COP16: Final Day

In Cancun, Mexico the 16th Conference of Parties will today (10/12) come to an end. With little expectation that the conference will create a binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions there is still great hope that significant progress can be made on the issues surrounding global warming and climate change.

Due to the time difference, the rioting and the sheer numbers involved I've been having trouble keeping up to date with the goings on at the summit. So assuming no-one's yet chewed off their own fingers in frustration I should cover some of the things I've either failed to cover fully or not covered at all.

London Riots/Prince Charles. Without blinding everybody with technical detail there are basically two approaches to riot control; containment and dispersal. Dispersal involves using tear gas, water cannon, baton charges etc to break up and disperse a rioting crowd. Containment involves a gathering a rioting crowd into a small space in order to contain the riot and it's potential for damage. Britain's Metropolitan police have always tended to use containment tactics but since the London G20 protests have received increasing public criticism for doing so because the tactic doesn't discriminate between rioters and innocent passers-by. During the December 9th riot the Metropolitan police used both tactics containing part of the crowd with Parliament Square and dispersing the rest away through the streets of London. It was the dispersed group that was able to damage Prince Charles car so the incident is likely to be used to shore up public support for containment tactics.

Egyptian Shark Attack. On December 5th a German tourist was attacked and killed by a shark at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheik. At the time I didn't think anything of it. Then a low level, local Egyptian Mayor claimed that the attack was an Israeli plot to destroy the Egyptian tourist industry and that Mossad had released a specially trained shark into the Red Sea. Although clearly demonstrating the anti-semitism that is routinely used by middle-eastern governments to distract their populations for their own failings this is not as insane as it sounds. Since the attack it has emerged that the shark in question was attracted to the shore because someone in Egypt had been dumping sheep carcasses into the sea which acted as shark bait. Therefore the Mayor may have thought that by spreading the Israel story he was drawing attention away from an Egyptian plot to bring up the issue of changes to the worlds oceans at the COP16. However I've not seen any evidence of Egypt or anyone else pushing the issue of oceans at COP16 so I think it was just an accident caused by someone dumping sheep carcasses into the sea without thinking about the consequences.

Operation Payback. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is currently in prison in the UK awaiting extradition to Sweden answer a Swedish arrest warrant for a sexual offence that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. In response the loose collective of hackers known as "Anonymous" have launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Attacks against the websites and computer systems of American companies such as Mastercard, Visa and Paypal who they accuse of attacking Wikileaks by refusing to handle donations of money to the site. This is a nonsense because the Swiss post office have frozen Wikileaks bank accounts making it impossible for Mastercard, Visa, Paypal or anyone else to handle donations to Wikileaks. As Anonymous played a crucial role in Iran's failed Green Revolution people are now trying to work out if they have spectacularly bad judgement of if they're getting helped by Israel.

Apologises if there's anything important that I haven't covered but the chances are that I haven't heard about it because at the moment it feels like my brain is under DDOS attack.