce sont eux qui en ressentiront les pires effets les premiers. Ils méritent que nous les dédommagions. Cependant, l’Union européenne et les États-Unis ont condamné cette proposition pourtant sensée, la qualifiant de « totalement irréaliste ».

Serions-nous donc, en tant qu’espèce, condamnés à sombrer durant cette rupture historique entre un monde tirant son énergie des combustibles fossiles et un monde énergisé par le soleil ? Est-ce que les fossiles découverts dans quelques millions d’années montreront que nous étions tout simplement trop irrationnels et trop primitifs pour faire ce saut ?

Si nous succombons au désespoir et nous contentons d’attendre d’un air maussade que l’effondrement se produise, il en sera ainsi. Ensuite, nous n’aurons plus d’autre choix que d’essayer de survivre le mieux possible dans un paysage radicalement transformé. Mais il existe encore une étroite fenêtre durant laquelle la raison peut l’emporter - et je crois, peut-être déraisonnablement, que c’est encore possible. Il faudra un mouvement de masse mondial d’une ténacité extraordinaire, exerçant partout des pressions sur les gouvernements et submerge les imbéciles du fossile. On peut encore écrire l’histoire du 21ème siècle, pour passer de l’effondrement promis à une histoire où l’espèce invente une façon de vivre avec son écosystème, plutôt que contre lui.

Cela peut être fait. Cela doit être fait. Le sommet de Copenhague se déroulera dans trois mois. A cette occasion, et dans les années qui vont suivre lorsque l’accord sera mis en œuvre, nous allons apprendre quelque chose de profond sur nous-mêmes. Sommes-nous une grande génération - ou la pire de toutes ?

We are - at the same time - thrillingly close and sickeningly far from solving our planetary fever. The world's leaders huddled in New York City yesterday to discuss man-made global warming, in a United Nations building that will soon be underwater if they fail. They all know what has to happen: their scientists have told them, plainly and urgently.

As man-made warming rises up to 2.4 degrees celcius, all sorts of awful things happen - whole island-states in the South Pacific will drown, for example - but we can stop it. If we turn off the warming gases, the temperature will stabilise. But if we go beyond 2.4 degrees, global warming will run away from us, and we will have lost the Stop button. The Amazon rainforest will dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon stored in the trees; the vast amounts of warming gases stored in the Arctic will be belched into the atmosphere; and so three degrees will turn ineluctably to four degrees, which will turn to five degrees, and the planet will rapidly become a place we do not recognize.

To stay the right side of this climatic Point of No Return, global emissions need to start falling by 2015 - just six years from now - and drop by 85 percent by 2050. Our leaders need to agree this at the climate talks in Copenhagen in December. The scientific debate is over. The answer is in sight. Indeed, each one of the leaders could feel the solution on their skin and in their hair yesterday: it lies in the awesome power of the sun.

Each day, the sun bombards our planet with 9000 times more power than we need to run every car, warm every home, and power every electrical appliance on earth. If we can capture just a sliver of one percent of it, we can kick fossil fuels into the melting dustbin of history. The technology exists. It is there, waiting for us. Professor Anthony Patt has shown that all the energy Europe needs could be provided by lining 0.3 percent of the Sahara desert - an area the size of Belgium - with concentrating solar power technology. A consortium of Germany's leading corporations is raring to go. They just need the money. It costs a lot up front - $50bn - but this is nothing like as much we would spend chasing the last dribbles of oil into warzones, and defending ourselves as the planet go into meltdown.

Every continent has the same option. The entire energy needs of the US could be met by covering 200 square kilometres of its empty deserts with solar plants: it would cost about ten years' worth of oil purchases, with none of the wars, tyrannies, or blow-back Islamism. China and India have similar options. It is achievable, with the kind of great effort we made to defeat the Nazis. We too could be a great generation - one that came close to the brink, but then came together in a great collective effort to change course. We would leave a lean, green civilization that will run for millennia.

But instead, our leaders are fiddling with the old dirty technologies, too addicted and too addled to move us on and up. In the US and Britain, we are actually turning back to coal, mining 15 percent more this year than last. Professor Jim Hansen, the head of NASA and the world's leading climatologist, calls coal power-stations "death factories" that condemn millions to drown or starve or burn. Across Europe, solar power is being allowed to wither: Germany's biggest solar company, Q-Cells, has seen its stock fall from 100 euros to 10 euros in a year. The other market-leader, Spain, has seen a similarly disastrous fallback.

The World Bank - which receives $3.7bn of your taxes every year - is promoting this soot-streaked vision across the planet. They have just spent $5bn helping poor countries to build power plants that will destroy them. Indeed, it just bankrolled the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in earth - a coal plant in Gujarat, western India.

How can this possibly be defended? US and European governments are engaged in the collective fantasy that coal can be rendered "clean" by "scrubbing" its carbon emissions from the chimney-stacks, and storing them somewhere forever. In the real world, one of the largest "clean coal" pilot plants in operation, the Latrobe Valley's Hazelwood, catches just 0.05 percent of its carbon emissions. Professor Howard Herzog, the renowned expert on this technology, was recently asked what the chances of the technology achieving the cuts we need is. He replied: "Zero."

But a small number of people make a lot of money on coal and oil and gas. A shift to reaping power from the sun and the wind and the waves would render the rocks and barrels they have spent a fortune mining worthless - so they are prepared to pay politicians to keep the system working in their favour, and lavish billions on misinformation campaigns to keep us confused.

You can see this process working most clearly in the United States. Barack Obama is a highly intelligent man who has appointed some of the best scientists in the world to explain to him what needs to happen now. But he is trapped in a political system soaked in petrol. The lackey-filled House of Representatives has passed a woefully inadequate "Cap and Trade" bill, which - if it worked perfectly - would cut emissions by 6 percent below 1990 levels. Even that won't happen: many of the permits oil companies are supposed to pay for will now be given away for nothing, producing no reductions at all. And even this feeble, sickly bill may not make it through Congress.

Meanwhile, China has hinted it would agree to more substantial restraint at Copenhagen if the rich world - responsible for 90 percent of all the warming gases belched into the atmosphere so far - agrees to give 1 percent of its GDP annually to poor countries to adjust to clean fuels. There's a lot to criticise the Chinese dictatorship for, but this isn't one of them. It's a reasonable request for simple justice. Poor countries have done very little to cause this crisis, but they will feel the worst, first. They deserve our reparations. Yet both the EU and US have damned this sane proposal as "totally unrealistic."

So are we as a species condemned to fall into the historical crack between a world powered by fossil fuels, and one powered by the sun? Will the fossil record discovered millions of years from now show we were just too irrational and too primitive to make that leap?

If we despair and wait glumly for the meltdown, we will make it so. Then we will have little choice but to try to survive as best we can in a radically altered landscape. But there is still a slim window in which sanity can prevail - and I believe, perhaps madly, that it can. It will require a global mass movement of extraordinary tenacity, pressuring governments everywhere, and over-powering the fossil fools. We can still change the tale of the twenty-first century from one of collapse to one of a species finding a way to live with its ecosystem, rather than against it.

It can be done. It must be done. Copenhagen is in three months. There, and in the years after when the deal must be implemented, we will learn something profound about ourselves. Are we a great generation - or the worst of all?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read an archive of Johann's articles about the environment, click here. To read his article about why geo-engineering won't save us, click here, and to read his article about the overpopulation question, click here.