Jubelirer's blog

Oh wait, he already has. Anyway, if you’re read this far, keep going.

There are many loud voices of dissatisfaction and disappointment regarding the recent UN climate talks in Copenhagen. This was the 15th meeting of the all the countries in the world, called the Conference of Parties (hence COP15). Global warming affects all of us, and literally, the entire world is coming together to tackle the climate crisis. You know how chaotic your own family gatherings can be at the holidays, right? Well, imagine if 5,000 family members all tried to sit at the same table! There is bound to be a lot of frustration and trouble.

I want to provide a perspective that is insightful and illuminating by going beyond the shallow coverage provided by the mainstream media. I will have a more in-depth analysis entitled "What Happened at COP15?" available in January. For now, here's a short summary:

Crossposted from Sustainable Futures

Cross posted from Sustainable Futures

How do you like the creative title of this post – catchy, eh?

Cross-posted from Sustainable Futures

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the convening body of the Copenhagen climate talks. This is the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (meaning countries), so it is called COP15. Right now, there is so much attention focused on these talks that the terms Copenhagen and COP15 are used interchangeably. The actual governmental meeting is COP15 but there are numerous other conferences, events, and gatherings in the city during these 2 weeks.

My trip began appropriately by reading an in-flight publication distributed by COP15. Copenhagen had its first frost-free November in history. There was a wealth of green and climate related advertising in airport. Verizon had an ad featuring sustainability efforts; I have not seen this ad run in US. Church bells ringing 350 times Sunday afternoon roused me from a post-flight recovery nap. Why 350? That is the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (measured in parts per million) beyond which we risk irreversible change. We are already at 378 ppm and rising sharply, so the 350 movement really has a lot to offer.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the largest, most complex collaboration of people working together on a common problem from all over the world. The scientists involved with this work received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work. The IPCC process is not perfect; finalizing all of the findings takes a lot of time and then the final report needs to be reviewed by the respective scientists' home countries. They issued their 4th major report in 2007, which reflected work that was completed a few years prior. In the meantime, many hundreds of papers have been published about human-induced climate change. The next full report is not due out until 2013.

Cross posted from Sustainable Futures

Do we only have fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation, as the Guardian and 56 other newspapers are proclaiming today?

In an unprecedented joint effort, an editorial calling for decisive action in Copenhagen will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. Most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

I am greatly concerned about our society’s inability to grasp the significant threats that global warming poses. Even though there is much positive progress, the overall trend, especially with the Senate’s dithering over real climate change legislation and Copenhagen looking wobbly, is that we aren’t making enough progress fast enough.

Cross posted from Sustainable Marketing Blog

Hardly a day goes by without another consumer research study coming out pronouncing record growth in green markets. You could spend all day just reading press releases touting new consumer insights. It is important to distinguish between surveys that are done more to influence public opinion than to report on public opinion. In the market research field, studies that are commissioned for marketing purposes are sometimes called For Public Release, in that the purpose of the research is to promote something newsworthy about the sponsor’s product or policy. Just because the research is sponsored, however, does not automatically mean it is biased.