Smoke Haze hits Chiang Mai February 2010

You may have noticed that Doi Suthep seems to be disappearing into the murk of late. This markup of a photo from NASA shows why. Smoke plumes in the lower left corner show the wind heading generally ENE, while those at the top show it heading generally N. Regardless, the prevailing winds right around our house here in Chiang Mai seem generally to be from the NNW, which would bring us the smoke from the Burmese fires to the left of Fang. – Thanks to David Hardcastle & Hak Hakanson

Latest pollution figures at: http://www.pcd.go.th/AirQuality/Regional/QueryAir.cfm?task=findsite

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Peoples´ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth´s Rights

Please sign up and register (even if we are not yet sure if we can actually go to Bolivia) as a participant

You may follow this link to registerat http://cmpcc.org –    Cochabamba, Bolivia 19 al 22 de Abril 2010

after registering, you will get an email confirmation as well as your unique accreditation number. Only after receiving this will you be able to SIGN UP for the different working groups – themes that the conference will address.

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Hang Zhou opts for bikes. Why not Chiang Mai?

Chiang Mai is once again talking about how to make our city livable.  In the first week of February 2010 a one day meeting was held under the auspices of Tessaban Nakhorn Chiang Mai and the German consulting agency GTZ.

To the annoyance of some of the long time Chiang Mai activists GTZ organised speakers in the morning to tell us some facts we already knew and then insisted on spending the whole afternoon playing childish games to get us to decide on a “vision” for Chiang Mai.  Practical suggestions were vetoed by the strong-man “facilitator”, a consultant who had not heard about the 350.org message. The veto was on instructions from the organisers,he said in private, when asked to broaden the scope of the meeting.

Specifically the suggestion to “Make Chiang Mai a Bicycle City” was vetoed.  One of the participants suggested that the real agenda of GTZ was to sell German technology to Chiang Mai. Sounds like traditional foreign aid?

Meanwhile in China, one city, the lovely city of lakes Hang Zhou, opts for bikes as shown in this Al Jazeera video:

China city banking on bikes
2 min 39 sec – 4 days ago
www.youtube.com

If that is what GTZ wants to sell us let them say so up front? If not why are they wasting our time?

On Feb 15-16 th at the Chiang Mai Orchid Hotel in Huey Keow Rd the next stage in their community participation program continues.  If you are free to visit some time please do go and take your bicycle and enjoy a delicious hotel lunch.

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NCCN – Now Clearing Confusion Network

Dear Northerners  Re emails & blogs

I am writing to you because you all appear to be working on group communication

Yesterday, Tuesday, Khun Ja from APWLD prepared a leaflet to advertise a meeting for 24th Feb and on it

there was the email address nccnclimatejusticenow@gmail.com

This caused some confusion as I had never received mail from this source and I knew of the existence of

northernclimatechangenetwork@gmail.com which never sends me mail and also has recently appeared

northernclimate@gmail.com which has now started to send mail.

In order to confirm the new address I  sent a mail which did not

bounce back but had no reply.

I then phoned Caroline from whom I eventually ascertained the origin of the new address from which I now write.

Ja & Tomoko and I have been talking of late about difficulties of e-communication and the managing of emails

and sender’s lists.

Some folk have many emails and there is much work in reading ( or failing to because of overload ) and responding.

One thing I find very difficult is when there are multiple responses to a mail. This may be from more than one

recipient at varying times, who may  may not have seen the responses from others, and make more than one response.

As a result most of us are somewhat in the dark most of the time.

Another problem associated with this way of communicating is that many folk do not respond so one does not know how they feel.

I suggest the best way to resolve this situation is to go over to a blog style of corresponding. Then everybody has equal information

which is serially recorded and can easily be referred to by simply scrolling up and down a blog stream.

As far as I know we are yet to enter a dangerous situation where our adversaries (e.g. the fossil fuel lobby) will try to hack our site

or spy on our activities, so openness seems the best policy.

If we use the blog approach our time spent on emails should fall more than any increase of time spent on a website blog

and we should be better informed.

We also have the problem of new email information coming in as more folk register an interest ( yesterday’s leaflet

produced another 12 or so, some of whom were also on other lists for sure).

How do we deal with this swarm of data. More data than may be usable perhaps?

The website of the International Citizens of Chiang Mai has many entries on Climate and other green issues

and has now had one year of development and now a brand new presentation.

http://www.ourchiangmai.com requires readers to register so they can post a comment. The registration form has space for

User Name, email address , First Name (which can have spaces and be an organisation name) , and Last name, Either name

can include Thai or Roman characters.

This then becomes a simple database which is only accesssible to or administrator (Alan Bull) who is at a safe distance

from “People of Influence” on snowy London town.

So what best to do?

My suggestion is to put new posts and try to have English & Thai (their posting need not be simultaneous) on ourchiangmai.com

and ask our network to include in their www access routine, a visit to the site and to invite registration and comments.

Then we will need to coordinate sending out emails to the various lists to ask for participation.

May I ask all to respond to this email via ourchiangmai.com and thereby get some experience with what is being suggested.

Remember the last word on this issue may be a little time coming and require a few visits.

I sincerely hope you find these suggestions helpful.

Yours in Solidarity

Ricky

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URGENT – Talk on Climate Catastrophe – Tues. 9 th Feb 2010

Talk on Climate Catastrophe – Tues. 9 th Feb 2010 by Michael Tuckson , at the Alliance Francaise, Caroenpratet Rd (just south of the Chedi Hotel and across the road) 7:30 pm—-

Dearies Please come to Michael’s talk Wednesday.

He likes to quote Philip Sutton who on radio in 2008  said the following:

“Clearly we mustn’t emit any more greenhouse gases that will add to warming. And we must remove the overload of carbon dioxide from the air – 200 billion tonnes of carbon in fact – and store it safely – for example by growing plant matter and converting it to agrichar for very long term storage in the soil). And for some decades we may have to actively cool the earth by boosting its reflectivity. The Arctic melt has rewritten the rule book.

Even (Ross) Garnaut seems unaware of this. The bottom line is that we can no longer afford to have any fossil fuel emissions from any source, wether from coal or gas, new or old. We must act with emergency speed over the next 10 years to build a new energy economy based on efficiency and renewable energy. ”

Now do not drive to the talk please.

Ricky

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