Coping with Copenhagen failure

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 11 and Nell, 8, spent the summer of 2007 travelling around Britain with an eye on their carbon footprint. Now they're home and trying to find ways to get out and about in a carbon lite way. This entry is from Nicola. (pic of girls looking at the UK's only polar bear who lives in Scotland)

My watch has stopped at one minute to midnight on the day I finally realise that the Copenhagen climate talks - in Denmark - have failed.

It takes the Guardian's hope-o-metre of one polar bear (the highest is five) for me to get this, read all about it in 19 December 2009 pieces here. With the world now set to warm up by at least 2 degrees low lying Pacific islands (as in the picture) and the super-flat Maldives, and anywhere with coastal homes/cities is going to be in serious trouble. As a result more than a third of species look set to become extinct.

The next day I wake (after a crap night of borderline sleep) feeling furiously low. The sky may be a beautiful, bright winter blue but it's obvious to me that it's just a picturesque tease. Everything I've loved is at an end: Borders is being sold off, ergo book writing is doomed (or at least the weekend free reading in a warm room with real coffee percolating out of the cafe). My list of complaints include cash crisis (mine, world), lack of paid work (mine, world), worries about food/inadequate stockpiling (me, world)... Pantomime doom and gloom really.

But after a cup of hot black coffee, I pick up a useful sort of a book called 52 ways to change it by life coach Annabel Sutton (website here), flip the pages to allow the text to choose what I read today and the perfect pick me up appears. Here's the quote: "There's no such thing as a wrong decision", which is backed up with calm balm... quoted here from p 17.

"No matter what happens, whichever decision you make it won't be wrong - it will simply result in a different outcome. Either way, there will be new things to learn, new people to meet, new opportunities will open up, and so on."

I'm going to hang on to that, because it makes the idea of the world learning to be more energy efficient, matching climate refugees with their hosts and taking advantage of any new opps a great deal more attractive.

And as Pete points out if the climate deniers turn out to be right (!) all we'll have to put up with is insufferable crowing. We could all live with that.