Money and website solved in one

Location Train back from Oxford. 23.50pm | Mood Clearing of the fog | Date 16 March 2007
Filed in:
Author (full name): 
Franny Armstrong
Location: 
Train back from Oxford. 23.50pm
Mood: 
Clearing of the fog
Soundtrack: 
Random person on the train enthusing about Mark's talk without knowing we know him. Sweet.
Ailments: 
Headache from sore eye
Date: 
16 March 2007
Current crisis: 
Will our bikes have got nicked from Paddington?
Current silver lining: 
Seemed to have solved our web and money problems in one

Slightly frightening that Crude pal Mark Lynas has dreamt up, researched, written and published a book, 'Six Degrees', all within the Crude timescale. Lizzie and I went to the launch in a cold church hall in Oxford tonight. Mark was doing one of his favourite slide-show talk presentation things - think Al Gore, but way bleaker - which I've now seen plenty of times, but never fails to scare the bejeezus out of me. For some reason the same facts are way more terrifiying when presented to a paying audience than when it's just Mark and I lying round on the floor eating lollies. His book basically explains exactly what we can expect to happen as the global temperature rises by each degree up to the maximum of six predicted for this century by the IPCC. (See our "climateometer " for Mark's book in a nutshell). In summary: we're at 0.7 already and most likely committed to 1.7 even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow. If we hit 2, that's where the positive feedbacks really kick in. So 2 leads to 3 leads to 4 leads to 5 leads to 6. And at 6 most of life on Earth will be dead.

Which means we really must Stop Before Two. But we're already at 1.7. The scale of the problem is, well, bigger than the biggest metaphor I could come up with.

Of course most of the questions after Mark's talk were about the Global Warming Swindle programme. But eventually George Marshall from COIN managed to change tack and ask everyone to say something positive they are doing to fight climate change - and *everyone* was doing something - but I was too shy to say "I'm making a documentary". Lizzie looked at me weirdly.

Most of the Oxford eco-mafia were there, many of whom I used to work with at oneworld in my dad's shed 10 years ago. Including Olly Willans , who was one of the lucky few whisked away from his desk to be a stand-in actor in our McLibel film before Ken Loach came along and did the real thing. (See the McLibel DVD for his starring appearance.) Since then, he and piano-playing Tom Dyson have set up a wee company called Torchbox and also got obsessed with climate change: they're working on a database thingy to run a carbon rationing system.

I gently floated the idea of Torchbox making the Crude website - which is supposedly launching in 6 weeks, despite the fact that we haven't started - and they signed up there and then. Yipppeee. Funny that they said our "survival wages" would be so inconsequential as to not be worth the effort of making the bank transfer. So they're going to defer ALL their fee and we're getting a free website. (Of course they get a % of Crude too). Bloody good news as we're almost out of cash and need to get the website up quick so we can launch Funding Round 3.