Hi all,

The first Manchester Climate Monthly (dead tree format) hit the streets last week. Feedback is very welcome… And you can deliver it face-to-face if you like. We will be at Nexus Art Cafe, Dale St, in the Northern Quarter from 3.30pm on Sunday 15th January, if you want to come have a chat, tell us what you think of MCFly, maybe even get involved…

Please encourage your climate-concerned friends to take out a (free!!) subscription – via our subscribe page. Here’s a 40 second video explaining the top ten reasons folks should subscribe…
And follow us on twitter (@mcr_climate).

Coming up this week
On Tuesday a committee of councillors will approve the Biodiversity Action Plan. On Wednesday evening there’s a film showing in Chorlton of “No Impact Man” (see MCFly calendar for details)
Friday 13th may decide whether the solar feed-in tarriff gets uncut or not… (Business Green)

MCFly stories you may have missed
Off to a Flying Start #2 – the Council’s flying habits…
Keeping up with bee-keeping, a piece by our new volunteer Roisin Weintraub

New and updated pages on our website
Our jobs pages – we have simple and quick, complex and quick, simple and lengthy and complex and lengthy jobs all waiting for volunteers…

Lessons we like to believe we’ve learnt this week
Read through the print edition thoroughly. Have you conflated/failed to edit out questions, leaving someone who doesn’t want to acknowledge a whole bunch of very awkward questions an opportunity for synthetic outrage? If so, shame on you.

Grab the money and run
If you can make a mobile phone app, the World Bank may have some money for you… (see our post from Sunday 8th)

Submissions are sought for a new book about climate and race/class/gender

See also our non-MCFly competitions page

Local and Regional News
Jan 5 According to Insider “Sustainable energy company ENER-G has secured a £30m funding line to help finance its international expansion. The deal with Barclays Corporate includes a £15m term loan and a £15m revolving credit facility.”

National News
Jan 3 Old bangers (and we don’t just mean certain MCFly readers) are going to be charged £100 a day for coming into London’s Congestion Charging zone, if they don’t clean up their acts.

Global News
Douglas Fischer of the Daily Climate reports that “Media coverage of climate change continued to tumble in 2011, declining roughly 20 percent from 2010′s levels and nearly 42 percent from 2009′s peak, according to analysis of DailyClimate.org’s archive of global media.”

Reading
An (non-denialist) American conservative’s take on climate change

Carbon Emissions? Boo, hiss!! Energy Savings Trust blog on panto and energy saving…

George Monbiot on the Durban climate talks

Cities Journal, Vol 28, Issue 6 is all about low carbon cities

‘Having a choice’ plays a critical role within processes of adjustment and change. It involves the assessment and judgement of different options, and the skills necessary to make a decision among alternatives that have a positive value. Thus, choices have profound implications in the ability of individuals, communities and even nations to cope with and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
This new post argues that the severity of climatic impacts is posing the need to re-think the way in which alternative courses of action
can be created, fostered and implemented in order to reduce vulnerability, particularly within developing contexts.
Given the widespread diffusion and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones, radio and Internet-based applications, the post argues that these tools could be changing the way in which choices emerge and are implemented within vulnerable contexts affected by climate change. Practical examples are provided, and the potential of ICTs is explored in three key areas:
enabling choices, exploring and evaluating choices, and enacting
choices.
To read more and to comment please visit:
http://niccd.wordpress.com/

The deeply disturbing Bank of Natural Capital

Watching
Brilliant (as ever) Climate Denial Crock of the Week by Peter Sinclair

Apology
It seems like apologies are in order. One will definitely happen, because it’s coming from MCFly. The other(s)? Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

In our first print edition, Jan 2012 we stated, among other things, that we had asked the Steering Group for an explanation for the cancellation of the 2011 “annual” stakeholder conference and not had a reply. As readers of the blog these last two months will have known, this was false. We have indeed had the official line that it was a better fit for Climate Week 2012 (coming sooner than you think, btw). Our specific statement was wrong, and our responsibility, and we are aware that many people will not have read our previous blog posts, or indeed have heard of the Steering Group before our article (not that this is our fault). We note that our offending article also stated that we have asked repeatedly about the upcoming (?) “annual” stakeholder conference (the one that should have been held in 2011) and received no answers. That statement was not challenged, because it, um, was true.

The Steering Group can have a print apology when apologies for the following appear on the manchesterclimate.com website;
1) Failing to consult stakeholders about cancelling what is, after all, their conference in 2011.
2) Failing to make an official announcement on their website about the cancellation of the 2011 conference.
3) Failing to put up any details about the outcomes of the 2010 conference on the official manchesterclimate.com website or in fact have more than 5 or 6 posts on the site through an entire year.
4) Failing to contact the MCFly reader who stated that he had asked to attend the 2010 conference and had never heard back to a) apologise and b) investigate it so it doesn’t happen again.
5) Failing to publish minutes of its meetings on its website – a commitment under its Terms of Reference. Incidentally, we are STILL waitng for the “action points”, despite having asked for them repeatedly.
6) Failing to KEEP any minutes of its meetings, in flagrant and extraordinary breach of its Terms of Referenece and of basic common sense.
7) Cancelling elections to the Stakeholder Steering Group.
8) Failing to set up any “devil’s advocate” sub-group to challenge the convenient belief that it would be incredibly difficult to hold elections.
9) Failing to set up any “devil’s advocate” sub-group to look at how cancelling elections – the sort of thing that Stalinists are fond of doing – might be a bit well, Stalinist.
10) Failing to publicise the opportunity to join the Stakeholder Steering Group more broadly
(We could go on – at length – but ten is a nice round number)

Not quite so Scary Science
Prof David Archer has crunched the numbers and thinks that the methane in the “perma”frost won’t kill us. No, that privilege will be left to the garden variety carbon dioxide we’re emitting…