Jeremy Leggett: War and skis

Global action is an amalgam of millions of tiny personal initiatives, and sacrifices – so I’m saying farewell to the slopes.

The Intergovernmental Panel’s warning was all across the front pages and TV news this morning. Apparently even the US networks turned up in force to the scientists’ news conference in Paris. For the Guardian’s man on the spot, the graphs said it all. “The words ‘hell’ and ‘handcart’ came to mind,” he wrote. I guess no amount of evidence will ever be persuasive for some of the contrarian contributors to my blog threads. But in the history books of the future, I suspect yesterday will prove to be the day that all reasonable doubt was set aside.

In my last blog entry, I likened the response needed from society to mobilisation for war. A number of contributors have taken issue with that view. Wary of machismo, and having a good few friends who hate militarism in all forms, I have reflected. But as a metaphor, the more I consider it the more it seems appropriate. All of a sudden, we need Spitfires and Lancasters, not racing cars and yachts. We need Churchills, not Chamberlains. Project the impacts of drought on agriculture into the future – not to mention peak oil – and we are going to need rationing, and land armies. To say nothing of the communal can-do, must-do, spirit my parents reminisce about from 1939.

I talk a lot about action, as my more critical contributors point out in that polite manner that blog commentators tend to have. What am I personally doing about it?

Guardian