CARBON MACHINE

What do you call a climate change campaigner sitting on an aeroplane? Sheepish. Especially since this flight to London is one of about 100 I’ve taken this year. I’m a carbon machine. Do I offset? I do. Do I think it matters? I don’t.

My rationalisation goes like this. Once upon a time I was a writer, which meant I stayed at home typing. I liked it. However, 20 years ago I wrote the first book for a general audience on climate change, The End of Nature. It was a bestseller, published in 24 languages – and it didn’t do a damn thing to slow down global warming.

A few years ago I decided it was time to do more. With six college students I organised a day of more than 1,400 rallies across the United States, helping to change Barack Obama’s position on carbon emissions. Now we’re trying to do the same thing worldwide, aiming for the biggest day of global action there’s been. I’m the one moving part, which explains why I’ll be at home for just 10 days between now and the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

From England I’m heading to Scandinavia, then Switzerland, Germany, Turkey, Portugal, the Maldives, India, Egypt, Qatar, and Lebanon. I’ve just come from Australia and New Zealand. It explains why terminal 4 is beginning to feel like my natural habitat.

Which doesn’t mean I can find my hotel tonight. The Novotel Paddington is extremely well hidden in some sleek development that must have been the last one built before the crunch. It’s 11 at night on Tuesday, and I’m wandering past closing restaurants, my suitcase trailing like a faithful dog, and asking directions.

Once there, I turn on the e-mail. Good news – more than 1,000 groups have signed up to join our campaign. The newest entry is from a nation I’ve never heard of: Niue. Google reveals it has 1,444 residents. And a ring of coral reef around the outside. Not a good thing to have in this particular century.

MAGIC NUMBER

As an organiser, as far as I can tell, I need to seek out people who can help to make change. On Wednesday, these include a man who writes the national magazine for church bell-ringers. Why the enthusiasm? Because we want churches around the world to ring their bells 350 times on October 24, our global day of action.

We are called 350.org because 350 is the most important number on earth. Eighteen months ago, after the Arctic melted, scientists published data showing that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million was incompatible with “the planet on which civilisation developed”.

We’re already past that figure, at 389, which makes sense, since the Arctic is melting for the first time in millions of years. So we’re going to take that day in October and make the most important number on earth also the best-known.

350 x 1,000

My next stop is the New Economics Foundation on Thursday. It is one of the keys to our big London action for October 24: a five. That is, it is going to help corral thousands of people to make a giant human figure five. Simultaneously a human figure three will be forming in Delhi, and a zero in Copenhagen. The satellite photos of each will be beamed to the United Nations in New York, where we’ll put them together to make our point: we can’t solve this problem one lightbulb at a time, or even one country at a time.

My final evening in England means meeting Nick Stern at a showing of the (quite wonderful) global warming movie The Age of Stupid. I’m a little nervy about meeting someone whose book on climate change I’ve reviewed the week before, but happily he’s a good writer and a clear thinker. He introduces the film by reminding people it will take strong political action to get anything done. I close by suggesting what form it should take. An organiser is, in essence, a bore – I’ve said the number 350 about 1,000 times today.

And then on to a party with an old pal, Solitaire Townsend, at her Futerra PR operation. She shows me the Ecological Confessions booth they’ve set up for the evening. Apparently she can grant penance for the cloud of carbon I’ve been spewing behind me as I travel.

DANISH BLUE

What do you call a climate campaigner on the early, early flight on a Friday morning to Copenhagen? Sheepish and groggy.

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