I Melt With You

Today's Guardian takes a lead on DEFRA's warning that we need to prepare for a catastrophic 4C temperature rise only the day after George Monbiot and Julie Burchill debated on Radio 4's Today programme just how ordinary people are being lectured on the green agenda.

It's hard to avoid the lecture approach when the situation is this dire. In a much softer way it feels like the mid 90s when early adopters of the Web drove through a more commercial internet than the academic/military comms network which had existed before. The man in the street wasn't interested then and certainly wouldn't be lectured on the changes likely to impact his life for the better... and yet now who hasn't got a mobile phone, thinks nothing of texting, updating their Sat Nav over the air and pausing live TV with their Sky Plus or TiVo.

This time, people are being hectored about more life changing events... more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

Elsewhere, I noticed irony-free reporting of the international fight over much easier access to previously unobtainable supplies of oil and gas underneath the ice-cap at the North Pole which is melting due to excessive use of... you guessed it. It's like a Dan Brown.