There will be a record number of side events at the United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen next month, but one woman’s one-woman show could give the delegates, most of whom will be men, the incentive they really need to agree a new global warming treaty.

In “The Boycott“, Kathryn Blume plays Lyssa, First Lady of the United States and climate crusader.  Loosely borrowing from a play from ancient Greece, Lyssa launches a nationwide sex strike to fight global warming. As the play unfolds, Lyssa is forced to take on her indifferent husband, a hostile press and a romantic rival who’s not only in bed with the President, but with the oil industry as well.

Blume is co-founder of the Lysistrata Project, named after the Aristophanean comedy on which The Boycott is based.  Originally performed in ancient Athens in 411 BC, Lysistrata tells the tale of one woman’s attempt to end the Peloponnesian War by convincing all women to withhold bedroom privileges from their husbands.

“I’m an obscure solo performer from Vermont … And I’m in a chronic, weepy panic over the fact that serious climate change is happening now and while the whole point of this piece is to help save the world, I’m afraid it’s already too late,” Blume writes on her website.

Blume will perform her play in Copenhagen at 8pm on Thursday, Dec. 10 at Klimaforum09, a parallel “people’s” climate change summit featuring live debate, art, music and film.

More than 20,000 people will congregate in the Danish capital between Dec. 7-18 as government officials from nearly 200 countries try negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.

Ahead of a U.N. summit in Copenhagen next month, scepticism is growing that an agreement will be reached on a global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012.

The protocol set targets aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which are believed to be responsible for the gradual rise in the Earth's average temperature. Many scientists say that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is key to preventing climate change.

But authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argue in their new book SuperFreakonomics that humanity can take an alternative route to try and save the planet.

"If the goal is to stop warming then geo-engineering solutions are worth considering because they are far cheaper, probably much more do-able and easily reversible," Dubner told Reuters before a talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Related vlog: How to become a freakonomist

GPS markers usually pinpoint a spot on the earth’s surface to help everything from map-making to navigation.

This one (left) spectacularly didn’t.

In fact, it wandered hundreds of miles (km) this year on an iceberg, blown by winds or carried by ocean currents in huge pirouettes off the coast of Antarctica.

When glaciologist David Vaughan (above) of the British Antarctic Survey stuck the pole holding the GPS (global positioning system) tracking device into the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica in January, the ice felt solid as rock.

Stuart McDill of Reuters TV and I had landed with him in a small plane mounted with skis on a 40-km-long floating ice bridge which had been in place probably for thousands and thousands of years. But it was weakening and about to snap in what Vaughan said was a sign of global warming.

We didn’t stay long.

The GPS marker was meant to transmit its position to satellites to help monitor movements in the ice shelf — up to about 250 metres thick — to measure the strains before it finally cracked up. The ice bridge shattered in April and collapsed into a swarm of icebergs.

But surprisingly, the GPS kept on going for months — broadcasting its position as a lone metal spike that may have puzzled passing penguins or the odd whale. The diagram above shows where it began (near top right by Charcot Island and then southwest until its last transmission on Aug. 30. No one knows its fate - maybe the batteries gave out or its iceberg cracked up.

The GPS did far better than planned. Vaughan had been convinced that the GPS, set up for Michiel van den Broeke of Utrecht University and colleagues, was not going to work at all. After he set it up, it went “beep beep beep” to signal that it was OK but then fell silent.

We all thought it had failed; we didn’t know that it was programmed to beep only briefly to show that it worked — too many beeps would have drained the batteries.

(Picture: REUTERS/Alister Doyle, diagram: Roderik van de Wal, Utrecht University, Matthias Braun, Bonn University) 

Scientists argue that rich nations must make drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. The way energy is used, priced and created would have to change in order to institute these cuts.

Ahead of elections in Britain, which must be held before June 2010, Dave Timms of Friends of the Earth shared his thoughts with Reuters on what the group thinks the next government needs to do in order to build a low-carbon economy.

While the world gets ready for December’s climate meeting in Copenhagen, a group of native Arctic women traveled to Washington this week to talk about what climate change is doing right now in places like Arctic Village, Alaska, and Whitehorse, in Canada’s Yukon.

Five of the women talked emotionally about how much harder it is to hunt for traditional game animals like caribou in a time of global warming, and how important these traditional foods are to their culture and health. They also took aim at some of Sarah Palin’s statements, especially her push for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.

Watch below as Norma Kassi, a member of the Gwich’in nation — sometimes translated as “People of the Caribou” — talks about her practices as a hunter, and her take on Palin and her “drill baby drill” strategy. (It’s a fairly long video; her comments on Palin start about halfway through):

Now watch Sarah James, of Arctic Village, talk about the plain fact that “Western” fare like pizza, meatloaf and fast food simply can’t satisfy her son like a soothing caribou soup:

Kassi, James and other members of the Arctic delegation are telling their story on Capitol Hill and to members of the Obama administration. Some are planning to attend the Copenhagen conference, despite dampening hopes of a major agreement from that gathering.

They have an invitation for President Barack Obama: they’d like him to visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge next year, the 50th anniversary of this far-north protected area where caribou herds have their calves and where some energy companies have hoped to drill.

Video credits: REUTERS/Deborah Zabarenko (Washington, November 11, 2009)

Photo credit: REUTERS/Nathaniel Wilder (Sarah Palin outside the Mocha Moose Espresso after voting in Wasilla, Alaska, November 4, 2008)

Papa Hemingway probably didn’t see this coming.

When he wrote “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway described the summit of that African mountain as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”

It’s still wide, but may not be white much longer, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that says the remaining ice fields atop Kilimanjaro in Tanzania could be gone in 20 years or less, a casualty of climate change. Changes in clouds and precipitation play a minor role but the scientists say it’s mostly due to global warming.

Here’s the trail of data released by the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research:

– 85 percent of the ice that covered the mountain in 1912 had been lost by 2007, and 26 percent of the ice there in 2000 is now gone.

– A radioactive signal marking the 1951-52 “Ivy” atomic tests that was detected in 2000 some 1.6 meters (5.25 feet) below the surface of the Kilimanjaro ice is now lost, with an estimated 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) missing from the tops of the current ice fields.

– Elongated bubbles trapped in the frozen ice at the top of one ice core show surface ice melted and refroze, apparently the only time there’s been sustained melting in this core in the last 11,700 years.

– Even a 300-year-old drought some 4,200 years ago didn’t melt the ice, though it did leave an inch-thick layer of dust.

These observations confirm that the current climate conditions at Mount Kilimanjaro are unique over the last 11 millennia. The same changes are happening on Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains in Africa, in the South American Andes and in the Himalayas.

Read more about it here.

Might be something for climate negotiators in Barcelona and on Capitol Hill to think about.

Photo credit: Lonnie Thompson, Ohio State University (Ice fields atop Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro glow golden in the last of the afternoon sun.)

The headline in the Gulf News English language daily reads 'UAE tops world on per capita carbon footprint'.

For a place so reliably bathed in sunlight, the Dubai property explosion seems to have generated enough construction noise to drown out the environmental debate raging elsewhere in the world.

For the first-time visitor, the scale of the global construction superlatives - The Palm, made from reclaimed land jutting out defiantly into the Gulf, the skyscrapers built in a region where there is no shortage of space - is staggering.

The amount of environmentally 'sinfull' concrete poured over the last decade is ncalculable. Billboards lauding the benefits of solar power look like a bit of an after thought.

Climate change was just beginning to take hold as an issue for property developers when the economic downturn struck and put paid to nascent environmental ambitions.  "Green is not cheap," says Markus Giebel, chief executive of Dubai property group Deyaar Development. "Dubai was on the right track, but there's no money now. People are thinking about survival."

Remember the Christian Coalition of America?

Under the political operative Ralph Reed in the 1990s it was an electoral force to be reckoned with as it mobilized millions of conservative Christians to vote for mostly Republican Party candidates and causes.

It has since lost influence and political ground to other "religious right" groups such as the Family Research Council. But it remains a sizeable grassroots organization and is still unflinchingly conservative.

So it will no doubt surprise some to see that this week it has joined with the National Wildlife Federation -- whose 4 million members and supporters includes 420,000 sportsmen and women -- to run an ad urging the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that among other things addresses the pressing problem of climate change.

"Defending the status quo is no longer an option. We need swift action
to ensure America is the world leader in clean energy technology.
We can put Americans to work making and installing the clean,
renewable energy technologies that reduce our dependency on
foreign oil and address climate change.
Senators should work together to move forward with a clean energy plan for America," says the ad, which ran this week in Politico.

It comes as the U.S. Senate considers a bill to curb the greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

Other U.S. Christian groups and prominent evangelicals such as Florida mega-pastor Joel Hunter have urged action on climate change -- a top priority of President Barack Obama -- on the grounds that the poor will bear the brunt of warming temperatures. They also see a biblical responsibility to care for God's creations.

(PHOTO: Vanishing Arctic Sea ice is one of the most visible signs of global warming. REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

But influential conservative Christians such as Richard land of the Southern Baptist Convention have spent the past months assailing the cap and trade provisions of the bill as a massive tax hike. In many religious right circles the climate change issue is seen as downright hysterical or an attempt by leftists to cripple the U.S. economy.

But even the most hard-line conservative Christians are no longer united on this issue.

Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican Senator from South Carolina, broke ranks with his party and recently outlined a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a New York Times op-ed piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry.

That won him praise from national hunting groups and local ones in his home state, which has a robust shooting and fishing culture woven into its rural fabric.

We have recently blogged and written on U.S. hunters and anglers -- many of whom are evangelical Christian, conservative and Republican -- urging action on climate change, not least because of its threat to the game they pursue.

Roberta Combs, the president of the Christian Coalition, told me in a telephone interview that her group joined forces with the NWF on this issue because it saw a biblical need to look after God's creation. But she said it also wants America to pursue alternative energy policies to reduce its independence on foreign oil including expanding its use of nuclear power -- a stance sure to make many greens see red.

"We don’t agree with environmental groups on everything but if we can find things we agree on this will be a better bill…I’m real proud of Senator Graham. He’s a man of lots of wisdom,” she said.

Republicans are mostly skeptical of any move to "cap and trade" U.S. carbon emissions that result from burning coal and oil, decrying it as a massive job-killing tax by forcing the use of more expensive wind and solar power.

But a big chunk of their base seems to be parting company with them on this issue though climate change skepticism still runs deep in the U.S. heartland.

According to a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday, 36 percent of Americans say global warming is a result of human activity, down from 47 percent in April 2008.

Some politicians are mentioning “Copenhagen” and “Doha” in the same breath — a worrying lament less than 2 months to go before a U.N. climate deal is meant to be wrapped up in the Danish capital.

So is there a risk – if negotiators are not smart — that the new U.N. accord to fight global warming will stall like the long-running Doha round on freeing world trade, launched in 2001?

India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, for instance, said on Oct. 10 that negotiators should aim for a realistic agreement in Copenhagen from Dec. 7-18 that was not too ambitious. He said there was a risk of repeating the “mistake of the Doha round”, saying that “the basic problem of the Doha round was ‘all or nothing’.”

And British Finance Minister Alistair Darling said on Oct. 21 that he wanted to ensure that the climate talks do not keep dragging on like the Doha round.

The WWF environmental group says there’s a lack of leadership in the run-up to Copenhagen, with a rise in whispered suggestions that the talks might fail.

One week of formal climate negotiations remains before Copenhagen, in Barcelona from Nov. 2-6, after almost two years of meetings.

“The world doesn’t want Copenhagen to come to mean another Doha,” said Kim Carstensen, head of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative.

Talks on the existing Kyoto Protocol for curbing emissions, agreed in Japan in December 1997 also often looked bleak in the run-up, especially after the U.S. Senate voted that year by 95-0 against some of the basic principles of an accord. 

WWF accused industrialised nations of trying to lower expectations for a deal “as they continue to dodge the hard decisions on slashing their emissions and funding the transition to a low carbon economy.”

So will Copenhagen echo Doha?

((Picture: Top: Smoke rises out of a cement plant in Baokang, Hubei province September 12, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer. Right: A Qatari security policeman guards the WTO conference centre during the 2001 conference in Doha. REUTERS/Nayef Hashlamoun))

While solar power has investors on Wall Street seeing green, countries in the developing world also see a bright future in solar technology.

They believe solar power systems that convert sunlight into electricity can help power developing areas without going the route of dirty coal-fired power plants.

Solar companies like China’s solar panel maker Suntech and California-based eSolar, have recently announced forays into the developing world.

Suntech is teaming up with Pakistan’s alternative energy development board, which the company’s chairman and chief executive Zhengrong Shi called “a clear example of the promise of solar energy.”

Solar thermal company eSolar said last week that it is expanding in Africa and earlier this year it partnered with an Indian company to build solar power plants in India over the next 10 years.

And a $400 billion euro plan is gaining steam to power Europe with Sahara sunlight, despite critics.

Today’s top solar market — and lots of profits — are found in Germany while the United States and China are fast-growing alternative energy sectors. Will countries like South Africa join their ranks one day? How will countries and governments make good on the promise of solar energy for the developing world?

Photo: Workers build a thermo-solar power plant in Beni Mathar August 20, 2009. Photo credit:REUTERS/Rafael Marchante