Bad Climate Camp! Naughty Climate Camp!

To the suprise of no-one except me the Climate Campers have set up their camp almost two days early in the very early hours of Thursday August 18th. This annoys me because I was planning on them being a day late. The camp has been set up at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) headquarters in Gogarburn Gardens (E12 9BH) just outside Edinburgh, Scotland.

It is important to understand that the camp has not been set up near to the RBS HQ or in a field overlooking the RBS HQ. It is actually within the grounds of the RBS HQ. Obviously this means that it has been set up on private property so RBS can evict it just as soon as a court date becomes available. This isn't expected to happen until Tuesday August 24th when the camp is scheduled to come to an end anyway. Therefore RBS probably won't bother and instead try and make some money by renting out parts of the HQ to police to set up the inevitable observation posts. Likewise Edingburgh council, who were informed of the camps location in advance by the campers, are being co-operative even offering to connect the camp to the mains water supply. They're doing this because they're hoping they'll win a prize from the state by using the Climate Camp as a practice session for the upcoming Dale Farm eviction. Dale Farm is a long standing Gyspy/Traveller site in Basildon, Essex which is actually owned by some of the Travellers who live there. As sort of a first wave of Britain's ConDem government's class war Dale Farm is expected to be evicted very soon. If previous attempts to evict Traveller sites of this size and scale are anything to go by the Dale Farm eviction will be very difficult and could actually fail.

Despite this apparent lack of activist credentials we shouldn't mock the Climate Camp for too long. After all the Brits plan was for the entire movement to die a gruesome death in a South London field at around this time last year. Their escape from the grave has not been made any easier by the fact that 2010 is a complicated year for both the science and politics of global warming/climate change.

While both global warming and climate change have both, indisputably taken place there is still an argument over what has caused them. Some people, me included, think that it is the result of humans releasing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the earths atmosphere increasing the amount of the sun's energy that gets trapped on the earth's surface. Other people, mainly oil companies, think it is the result of an increase in the amount of energy being released by the sun due to natural solar cycles. In mid-2008 the high point in this natural solar cycle came to an end and global temperatures accordingly dropped dramatically. In 2009 the solar cycle remained more or less constant giving scientists a unique opportunity to examine the effect it has on global temperatures. If global warming was purely due to increased solar cycles then in 2009 you would expect to see global temperatures to continue to fall as excess heat continued to leave the earth. However if global warming is the result of greenhouse gas emissions then in 2009 you would expect to see global temperatures to either stabilise or possibly even begin to rise again slightly.

As always in science a single set of data is going to be inconclusive. However the fact that the people who have access to this data seem to be in no hurry to release it would suggest that the trend has not gone the way that supporters of the solar cycle theory would have hoped.

Going back to the Climate Camp itself it is located close to Edinburgh airport and is literally a stones throw away from the RBS HQ so has plenty of potential targets for direct action. However it is also located close to Edinburgh itself which is currently hosting the World famous Edinburgh Arts festival along with the highly fashionable Edinburgh Fringe festival. Therefore I expect this years Climate Camp to be more of a social event then an activist event. That really should be quite a lot of fun providing the participants remember where they are.