Well a couple of weeks silence here, not because there is nothing to say, but more because we all needed a chance to re-group and catch our breath and then before we knew it the Solstice and SantaFest were upon us.

Expect some more thoughtful reactions to the Paris outcomes on here in due course and also details and ideas of ways to take things forward. Over the next couple of months we are planning various Report Back events at which we will talk about why we went, what we did, who we met, what happened, and what needs to happen now.

The first of these is in Launceston on Wednesday 30th December at 7pm in the Liberty Suite, Northgate Street. All welcome and there will be three of us there – it is a bit far for Ewan to come over from Somerset and he has a prior engagement.

The headline good news outcome from Paris is of course that governments have finally accepted what Science is telling them – human activity is warming the climate and it is vital (literally) to keep the global rise in temperature as close as possible to 1.5 degrees and certainly less than 2 degrees.

The bad news is that having agreed the What, they made zero progress in agreeing the How. All they could come up with was a vague ambition to limit the rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions at some point in the future – maybe starting in 2020.

Just think about that for a moment – they agreed to limit the rate of increase. That is like being in a car hurtling faster and faster towards a cliff edge with your foot jammed hard on the accelerator and deciding to slightly ease your foot off so that the car doesn’t continue to gain speed as fast. No mention at all of not increasing at all, never mind actually decreasing the speed or using the brakes.

However they have, in effect, given the green light for us to demand that they do apply the brakes – as hard as the science demands. They have recognised the problem and accepted the science, the fact that they can not find a solution that is acceptable to them, a solution that allows economic growth to continue even as the bakes are jammed on, is their failure to understand the consequences of the science. The leaders of governments around the world have just admitted that they are incompetent and unfit to govern. They have signed their own death warrant, it now falls to us to execute that warrant.