Scorched

Day 5: Survival of the fittest

Friday, December 11th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

11 Dec 2009
Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

I’m tempted to have a t-shirt printed saying “I survived CoP15 – week one”. But there are two problems with this: a) it might be a bit premature (technically, this weekend still constitutes the first week, and tomorrow’s jam-packed with stuff happening, including a possible interview with Wangari Maathai) and b) not many people will know what CoP15 even means, so the boast will fall a bit flat! › Continue reading

Day 4: Slow news and rain-slicked streets

Thursday, December 10th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

10 Dec 2009
Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

People talk about their country’s weather the way fishermen talk about that “big” catch – it’s always more impressive in the storytelling. I strolled back to my digs through the glistening streets of a rainy Copenhagen-by-night, thinking how the weather’s been far less impressive than we were warned about.

Either Copenhagen’s winter clime is milder than the storytellers would have us believe, or climate change has arrived here. Most sources will tell you that the average winter temperature here is zero degrees – but the mercury has hovered constantly between maximums and minimums of about 4°C to 7°C. › Continue reading

Day 3: Too smart to fix the problem?

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

9 Dec 2009
Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

Blink… blink… blink…

There’s nothing more judgemental than the winking curser on a blank computer screen when you need to put some profound scribbles down on that page. It’s not writer’s block that’s stopping the flow. Nope, it’s something a more paralysing.

It’s a profound sense of impotence in the face of a global crisis as massive as climate change. This week the climate conference heard that observed environmental change as a result of rising temperatures is happening much faster than was expected. And yet, in spite of this, and in spite of the fact that we have most of the solutions we need to begin fixing things, we can’t seem to resolve the matter… and the main reason is greed and insecurity. › Continue reading

Day 2: Big carbon, and crunch time

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

8 Dec

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

The tick… tick… tick-tick-tick-tick…tick… tick… of the central heating woke me at some unholy hour this morning.

I reached for my cellphone in the gloomy artificial light that cut through the blinds from the street outside: 2:34am glared up at me from the phone’s screen.

“Blast.”

But in the three hours of sleeplessness that followed, I lay under the thin duvet listening to the building creak and clatter its way towards the frigid Nordic dawn, and I pondered the very point that this old building was making, inadvertently or not: that for modern society to have thrived as such high latitudes, in such cold places, as those seen in parts of northern Europe, Asia, the US and Canada, you need loads of energy. › Continue reading

Day 1: What’s the end-game going to be?

Monday, December 7th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

7 Dec 2009
Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from Copenhagen on the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

“What do you expect to come out of Copenhagen?” the German TV reporter said, stabbing his mike at the guy behind me in the queue.

It was way too early for the blinding light of the camera, let alone a question like that. (Actually, it was 7:30am already, but with the mist still rolling about us in the Scandinavian winter, and sunrise still a good hour or so away, it felt too early to be out of bed, let alone faced with a question like that.)

But the truth is, that’s what everyone’s asking: what’s going to come out of Copenhagen? › Continue reading

CLIMATE CHANGE: Fears Forest Proposals Are ‘Human Rights Disaster’

Thursday, November 26th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

By Leonie Joubert

COPENHAGEN, Nov 26 (IPS) – The clean, ultra-modern chrome and glass lines of the Bella Centre, in the Danish capital Copenhagen, is a world away from the thronging canopy suspended over the tropical forests of Uganda, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Cameroon.

But it’s here in Scandinavia, in the shadow of the spinning blades of the convention centre’s wind turbine, that the foundation for an international law governing greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution will be thrashed out this December. The agreement, if it is reached, could determine how the forests of Africa are managed in decades to come, and whether or not local communities will benefit from it. › Continue reading

Environmental Journalist of the Year

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

Leonie Joubert, a science writer and associate of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University, has been named the SAB Environmental Journalist of the Year in the print and internet category for two books she authored on climate change and invasive species.

 The SAB Environmental Journalists Awards have become South Africa’s most prestigious accolade for journalists producing crucial environmental coverage.

Read more…  

“Invaded” on 702

Monday, August 24th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

Interview with Jenny Crwys-Williams, from 702, on Monday,  24 August, to talk about “Invaded: the biological invasion of South Africa”.

Download the podcast here.

Handling the climate deniers (WFSJ)

Sunday, August 9th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

It was one of those bombshells that sucks the conversation from the room.

“But now new studies say that climate change is part of a natural phenomenon,” a financial journalist hammered out in an email to me recently. There was a hint of a question mark at the end of the statement.

“Oh? Um… could you point me to the report you’re referring to, please?” I shot back, curious.

Sure enough, the source of this information was a column written in the financial magazine FinWeek by a retired newspaperman with decades of journalism under his belt. But he’d been reeled in by one of those dissident polemics about how climate change isn’t caused by humans (in this case, Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth).

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The big carbon conundrum (M&G)

Friday, July 10th, 2009 | uncategorized | No Comments

There’s something incongruous about the fact that Denmark is hosting this year’s United Nations Climate Summit in December.

Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from wind and, until recently, was the world’s biggest exporter of wind power technology. But its other “big export” is political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, one of the most prominent climate “sceptics”, who claims that global warming isn’t nearly as bad as some would have us believe.

› Continue reading