the land of the past

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On channel 4 uk time team there was a brill program on the past land which once joined uk to holland and europe ,what was so brill about this if you watch it it tells you the history of our planet around 12000 years ago and more ,it states there as always is change in our enviorement and the sea will rise and fall not due to global warming but the earth always goes up and down with its weather history ,so folks watch this its brill and we once lived in the north sea 12000 years plus ago .
So global warming yes not man made no just watch a volcanoe like st helens blow and change our weather for 2 years ,man makes heat yes but thats not the problem ,the problem is man steals the rainforest for greed and grows crops on the land for 4 years and after that the stolen soil of the forest dies ,that is the main problem for our future ,why because the forest is our lugs without it we dont breath .
Find this and watch it .
Axes at bottom of sea rewrite history
A cook was the toast of the archaeological world last night for his discoveries of prehistoric axes that have rewritten the history of Britain.
( 0 ) Related Tags:The NetherlandsaxesLondonBritish Museumhistory
Jan Meulmeester - who has won the best discovery category at the British Archaeological Awards - took time off from his job at a care home in Holland to indulge his interest in fossil hunting.

But instead of fossils he found the axes - dozens of them, buried in mud dredged from the bottom of the North Sea.

It took three months of arduous work to uncover the pristine axes. 'When you have a certain passion for something, you don't care about mud,' Mr Meulmeester, 56, said last night as he was given his prize at the British Museum in his first ever trip to London.

Mr Meulmeester was given permission by the dredging company to search through the gravel, raked from the sea 13km (eight miles) off Great Yarmouth in Norfolk when it was brought into the port of Flushing, near where he lives in Holland. The axes could be as much as 500,000 years old.
They show that parts of the North Sea were once dry land and that England was occupied by humans far earlier than anyone had previously thought.

Phil Harding, of Channel 4's Time Team programme, said: 'Although we don't yet know their precise date, we can say that these hand-axes are the single most important find of Ice Age material from below the North

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during the miners strike in the uk the goverment was bought down the first strike did this ,but thatcher came to power in the uk and vowed to destroy the labour party and destroy the miners power ,thyere was a second strike and thatchers whish came true she destroyed the party and the miners .
But what a thought the labour party was not destroyed ,so the best way to destroy somthing or make it differnt is to get inside it and destroy or take over from within ,ie tony blair the new party what a con uk people .
What does this mean well read this and see if you can find the truth and look at the history of the green isue of global warming it all leads back to thatcher and the miners strike ,thats why america did not go with it and never will 50%of its power in uk is from king coal .


Climate Change Ringleader Phil Jones to Step Down
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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
December 1, 2009




CRU director Phil Jones.

CRU’s Phil Jones will step down from his position as director of the unit that cooked climate change data to hide global cooling. Britain’s East Anglia University says Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review.

The CRU scandal emerged after anonymous persons gained access to 160 MB of emails and source code. It is uncertain if the evidence implicating Jones and the CRU came from hackers or whistle-blowers.

Lord Monckton, the third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and adviser to Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit in the 1980s, went on the Alex Jones Show last week and called from criminal prosecution of Jones and his crew of climate change fraudsters.

In a blog entry posted prior to talking with Alex Jones, Monckton noted how Phil Jones and his co-conspirators “have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings.”

Phil Jones and the CRU have stonewalled FOIA requests demanding access to the data. It is alleged he destroyed evidence in an effort to cover-up the fraud.

On Sunday, the Times Online reported that scientists at the University of East Anglia admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. The CRU was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

On Saturday, the University of East Anglia said that 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been made available to the public for “several years” and that all data will be released as soon as they are clear of non-publication agreements.

Phil Jones told the science journal Nature that he was working to make the data publicly available with the agreement of its owners but this was expected to take some months.


A d v e r t i s e m e n t

He has called the charges that the emails and source code involve any “untoward” activity “ludicrous.”

Monckton and others dispute the usefulness of this data. “As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up.”

Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma has called for an investigation of the CRU and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to Inhofe, the IPCC “cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”

Alex Jones and Monckton addressed the climate change fraud and talked about how it will be used to create a global carbon taxing scheme and world government.

Lord Monckton talks with Alex Jones, November 26, 2009:


so it all comes out find the truth behind GLOBAL WARMING OR JUST NATURAL EARTH CHANGES ,you may say why bother well you will be taxed on this idea now and in the future so wise up or be CONED WITH NEW TAX JUST LIKE ONCE IN UK THEY HAD A WINDOW TAX .may be they might tax the air you breath and decide on its price and meter you .

[Morbidlife666 Profile]

Th U.K. can eat dicks. Seriously,a fucking truckload of dicks. So many dicks you would need a pitchfork to properly ingest them. Fuck the U.K.!!!

[Morbidlife666 Profile]

Th U.K. can eat dicks. Seriously,a fucking truckload of dicks. So many dicks you would need a pitchfork to properly ingest them. Fuck the U.K.!!!

Im sorry. I took a piss and my drunk friend posted this babble. I love you brits!!!

[Truthseeker Profile]

The $700 Billion Bailout Man
Laura Blumenfeld – Washington Post December 6, 2009

He wears no coat though it's freezing, shines no light though it's near midnight, carries no shotgun though he's tramping on the pine-needled tracks of black bears.

He wants to be lost in these woods.

"Come on, you bums," Neel Kashkari calls to his dogs, two giant Newfoundlands. "Boys, let's go."

He is walking through the smoke of a controlled burn in the Sierra Nevadas. He is talking about the people and the life he left behind in Washington.

" . . . and it wasn't about politics, they were non-political. These people were killing themselves – in Don's case, literally."

The moon hits his stubble, which is six days old. And the sweater he hasn't changed in three or four days. His BlackBerry – he can't kick it – rang once today. A year ago in D.C., it buzzed every few seconds. All night, he'd roll over to its bluish glow. His Treasury Department assistant slept with hers, powered up, on her pillow.

"It's like a dream," Kashkari says, his work boots crunching pine cones. "Sometimes I think: Was it real?"

It all began as it ended, abruptly. Kashkari was a 35-year-old business school graduate from a suburb of Akron, Ohio, who had gone to Washington in 2006 to learn how government worked. Then came the recession, and through a freakish set of circumstances, mixing pluck, cataclysm and luck, he was appointed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as the federal bailout chief.

Suddenly, he was in charge of $700 billion.

Congress savaged him. Wall Street Journal editorials doubted him. His home-town buddies urged him to use the money to buy the Cleveland Browns and fire the coaches. His wife spoke to him so rarely, she described them as "dead to each other." He lost sleep, gained weight and saw a close adviser, Don Hammond, suffer a heart attack at his Treasury desk. On May 1, after serving seven months under Presidents Bush and Obama, he resigned.

Within a week, Kashkari and his wife put their belongings into "indefinite storage." They moved to a cabin near the Truckee River in Northern California. "Off the map," he told his friends. He threw away his business cards, and made a list of the things he wanted to do:

1. build shed

2. chop wood

3. lose 20 pounds

4. help with Hank's book

He called his four-step program "Washington detox."

Now, six months later, he is almost done. He is nearly better, nearly free of Washington, D.C. Tonight, Kashkari is out walking his dogs on a mountain, listening for the coyotes that sometimes shadow him. The wind washes through the treetops. It sounds like rushing water. Kashkari pivots between two thick, rough trunks. His shaved head, his broad-brush eyebrows, his blackest-brown eyes – all turn sharply.

He opens his hands into the darkness:

"This makes $700 billion seem small."


Step one: Build shed

It was October 2008 when Hank Paulson announced that the government rescue operation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), would be run by his aide, Neel Kashkari. The choice was met with considerable surprise. Who was Neel Kashkari? He was too young, too inexperienced and had ties to Wall Street, detractors said. To some, the appointment seemed all wrong. Critics described Paulson as a "Dr. Evil" figure who brainwashed Congress into giving him unprecedented financial authority so that Kashkari, his "Mini-Me," could distribute it to Wall Street friends.

Overnight, Kashkari became the face of the biggest, and one of the most controversial, market interventions in American history. Even he questioned their chances of success.

The Friday evening he was named, he slumped over a bowl of chips in Bethesda with a childhood friend. He held his head in hands and said: "Dude, tell me something funny."

"Man, what's going on, Neel?"

"I've been tapped to put TARP together. I gotta set up these seven teams and build this thing from scratch – by Monday morning."

One year later, Kashkari is dressed in sap-stained jeans and a Cleveland Browns T-shirt, whistling in the lumber aisle at a Home Depot in Reno, Nev.

He is shopping for the boards to finish his shed. He stops at the pressure-treated two-by-sixes. "How many horizontal pieces do I need if the ramp is 96 inches long?"

He rubs the scruff on his chin, and takes out his BlackBerry.

In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: "We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number."

Looking back, he says, he is more confident about the two-by-sixes.

"Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air," Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. "It was a political calculus. I said, 'We don't know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?' 'No way,' Hank shook his head. I said, 'Okay, what about 700 billion?' We didn't know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn't admit how scared we were, or how uncertain."

At the Home Depot checkout counter, Kashkari pays $157 for his lumber. He loads it onto his truck and drives into the Tahoe National Forest, climbing to 6,500 feet. The paved road turns to dirt at his cabin.

He rounds a corner and there stands the shed, in an old horse corral. He began designing it in his mind on Christmas Eve when incoming Treasury secretary Tim Geithner asked him to stay for the new administration. Kashkari didn't have anything to store in a shed but he knew, right then, that he needed to build it:

"I had to do something with my hands. It's a big amorphous unknown -- what's going to happen to our economy. And the shed is solid, measurable. I can see it, I can touch it. It's going to be around for the next 30 years. It's the opposite of amorphous."

Now his wife, Minal, is staggering down a slope pocked with snake holes, carrying 11-foot pieces of cedar trim. Kashkari grabs the nail gun.

"Hank was like: What is this thing you're building -- an outhouse, a deck?" Kashkari says, laughing.

"He probably thinks you're crazy," Minal says. "We're going on six months now. People are like: What are you doing?"

Kashkari climbs the ladder, 10 rungs up. He shoots a volley of nails, attaching the trim.

"Sweetie, get down, only one leg is hooked on the ladder."

"It's okay," Kashkari says, his voice steady, the ladder shaky.

The panting dogs, Winslow and Newsome, named for Cleveland Browns tight-ends, make the only sound.

"Oh [expletive]," he says. A large gap opens where he nails the trim to the wall. "[Expletive] it. We're going have to scrap this piece."

"Ugh, we don't have any more wood," Minal says.

Kashkari stares at the gap – Minal calls it "the death stare." His cinder eyes can singe, and at Treasury meetings he was careful not to shoot disapproving looks. In Washington, colleagues described him as "unflappable." But now that there were no global monetary consequences to losing control, Kashkari smolders.

"Hold on," he snaps. He leans against the trim and rips off the gaping lumber, which somehow doesn't break.

"Woo-hoo!" Minal claps. "All right, let's get this last damn piece."

Twenty minutes later, in the fading light, they hug. "I didn't think we'd ever finish," Minal says.

Kashkari checks his BlackBerry, a Bloomberg alert: "U.S. says G20 Shouldn't Remove Stimulus Too Soon." Then he steps back, and considers the shed.

It looks like a small, country church. "The Anti-D.C. Sanctuary," he calls it.


Step two: Chop wood

Kashkari raises his ax.

"It felt like I got jumped."

Whack.

"Like three guys beat the crap out of me."

Whack, whack.

The massive block of sugar pine breaks, the crack bouncing off the mountain.

Kashkari is recalling his testimony before Congress, while splitting logs to feed the stove for the winter. He is down to his last two chain-sawed trees.

"Members of Congress will tell you they agree with you, and then in public they blast you. I understand their anger, but the playing at politics when so much was at stake -- "

Whack. The ax blade flies off its wooden handle.

As interim assistant secretary for financial stability, Kashkari had to defend multibillion-dollar cash injections in hearings on Capitol Hill. Constituents were losing their jobs and homes; Kashkari became the object of free-floating recession rage. He sat for five oversight hearings, whose headlines ran from "Lawmakers Slam Kashkari!" to "Congressman Calls Kashkari 'A Chump.' " In one House session, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) opened with a round of criticism, and then a Republican finished him off, suggesting that Kashkari resign.

"I wasn't prepared for their hostility."

As a boy, Kashkari fell in love with Washington, watching the Iran-contra hearings.

"I was appalled when I found out," Minal teases, driving with him to buy a new ax. "You were 12 years old, what's wrong with you?"

"As a kid I thought: How glamorous," Kashkari says. "Well, it wasn't very glamorous when I was sitting there."

His flukish route from his parents' TV room to a Hill hearing room tracks back to June 2006. He was a tech banker at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. Hank Paulson, the chief executive, was named Treasury secretary. Kashkari called Paulson, who didn't know the low-level employee, and asked – his heart pounding – to go along.

Five rush-altered Macy's suits, an 80 percent pay cut and 10 days later, Kashkari was sworn in as Paulson's aide. He was so nervous and so eager to prove himself that some nights he had to take a sleeping pill. He was an engineering nerd, suddenly working for a man who'd been a star offensive lineman at Dartmouth, whom he considered "the Joe Montana" of the business world. As Kashkari drove to Treasury, he coached himself, "Don't try to score a touchdown. Just – if Paulson throws the ball, catch it."

In February 2008, that meant drafting an emergency plan in the unlikely event of an economic meltdown. Kashkari and a colleague wrote, "Break the Glass: Bank Recapitalization Plan." When the banks actually tanked later that year, the 10-page plan laid the basis for TARP. Amid the chaos, Kashkari was appointed czar.

Soon he was marking hearing dates on his calendar: "BEATING ON THE HILL."

"When I first got to Washington, I tried teamwork, consensus-building," he says. "But even before the crisis, I realized it doesn't work like that in D.C. "

At Truckee Mountain Hardware, Kashkari picks out a new ax, a heavier one with a fiberglass handle. "Pure therapy," he says, hoisting it. At this altitude, pressure builds to bursting. Minal's hand lotion oozes in her purse, the pretzel bags swell, and when Kashkari hacks a log, it explodes with pine-scented powder. The smell, he says, is "purifying."

They drive back to the cabin, where Minal reads out loud a November 2008 Gawker column about her husband:

"Financial Crisis Taking a Toll on Our Favorite [expletive] Banker: He came in looking peppy enough to bore holes in a taxpayer's forehead . . . now his eyes are dazed, plaintive even, and he's putting on classic stress-related weight under his chin. Congressmen yell at him –

"All right," Kashkari interrupts. He slips out the door. "I'm going to chop wood."


Step three: Lose 20 pounds

At the Truckee gym on Donner Pass Road, Kashkari steps onto a digital scale.
"Let's see," he says, as the black numbers pulse.

In Washington, Kashkari, about 5-foot-10, had ballooned -- "I'm a stress eater" -- to 203 pounds. His waistband cut into the folds of his stomach. His biceps felt like "bags of Jell-O."

Washingtonian magazine voted the "bailout czar . . . a person we'd most like to have over for drinks, good food and conversation." His actual lifestyle: dining at his Treasury desk on family-size Cool Ranch Doritos. Crashing at 2 a.m. on his lumpy office couch, his only companions the counter-snipers outside his window, on the White House roof. Showering in the Treasury locker room at 6 a.m., drenched in the smell of other men's sweat and toilet cleaner.

Now, after six months of dieting and 45-mile alpine bike rides, the gym scale under Kashkari's sneakers reads: 181.2.

"No dinner tonight," he grumbles.

"Are you detox'd yet?" A friend had messaged.

Not until he weighs 180.

Tonight, Kashkari is lifting weights. He starts with upper-back exercises and tells the story of Don Hammond. Overnight, Kashkari had to create 135 TARP positions. Hammond was on the 12th hole of the golf course when Kashkari called to recruit him as chief compliance officer: "Can you be here in an hour?"

Kashkari was managing a team of mostly older career bureaucrats. Hammond, 55, a jovial man with 23 years' experience at Treasury, was Kashkari's "confidence builder": "In meetings, I'd look over at his face for signs of concern. If his eyes crinkled, I'd say wait, Don – what are you thinking?"

Thoughts tended toward the apocalyptic. During midnight negotiations with congressional leaders, Paulson doubled over with dry heaves. A government economist broke into Kashkari's office sobbing, "Oh my God! The system's collapsing!" Kashkari counseled her to focus on things they could control. (Minal: "So you offered her a bag of Doritos.")

"We were terrified the banking system would fail, but the thing that scared us even more was, what would we do the day after? How would we take over 8,000 banks?"

Kashkari suffered from an "enduring headache at the center of my brain." At night, he thrashed around – no sleeping pill – because he couldn't spare six hours. Minal's co-workers assumed she'd quit her engineering job because her husband had "somehow got a cut" of the $700 billion. She told them, "Hey, my husband took a pay cut for this job. I gotta keep working."

Hammond worked beside Kashkari, 18 hours a day, for 40 straight days. Then, after submitting a TARP report, he admitted to himself what he'd been denying: burning pressure in his chest.

"He was pale in the ICU. All these tubes in his nose and his arms," Kashkari says, recalling his hospital visit after Hammond's heart attack. As he speaks, Kashkari is gasping, doing lat pull-downs at the gym. "He was tilted up in bed. He asked about my upcoming House testimony. He said, 'I'll be checking my BlackBerry, if you need anything.' "

That evening, a Sunday, Kashkari convened his chiefs: "We need to divide Don's work, and keep going." The civil servants, working on stackable chairs in Treasury's basement, worked all night, he recalls: "I saw a 60-year-old man pull an all-nighter. In one of the worst times in American history, I saw the best in people coming together to put out the fire."

Later that week, when Kashkari testified before the Financial Services Committee, Hammond and his wife watched from the hospital bed. Rep. Meeks demanded to know why the secretary "has not moved to do anything" to prevent foreclosures. Other lawmakers grilled him for nearly six hours. "You can't ask him that question!" Hammond shouted at the little men on the screen. "You have to calm down," his wife said, glimpsing the heart monitor, "or we're turning off the TV."

"We were counting on each other," Kashkari recalls now at the Truckee gym. "The camaraderie." Veins knot at his temples. Sweat dots the skin between the hairs on his forearms. He does 20 reps of lower-back extensions.

"My friend almost died." Kashkari's face contorts, fighting against the weight of the machine. "But he survived, and he's okay. And I'm making sure I'm as strong or stronger, as a way of saying Washington tried to break us, but it didn't."

It's personal, this -- him vs. Washington. "It's detox of a tough period," he says later, wiping his forehead. "Through exercise like running, but exorcize is relevant, too."

The affliction, or D.C. addiction, doesn't corrode livers or taint blood. Its "toxins" lodge elsewhere, Kashkari says.

Where?

He raises an index finger and taps his skull.


Step four: Help with Hank's book

Kashkari steps off the plane at Reagan National Airport.

His bag bulges with manuscript pages from "On the Brink." It was Paulson who first brought Kashkari to D.C. in 2006, and it is Paulson who brings him back now for his first visit since he quit in May. Kashkari is helping with the final read-through of Paulson's book.

Near the taxis, Kashkari runs into Rep. Meeks of the Financial Services Committee. Last time they met, at a hearing, Meeks was the one asking questions.

"How are things going in Washington?" Kashkari now says politely. On the plane, Kashkari had sat in 12A behind Meeks's 11A, but he hunched down, unseen. Kashkari was annotating Paulson's chapter criticizing Congress.

"Barney Frank is drafting new regs for the financial system," Meeks says. "We gotta make sure this doesn't happen again."

The congressman edges away awkwardly: "Thank you for what you've done."

In the taxi, Kashkari rides past the Washington Monument and the White House. "I'm so happy not to live here," he says. "Zero longing." He doesn't see anything out the window that he misses, except maybe Chipotle.

He had disbursed more than $400 billion, invested in 540 banks, implemented a $50 billion foreclosure prevention plan. He made People magazine's "Sexiest Men Alive" issue. And he also made mistakes – a punitive interest rate on the American International Group intervention, he says, and a clause allowing unilateral changes to the Capital Purchase Program contracts – decisions executed quickly in the crisis and recognized belatedly by him on the road to Lake Tahoe, while biking up a 9 percent grade, his thoughts grinding round.

The next morning of his D.C. visit, he knocks on Paulson's front door.

"Neel," Paulson says warmly. "You're a different man."

"I lost 18 of the 20 pounds."

"Almost there," Paulson smiles. "I remember when you were here in April, and you were fat."

"And unhappy."

For the next five hours they edit "On the Brink." In the book, Paulson describes Kashkari as "talented and self-confident." Through Paulson's narrative, Kashkari, too, hopes to reclaim his story, to rebut the Facebook page titled "Neel Kashkari Is a Traitor" and the bloggers who called him "Cash-n-Carry." He tells Paulson about a job offer he's gotten in financial services and that he feels ready to start work before the end of the year. They reminisce about late nights together – two dogged, bald, former Goldman bankers – the older college football hero offering the younger fan a long-sought nod.

Later, he meets a friend from the Federal Reserve for lunch. He'd spent every weekend working with him when the economy was in free fall.

"That's the thing," Kashkari blurts across the table. "I started praying when I came to Treasury. At Goldman, I didn't pray. Not once. 'Cause I just didn't care. At Treasury, there were so many times."

His friend is silent.

"That's really personal," Kashkari says about his Treasury prayers, his eyes stinging from embarrassment. He says he'd like to take it back.

There rests the center of Kashkari's tension. He loathes this city. Yet his work was meaningful. It penetrated him so deeply that he learned to pray: "God, we need you." "Help Don make it through." "God, help me do my best, so I can catch the ball."

In Washington, it mattered – and that, perhaps, is all that matters.

Two weeks later, Kashkari is back in the Tahoe forest with Minal. They are talking about the chipmunks nesting in their dryer vent, and the two-mile drive to their garbage cans. They can see shooting stars every night, but they can't get the Wall Street Journal home delivery.

Kashkari wonders out loud if they might move back to D.C., someday.

"You're crazy," Minal says.

"In a long time, in 10 years. Or 20." He looks at his wife sideways. "Because there's nowhere else you can have such a large impact -- for better and for worse."

Minal takes a deep breath. An addict, she understands, is never cured, but always recovering. "Not before 10 years." She waves a finger at him. "No reneging!"

That night, Kashkari sleeps for 9 1/2 hours. He dreams he's back at Treasury. The Federal Reserve chairman has come to hear Kashkari's important report. A meeting has been called, and everyone's waiting. But Kashkari can't find his report. He tears up his desk.

In the morning, Kashkari's sheets lie jumbled. He sits up, in his Cleveland Browns T-shirt, a TARP headache crawling across his brain. He thinks, "Rid the toxin." He makes a list: Go to gym twice today. Attach handles to doors of the shed.

The shed!

Kashkari pads over to the cabin window and looks down at the old horse corral. In the pine-filtered light, his anxiety dream dissipates. He checks, and his shed is still there.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/a ... 02016.html

Photo slideshow of the re-branded 'bailout czar'.

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Last updated 07/12/2009

[Truthseeker Profile]

Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages
Copenhagen climate change summit - opening day liveblog
Comments (754)
Editorial
The Guardian, Monday 7 December 2009
Article history


Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

• How the Copenhagen global leader came about
• Write your own editorial
• Bryony Worthington: How to make an impact
• In pictures: How newspapers around the world ran the editorialClimate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

This editorial is free to reproduce under Creative Commons
'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation' by The Guardian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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(please note this Creative Commons license is valid until 18 December 2009)

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