The devil's ultimate conundrum

How do you campaign on an issue like climate which requires the long view and can be complicated?

I bumped into an old BBC news colleague on a Climate Rush [1] bicycle event a fortnight ago.

More than 500 cyclists gathered outside Chatham House at a coal industry conference before spending a crazy two hours [2] whizzing around central London taking in international climate criminal sites.

He was there with his wife and children and I was talking to him about the difficulty of campaigning on what for many, is still an abstract, long term issue. This is how I put it:

"If the devil wanted to give humanity the ultimate conundrum, it would be about invisible gases, allegedly affecting people on the other side of the world at a time in the future we can't be sure of. And by the time we get our head around that and begin to take urgent action, such is the built-in momentum on the climate system in terms of global heating, that runaway climate change will be impossible to stop."

Now he asked me where the quote came from and I know I read it in a book in the last twelve months, but then I have read so many times now on climate change, so a challenge for you:

a) Think and meditative on this. Is it true?

b) Source the quotation and send it to us. We’ll get it back to BBC news.

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(c) Mark Dowd is campaign strategist for Operation Noah (www.operationnoah.org [3]). He is well-known for his TV documentaries on the environment and other issues.

This is one of a series of reflections Mark (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/search/node/mark+dowd [4]), political economist Ann Pettifor and others are writing for Ekklesia in the run-up to the Copenhagen Conference (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/tags/6711 [5]) in December 2009.

Learn more about the ARK Campaign and send Gordon Brown an origami ARK at www.operationnoah.org [6].

Church Action Starter Pack for climate change is here [7]

Follow Operation Noah on Twitter: www.twitter.com/noahandhisark [8]

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Keywords: climate rush [17] | operation noah [17]

[18]This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License [19]. Although the views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of Ekklesia, the article may reflect Ekklesia's values. If you use Ekklesia's news briefings please consider making a donation to sponsor Ekklesia's work here [20].