As I write this last posting of 2015, the Paris climate change talks progress at the speed our glaciers morph into lakes of their making-by-melting.

And melting they are. Below is a photo taken a year ago on Lake

Tasman in New Zealand’s Mount Cook National Park. Beyond our heads is the cliff-like front of of the Tasman Glacier where huge chunks break off and fall into the lake. For more on this new lake, go to a well-referenced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman Lake. Despite the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, there will be doubting Thomas’s reading this for whom no amount of proof will crack their resolve that mankind’s activities are not causing global warming, or that there is no global warming. But click onto

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

The right end of the graph is an unstoppable erection (“The Engineer’s Song” springs to mind) that is pointing provocatively upwards. But only unstoppable if our doubting John Thomas’s delay through doubt and denial until we’re past the tipping point, approaching frighteningly fast.

Back to the talks in Paris: A Plea to World Leaders

A Time For Greatness in Leaders

Around the world citizens hope and pray that the gathering of world leaders will facilitate a meaningful agreement on an urgently needed action plan to combat global warming. But those same citizens will be expecting rosy words that are no more than shapely sentiments.

It is time to acknowledge that the future has to be different from the past, if our grandchildren are to have a future. It is time for bold leadership that not only stands out through history as Great Leadership, but stands to afford the as yet unborn generation the opportunity to judge it as such.

Some words of encouragement from one of the 20^th century’s Great Leaders, Winston Churchill:

“If the present tries to sit in judgement of the past, it will lose the future.”

So let us not judge the past two decades of delay caused by the climate change deniers, but let us see decisions, very hard decisions, that place human consumption and reward for some, as subservient to the retrieval of a sustainable global environment for all.

“Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.”

So give parents hope that their grandchildren will have a world worth inheriting.

On page 49 of “On My Country and the World” Mikhail Gorbachev wrote: “The present system of economic management based on the pursuit of profits is destroying nature. In the West, measures are being taken to make production safer ecologically. But this occurs only when the system reaches extreme limits, or it happens under pressure from public opinion. In many cases, attempts to “solve” environmental problems are made by exporting harmful production to other countries. Thus, in the final analysis, improving environmental conditions in one place, is accomplished at the expense of worsening the world ecological situation in general.” That was in 1999. What collective global determination has been shown since to address the accelerating deterioration of our shared global environment?

The multi-decade economic norm of prioritising growth of GDP has to be radically changed by International Treaty and International Law. From here, the settings, the goals, the outcomes have to be different – by definition. To allow the same settings of maximising GDP growth and maximising personal material wealth to prevail in the future, does no more than bring forward the end of the future.

End of plea.

Lastly on this climatic note, it has been great to hear that Vanuatu has been one of the most outspoken of the Pacific Island nations. What impact remains to be seen but well done Team Vanuatu.