I did not see the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland at the UN yesterday, but he provides this interesting and mostly accurate account of the first attempts by the Security Council to integrate climate change threats into its security mandate: “Yesterday’s debate is a sign that this penny is beginning to drop. Maybe not in Russia, whose UN ambassador warned against overdramatisating the problem of global warming, nor in the White House, which offered the security council an empty statement yesterday, in keeping with the Bush administration’s shaming record of denial. Still, and in defiance of all that, two US senators, Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrat Dick Durbin, have tabled a bill that would demand all US agencies come together to produce a national intelligence estimate of the threat of climate change. Such exercises were once reserved for the Soviet nuclear arsenal or the state of the Middle East.

These changes matter. The big powers know how to put out fires when they want to. Now they just have to realise they are facing a blaze larger than any of us have ever seen – and one that could engulf us all.”

High Risk

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