31/01/07, Bill Graveland, Laments lonely life of bloggers

Michael Keren says individuals who bare their souls online are isolated and lonely and live in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships.

CALGARY — Bloggers are living in a world where emotions may be real but everything else is make-believe, says a University of Calgary professor in a new book.

Blogs, short for web logs, are everywhere on the Internet these days and often reveal the innermost feelings of individuals who hate their jobs, activists with a political cause or even angst-ridden teenagers in the throes of first love.

The popularity of sites such as MySpace.com, which contains virtually thousands of blogs, is a testament to the world of self-expression.

But Michael Keren, who has written "Blogosphere: The New Political Arena," suggests individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world.

[Image, Professor Michael Keren, shown at the University of Calgary on Tuesday, Jan.30, 2007, has written a book on bloggers. He says most bloggers fail to get the attention they need and are often lonely.]

"Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills," the author says.

Keren, who teaches in the faculty of communication and culture, spoke to reporters Tuesday at The Loft, a student cybercafe at the university, where many students were busily typing away on laptops - perhaps updating blogs of their own.

"In this world of blogging, which the whole world can read, you have a personal expectation about a readership that's just not there for the millions of bloggers who are writing their personal feelings."

Keren praises the Internet as a great place for self-expression, but he also suggests that blogs often have the opposite effect by creating feelings of loneliness for those who aren't lucky enough to reach "celebrity" status.

"Many of us end up like Father McKenzie in the 'Eleanor Rigby' Beatles song, who is writing a sermon that no one is going to hear," he suggests. "Some of us are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness."

In his book, Keren follows the blogs of nine individuals, including a Canadian woman living in the woods in a cabin in Quebec. She discusses her identity through stories about her two cats.

"One day one of the cats dies and the whole blogosphere becomes crazy about the death of this cat, and what happens is she gets a community of support which is not real.

"These are people with nicknames who express enormous support, but they can disappear in the next minute and they are not real, and she remains lonely in the end."

Keren's view of the blogosphere is not shared by everyone.

"That's harsh," declared Arian Hopkins, 36, of Calgary, who has a spot on MySpace.com.

Hopkins said the web, along with community portals and blogsites, has become a great tool for Generation Y to spout on everything from "how much they hate their mom to the best show that is out there."

Saying bloggers are lonely and living in a make-believe world is unfair, she said.

"I don't think it's based on these poor people who are so lonely and sad. I don't think that's really fair because it's being used in all sorts of mediums," said Hopkins, a business analyst for TransCanada Pipelines.

Living in a make-believe world can help some people deal with loneliness, she suggested.

"There are these crazy relationships that are happening online from people getting to know people through their blogs. Who cares if they're not real people?" said the mother of three.

"Bloggers tend to be a little more extroverted. They say, 'I have a story and want you to hear it.' It's kind of like my story is as important as everybody else's."

Fellow blogger Peter Leveque agrees.

"I would disagree with anyone whose thesis is that people who blog are lonely outcasts," the Calgary lawyer wrote in an e-mail.

"I expect bloggers are like everyone else and come from all walks of life with all sorts of different interests.

"But what do I know? Not much likely."

27/01/07, Gary Mason, Time to take RCMP probes outside force

VANCOUVER -- The conduct of the RCMP in British Columbia becomes more frightening and disturbing by the day.

The latest whiff of scandal enveloping the force comes courtesy of a coroner's inquest that took place this week in Vanderhoof into the RCMP shooting of Kevin St. Arnaud in December of 2004.

The facts of the case are these: On Dec. 19, 2004, Mr. St. Arnaud, after a night of heavy drinking, broke into a local pharmacy. He set off an alarm and scrambled out the back door and was soon pursued by police.

Constable Ryan Sheremetta, the first on the scene, chased Mr. St. Arnaud onto a soccer field.

Constable Sheremetta told the inquest this week that he yelled at Mr. St. Arnaud to stop and ordered him to put his hands in the air, but the suspect turned and started coming after him with a "death look and shouting, 'You're going to have to shoot me.' " The backpedalling police officer fell down and then saw Mr. St. Arnaud put one of his hands in his pocket. Fearing for his life, the officer said, he pumped three shots into Mr. St. Arnaud, who was standing over him at the time.

Of course, this being B.C., the RCMP shooting was investigated by the RCMP. Not surprisingly, it concluded that Constable Sheremetta, with less than two years of experience on the force at the time, acted in self-defence.

The Mounties passed their report to the Crown, which decided not to press charges against the officer.

RCMP spokesman Tom Seaman said of the Crown's decision: "It really shows the officer was justified in protecting himself from death or grievous bodily harm. That's the bottom line."

Not quite.

The coroner's inquest heard testimony this week that completely undermines the RCMP's and Constable Sheremetta's version of events. The most damaging deposition came from a former RCMP officer who was on the scene the night of the shooting.

Constable Colleen Erickson said she arrived at the pharmacy shortly after Constable Sheremetta. A 25-year veteran of the force, Ms. Erickson said she ran onto the field and witnessed Constable Sheremetta ordering Mr. St. Arnaud to stop running and to put his hands in the air.

According to Ms. Erickson, the unarmed man stopped, put his hands in air and took a couple of steps toward the officer.

She said her fellow officer then assumed a shooting position; feet shoulder-length apart, two hands on the barrel of the gun. From this position, she said, she saw Constable Sheremetta fire two shots quickly and then a third a few seconds later.

She did not see Mr. St. Arnaud move to put one of his hands in his pocket, as Constable Sheremetta described.

Nor did she hear Mr. St. Arnaud say: "You're going to have to shoot me."

Afterward, Ms. Erickson testified, Constable Sheremetta twice asked her if she saw what happened. She said yes. He then said: "What do you think I should do?"

It should be noted that a senior RCMP officer who was once a superior of Ms. Erickson, described her in the witness box as a person of the utmost integrity and trustworthiness.

Ms. Erickson has since left the force to become a first nation chief.

Meantime, a pathologist testified that the bullets entered Mr. St. Arnaud's body on a downward angle of 30 to 40 degrees, not an upward angle, which would have been the case had Constable Sheremetta been lying on the ground as he said.

A bloodstain expert testified that Mr. St. Arnaud was likely standing still at the time he was shot, not moving ahead.

And a ballistics expert said that based on the distance between the body and the shell casings, Mr. St. Arnaud was anywhere from three to nearly six metres away from Constable Sheremetta when he was shot, not standing over him as the officer suggested.

The overwhelming body of evidence, in other words, suggests a completely different set of circumstances around Mr. St. Arnaud's death. The evidence, especially Ms. Erickson's witness testimony, completely discredits the RCMP's version of events.

And now there are some extremely serious questions that need to be asked.

The RCMP would have had access to all of the contrary evidence and testimony heard at the coroner's inquest, including the statement by then Constable Erickson. Given that, how could the Mounties conclude Constable Sheremetta was acting in self-defence?

Was the Crown aware of Ms. Erickson's statement? Was the Crown aware that pathologists and bloodstain experts were painting a different picture of what happened that night than Constable Sheremetta? Not to mention Ms. Erickson. If so, on what grounds did it decide not to press charges?

What further evidence does Solicitor-General John Les need to finally call for a completely independent review process in cases where RCMP officers have been involved in the shooting deaths of civilians?

There are all too many similarities between this story and the one of Ian Bush, the 22-year-old mill worker from Houston, B.C., who was shot in the back of the head in an RCMP detachment after being arrested for having an open beer outside a hockey game.

It took the RCMP months to complete its investigation into the Bush shooting before turning the matter over to the Crown, which found the officer who fired the fatal shot acted in self-defence.

The officer, who had been on the job only five months, said he was being choked by Mr. Bush to the point of unconsciousness and yet somehow got his gun behind the victim to shoot him square in the back of the head. There were no witnesses.

In the case of Kevin St. Arnaud, it would appear the RCMP's investigation into his death either glossed over or completely dismissed conflicting testimony and forensic evidence.

The Criminal Justice Branch, an arm of the Attorney-General's ministry, has been monitoring the St. Arnaud inquest. A branch spokesman said yesterday that if any new information comes to light at the inquest that was not available when the Crown originally reviewed the case it can be submitted for further review.

Regardless, the Attorney-General of B.C. has to immediately reopen the file on this case and take another look at whether charges of criminal negligence causing death or manslaughter should be laid against Constable Sheremetta.

The RCMP's own investigation into this shooting has to be investigated as well.

Something is not right here.

Tide is Turning

27/01/07, Editorial, Hot on the environment, and willing to sacrifice, (Source).
26/01/07, Rex Murphy, And now politicians will fix the weather?, (Source).
27/01/07, Edward Greenspon, It's crystal clear: The environment will be the single most important issue of 2007, (Source).
27/01/07, Margaret Wente, Climate change a 'questionable truth', (Source).
26/01/07, Jeffrey Simpson, Climate-change scoffers have seen their day, (Source).
29/01/07, Steven Chase, Wary Tories rip Dion in TV ad blitz, (Source).
31/01/07, Martin Mittelstaedt, The fallout of global warming: 1,000 years, (Source).
31/01/07, Brian Laghi, Harper sought money for 'Battle of Kyoto', (Source).


27/01/07, Editorial, Hot on the environment, and willing to sacrifice, (Back).

At this time a year ago, climate change barely made it onto the public's radar screen. Among the issues of greatest concern to Canadians, the environment was rated the most important by only 4 per cent of people, far behind health care at 25 per cent and also trailing crime, corruption and the economy.

By this month, environmental issues had surged to the top of the worry list of 26 per cent of the people who participated in a poll conducted for The Globe and Mail and CTV News. An Angus Reid survey produced similar results, with more than a third of Canadians ranking the environment as the number-one issue facing the country today. This helps explain why politicians who tap into those concerns, such as Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion, have gained so much traction. And why others, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, have clambered aboard the bandwagon.

The rise of the environment as a major political factor is a global phenomenon, and the only question is whether it signals a permanent change in public attitudes or is a momentary blip that will fade as economies weaken, gasoline prices fall, weather conditions return to seasonal norms and other fears take hold in the popular imagination. Several times in the past, the environment has risen from the sea of voter concerns to become the issue of the day, rousing great passions among adherents and opponents of proposals to reduce carbon emissions, clean up the air and water and persuade industries and consumers to be less wasteful of energy and other resources. But when the problems that triggered the concerns -- acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer and the Arab oil crises of the 1970s, for example -- abated, Canadian consumers and businesses quickly returned to old habits and the politicians moved on.

This time seems different. "It's developed a top-of-mind salience the likes of which we've never seen before," said Allan Gregg, chair of the Strategic Counsel, which conducted the Globe/CTV News poll.

In particular, a remarkably high percentage of people say they are willing to make personal sacrifices if it means protecting future generations from the potential ravages of climate change and environmental degradation. The Globe/CTV poll found that 72 per cent are willing to pay more for a more fuel-efficient car; 61 per cent would cut their automotive use in half; 73 per cent are prepared to fly only when it is essential; and 62 per cent could live with significantly slower economic growth. Only 9 per cent said they would make no real sacrifices in their lifestyles.

Talking about sacrifices is one thing; making them is something else entirely. Even as conjecture, only 31 per cent support significantly higher prices for gasoline or heating oil. And fewer than half of those polled favour slowing or cutting development of the Alberta oil sands. But the poll sends a signal that Canadians want tough action from political and business leaders, and that merely paying lip service to the problem will not be acceptable.

In the United States, even President George W. Bush, who has an abysmal record on the environment, told Americans this week that they have to face the "serious challenge of global climate change." That followed a U.S. poll which showed that 88 per cent of Americans regard global warming as a threat to future generations. In Australia, which is suffering through a major drought, the Opposition Labor Party has made big gains by championing the environment. With a platform that includes signing the Kyoto Protocol and taking tough action on climate change, Labor Leader Kevin Rudd has jumped into a 10-point lead in the polls over Prime Minister John Howard.

In Canada, the surge in concern about climate change has led to a strong expression of support for the Green Party and its environmental program, which was to be expected. Twenty per cent of Canadians say they are very or somewhat likely to cast their ballots for Green candidates, which seems quite a jump from the 4.5 per cent who actually voted for them in the last election, though even now the number of "very" likely supporters is only 4 per cent. And 27 per cent say they prefer the Green environmental plan, compared with 16 per cent who favour the Liberal platform, 12 per cent who side with the Conservative approach and only 9 per cent who opt for what the NDP has to offer. In fact, nearly a third of NDP and Liberal supporters say the Greens have the best ideas. How much of this will translate into real support on election day is an open question; the issue of Afghanistan, for one, may direct a number of ballots. But if the voters are true to their word, the Green wave could cost the New Democrats dearly in the next election and siphon enough votes from Mr. Dion's Liberals to help the Conservatives.

Whatever happens, climate change has taken hold of public attitudes in Canada, and this shift appears irreversible.


26/01/07. Rex Murphy, And now politicians will fix the weather?, (Back).

There's a study out, the fruit of 30 years' observation, from an Italian research academy that argues a relationship between global warming and suicide. Have we really reached a point of such despair over the prospect of temperature up-creep, that some people are departing this vale of (ever-warmer) tears prematurely?

In Italy, evidently so: “The global increase in surface temperature [known as global warming] was found to impact on mortality through ill health, particularly among the elderly and in summer.” I'm not surprised, though. If you think about it, what doesn't “impact on mortality?” Read Hamlet's great catalogue — the law's delay, the pangs of dispriz'd love etc. — again. I have a real fear, for example, that another season of Deal or No Deal could “impact” on my mortality. Higher blood pressure brought on by the sight or sound of Howie Mandel and his harem, combined with beating my head against the nearest hard surface during a given episode (known physiologically, I believe, as an “involuntary response”) will probably trim a few years from the slender pile.

In the interests of science, may I offer a contrastive thesis, this one, I confess, anecdotal and not swaddled in the language of a scientific abstract. I have often wondered how the interminable fogs that blighted every summer in Placentia Bay shortened the lives of the clutch of us who lived there, starved for decades of what the rest of the world knew familiarly as the summer sun. I can't actually name those whom endless fog drove into the greater void. But spending the better part of a lifetime in a grey, cold mist has to be an extra kick in the shins any time life's other miseries gang up on you. So, yes, I think summer fogs can be “found to impact on mortality.” I must seek out the medical journals for supportive research.

I shall hold off, till such is found, any move to argue for a Fog Supplement to the Kyoto articles.

Global warming, I grow daily more aware, is a very promiscuous phenomenon. It gets credit for everything. Besides all the stuff everyone knows is caused by global warming — the waning of the ice caps, the stranded polar bears, retreating or advancing deserts, snow in Florida, light in Newfoundland — came news this week from a conference of experts in London that global warming “could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism.” That's a full plate.

To modify the wonderful question of Homer Simpson: Is there anything global warming can't do? Take whatever the world's miseries and conflicts may be, there is none, apparently, that cannot be made its ready predicate. Conference expert, Sir Crispin Tickell, offered that terrorists were likely to exploit whatever ravages global warming carries in its humid wake. And a noted meteorologist, John Mitchell backed Sir Crispin by reminding conferees that al-Qaeda (ecological brigade, I assume) “had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.” I would only ask Mr. Mitchell if he is aware of anything that is not on al-Qaeda's “litany of grievances” against the United States. Mr. Mitchell pressed the point by quoting Osama bin Laden himself — I'm not joking — on Kyoto. From Osama's epistle to the Americans of 2003, he cited: “You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement . . .” Who knew? Osama, a Gaia man.

Hot, cold, wet or dry — drought, flood, frost or furnace — if conditions are not seasonal, the insidious influence of global warming is a piece of every weather dynamic. And every social phenomenon. Be it terrorism, famine, suicide in Italy or a flood in New Orleans, there's an article, a news story, or a conference to point to global warming as a principal cause, or a contributory aggravation.

There's something askew in this picture. To subsume every social, natural and political crisis as being subject to a single, all-encompassing force, is either to remove that phenomenon from human capacity to deal with it, or to invite a greater error — the hubris to believe that we can.

If we believe global warming is as big a problem as the world's experts are telling us, we also have to believe the world's politicians are capable of fixing it. That's a leap of faith the record doesn't support.

Every tiny corner of this planet, big or small, is a record of some politician's failure. Check your street: How long have the potholes been there? How's traffic in your downtown? The Vancouver Eastside — how long has that been a blight? Darfur? Oil for Food? Now, we want to believe the politicians are going to fix the weather of the whole world.

The world wants its politicians to “do something” about global warming.

Most likely, alas, they will.


27/01/07, Edward Greenspon, It's crystal clear: The environment will be the single most important issue of 2007, (Back).

Several fortnights ago, back in the dark ages of 2006, I roamed the hallways of the Liberal leadership convention wondering what in heaven's name was going on.

No, not the Stéphane Dion thing. That he stood to win seemed clear enough after the first ballot, and certainly the second.

Rather, it was the extraordinary greening of the Liberal Party. In government, the Liberals talked about tomorrow but lived for today and therefore successive environment ministers were sacrificed on the altar of economic expediency.

Now here I was in Montreal's Palais des congrès feeling a vibe more in keeping with a Green convention. Nor was it just Mr. Dion and his third pillar of environmental sustainability. Every candidate seemed to want to own a pooch named Kyoto. Every delegate seemed to bleed green, even if they wore red.

I left the convention wondering if 2007 would be the year of going green for Canada and then asked myself, if so, whether I knew about the issues at hand. Certainly I had written about the Kyoto Protocol over the years, once even tripping up Ralph Goodale over the costing and effectiveness of programs to achieve our targets. I had come to believe an international framework was necessary but that Kyoto asked a disproportionate amount of Canada.

But what did I really know — and if I felt lacking in confidence to navigate in a greening world, what about our readers?

Back in the newsroom, my colleagues were consumed by similar musings. They also felt something significant was afoot, not so much in terms of the science of global warming, but the public's perception of it. If there was any remaining doubt, Mr. Dion's first post-leadership trip to Toronto dispelled it. He squeezed in a private dinner before some television interviews. When the restaurant staff learned he would be dining there, they reset the table, insisting on using green dishes. There was definitely something happening here, although what wasn't exactly clear.

But what to do? First we wanted to test — really test — the extent to which public perceptions had shifted. We commissioned an in-depth poll from the Strategic Counsel. Then we decided that we would also turn 2007 into our year of going green.

Not that The Globe hasn't been concerned about the environment for a long time, including the phenomenon of global warming. We have reported aggressively on toxins in everyday goods, chemicals in our bodies and pollutants in our air and water.

But we have not fully devoted ourselves into plumbing the depths of the science of global warming, the emerging politics or the economic implications.

We began our planning by pulling together a group that included our science, environment and energy specialists to discuss the issues at play and how best to tell the story.

We concluded that debate over whether global warming and climate change actually exists was over, but that other debates remain alive and kicking. How much of the Earth's greenhouse-gas emissions were humankind's responsibility? Were the melting polar caps really a matter of concern for anyone other than polar bears and penguins? What was the economic cost of action? What was the economic cost of inaction? Was Kyoto a reasonable basis for moving forward?

And what was with the weather anyway?

Now it is 2007 and our year of going green officially starts today. That doesn't mean we have traded in journalist agnosticism for religion. We want to go big in order to help our readers gain insight into a hugely important issue. We are in the business or promoting debate, not dogma.

Yesterday, we reported on the remarkable surge of global warming as a political issue. Today, we go deeper and broader. Environment reporter Martin Mittelstaedt provides a preview of a major gathering of climate scientists in Paris next week that will put together all the recent and disturbing findings about global warming and climate change. Martin pulls together the whole issue himself.

In the Focus section, Margaret Wente, a famous skeptic, tells us about the evolution of her skepticism and handicaps Al Gore's prospects for winning an Oscar. Also in Focus, graphic artist Richard Johnson has crafted a luscious global warming map of Canada that every school child (many adults too) will want to pin to their wall.

We are a year away from the greenhouse-gas reduction commitments in the Kyoto Protocol kicking in. The time has come to truly understand and debate the issue of what Canada should do.

In the coming days and weeks there will be much more. Our intention is to give you coverage that is both smart and accessible. We are calling our continuing series The New Climate, a reflection of the apparent shift of weather patterns and public opinion.

Journalism is about asking the questions and debating the answers. Intuitively the country seems to have come to a conclusion that global warming is real and of importance. But so many more questions flow from that. We all have a lot to chew over.

Edward Greenspon, Editor-in-chief


27/01/07, Margaret Wente, Climate change a 'questionable truth', (Back).

A n Inconvenient Truth, the hugely influential documentary starring Al Gore, is a shoo-in for an Oscar. Its riveting depictions of violent storms, collapsing ice mountains and parched deserts have scared millions of people into believing that the world faces a catastrophic fate unless we make dramatic changes to our way of life, starting now.

Climate change has made its way onto the agenda of every developed nation, even the United States, where some of the nation's biggest businesses, including energy companies, are pressing the government to take action. It even figured in George W. Bush's State of the Union speech this week.

And next week the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will unleash another storm of headlines when it releases its latest consensus of scientific findings, stressing even more emphatically that human activity is causing global temperatures to rise.

Is the sky really falling? How fast and how hard? And if the vast majority of scientists agree, then why don't governments act? After all, nobody wants the world to melt.

If you're an average, concerned citizen, no one will blame you for being confused or angry. The global-warming debate has become so shrill, so political and so polarized that it's impossible for even a reasonably well-informed person to figure out who or what to believe. Only one thing is for sure: Science isn't all that is driving this debate. Politics, ideology and scaremongering are too.

Because I'm skeptical by nature, I've always discounted the environmental catastrophists. Their message is religious, not rational. But I've also spoken to enough brainy scientists to conclude that human activity is affecting the climate and that global warming is for real.

That's the famous consensus you keep hearing about. But that's where the consensus ends. Beyond that, the science is very far from settled. Scientists themselves are deeply split about how alarmed we should be, the nature of the threats we face, how imminent those threats are and what to do about them.

For apocalyptic predictions, you need only look to the bestseller list. Tim Flannery ( The Weather Makers) and George Monbiot ( Heat) both warn that civilization will collapse if we do nothing. So does Canada's David Suzuki. In Britain, James Lovelock argues that the Earth has already caught a “morbid fever,” and that “we are in a fool's climate and before this century is over billions of us will die.”

But many scientists are alarmed at the alarmism, and warn that catastrophic scenarios like the ones in Al Gore's film have pushed the science way too far. Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist who specializes in ocean/climate physics and water-resources management, has said, “Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster.”

Last fall, Professor Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Britain, wrote a damning condemnation of climate alarmism: “Over the past few years, a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country — the phenomenon of ‘catastrophic' climate change,” he wrote. “The increasing use of this term and its bedfellow qualifiers ‘chaotic,' ‘irreversible' and ‘rapid' has altered the public discourse, [which] is now characterized by phrases such as ‘irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate' and ‘we are at the point of no return.' ”

Prof. Hulme is no climate skeptic. He was the co-ordinating lead author of the chapter on “climate-change scenarios” for the last IPCC report in 2001.

To try to get a grip, I checked in with eight leading climate scientists, climate economists and climate-policy analysts. All believe that man-made climate change is a serious issue that demands action. And all reject the extremists at both ends. They represent the broad middle ground — the people whose voices have been all but drowned out by the shouting.

The first thing they stress is that while climate change is certain, what will actually happen is not. For example, scientists are pretty sure that sea levels will rise, and rising seas will pose a threat to coastal areas. But how much will they rise, and how fast, and where will they rise most? Sorry. Science can't tell you that.

“Nobody can really tell you what the probabilities are,” says Carl Wunsch, a leading climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The probability of another metre of sea-level rise in the next 50 years isn't zero, but it isn't 90 per cent, either. And if you pinned me down to tell you what it really is, I couldn't do that.”

Robert Mendelsohn is an environmental scientist at Yale who specializes in modelling the regional impacts of climate change. “The drought issues are one of the great uncertainties,” he says. “We know precipitation will increase, but we don't know exactly where.”

The very great uncertainty of long-term climate impacts is a point that often gets lost in the debate. The scenarios range from mild to severe, but it's the extreme ones that get the ink.

On top of that, many scientists say the average global surface temperature (which is the most popular way to talk about global warming) doesn't tell us very much at all about what's going to happen in any given region of the globe. “It's almost useless for what people care about, which is their growing season and how they live,” says Roger Pielke Sr., professor of climatology at Colorado State University and the state's official climatologist.

Dr. Pielke is steeped in decades of climate research. And he points out that carbon-dioxide emissions are just one of many man-made impacts on the climate. Land-use changes are another. “There are a lot of things that humans are doing to the climate beyond CO{-2}, and we don't understand them,” he says.

We also don't know enough to say with any degree of certainty whether taking action X will produce result Y. “Say you spend a trillion dollars to limit CO{-2} emissions. Will you be able to limit the sea-level rise, or droughts?” Prof. Wunsch says. “People are asking questions of the science that science can't answer.” (For the record, he believes that rising seas could cause “an awful lot of damage to an awful lot of people.”)

Science can, and must, inform policy decisions. But science by itself can't tell us what to do. What to do is a matter of great (and understandable) dispute, and making policy to deal with climate change is fraught with all kinds of real-world complications. Figuring out smart policies to adopt is hard, and implementing them is even harder. It's all very well to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. But if nobody complies, then what's the point?

All this doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and give up. The challenge is to figure out what actions are feasible and give us a reasonable insurance policy against disaster.

At this point, most people say: Well, obviously we've got to start cutting greenhouse-gas emissions as fast as possible. Surely that's the way to make a difference.

This is one of the most common misunderstandings in the global-warming debate. To explain why, I called on Roger Pielke Jr., a leading climate-policy expert (and, coincidentally, Roger Sr.'s son.)

He supplied this analogy: Imagine that you are filling up a bathtub. Right now, it is 380 inches deep. You are filling up the tub at a rate that adds seven inches every year. The drain at the bottom lets out the equivalent of two inches a year.

Under these conditions, the bathtub will keep filling up at a rate of five inches a year. If we cut the rate of filling by, say, 20 per cent, to 5.6 inches per year, the bathtub will keep filling up by 3.6 inches a year. Cuts in the rate of filling do not mean that the level in the tub will go down. In fact, if you cut the rate of filling to zero, it will still take quite a while for the tub to drain down to, say, 280 inches.

Now, substitute CO2 concentrations for tub depth and emissions for water, and you have a rough analogy to the climate system. Carbon cuts will have an impact — but not for many, many years, because they represent only a tiny fraction of the total CO2 that's already in the atmosphere.

“ ‘Stop global warming' is a non-sequitur,” Prof. Pielke says. “Any emissions reductions won't have a perceptible impact on climate in our lifetimes. It's quite misleading, as Al Gore suggests, to say that if we drive a hybrid or change our light bulbs, we can reduce the risk from hurricanes.”

The climate debate focuses almost entirely on mitigation (how we can slow down global warming). But climate scientists and policy experts say that in the short term — our lifetimes — our most important insurance policy is adaptation. Nothing we do to cut emissions will reduce the risk from hurricanes or rising seas in the short term. But there are other ways to reduce the risk. We can build storm-surge defences, stop building in coastal areas and make sure we protect our fresh-water supplies from salination. We also can develop crops that will do well in hotter climates.

“Adaptation” is not a word that figures much in climate-change debates. Activists (and much of the general public) think it sounds lazy and defeatist. But the experts talk about adaptation all the time.

“Climate-change policy requires that both of these issues — adaptation and carbon reduction — be addressed simultaneously,” Yale's Prof. Mendelsohn says.

He adds another unpopular observation: Climate change won't necessarily be all bad. Moderate warming would even have some benefits. Large parts of Canada would become far more pleasant, with longer growing seasons, more arable land and warmer winters. Our energy consumption would go down, as would our heating bills. “The magnitude of the good things could be very large for Canada,” he says, while hastening to add that he hopes we are altruistic enough to curb our greenhouse-gas emissions anyway.

For the record, all these experts are highly critical of An Inconvenient Truth and the scary headlines that regularly sweep the media. (Climate alarmism sells, and the media know it.)

Prof. Wunsch, the ocean-currents expert, says that despite what Mr. Gore asserts, there is no chance whatsoever that the Gulf Stream will slow down or stop. Nor did Hurricane Katrina have any link with global warming, nor do this winter's storms and other strange weather. There are enough real worries about climate change that we don't have to invent imaginary ones.

There's something else on which the middle ground agrees. Curbing CO2 is in fact a very wise and prudent thing to do. Call it an insurance policy for the long term.

How to do that? We're back to policy again, and consensus is hard to find. But climate economists generally agree that the first and most important thing to do is put a value on the atmosphere. You do this with carbon taxes and emissions caps. If emitting carbon costs money, then people will have a big incentive to cut down on it.

Mark Jaccard is a professor of resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and also the author of an award-winning book called Sustainable Fossil Fuels. It's not a zippy read like The Weather Makers, but it's way more important, and Prof. Jaccard is in big demand these days among people wrestling with climate policy.

He argues that the best way to cut down on emissions is to clean up fossil fuels — which, like it or not, will still be our main source of energy for the next few decades. Cleaning up fossil fuels is far more feasible than, say, imagining we can replace them any time soon with wind or solar or biomass or hydrogen.

How to clean up fossil fuels? Tell the energy industry that it must capture a growing amount of the carbon it emits, by scrubbing it out or dumping it back into the ground. Set the targets and let the industry figure out how to meet them. Start gradually and ramp up. Small changes starting now will reap huge benefits down the road — not in time for the next hurricane season, but in generations to come.

This is not as sexy as putting solar panels on your roof or riding your bike to work. But it's actually a better solution to the problem. California's Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing this already, by imposing carbon-reduction targets on the automakers. “They're market-oriented regulations,” Prof. Jaccard says. “What he says is, ‘You guys figure out how to get it done.' ”

By the way, Prof. Jaccard and other climate economists agree we should have started taking this type of action years ago, and they blast both business and governments for not getting off the dime.

Other experts have different (but not incompatible) takes. “We need to break out the challenges of energy policy and adaptation into many tens of thousands of parts,” Roger Pielke Jr. says. Despite the many uncertainties, we don't need to wait to act, if only because many of the things we should do are worth doing on their own. For example, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels from unstable parts of the world — through substitution, conservation and new technologies — is a no-brainer.

But what about the alarmists? The ones who argue that the only way to save the planet is to stop driving, stop flying and stop consuming? Prof. Jaccard (who told me that he himself tries to live with a “small material footprint”) says: “Environmental activists are using climate change to wrap around their message about how they want humans to behave differently.”

In other words, it's not just carbon emissions they object to. It's our whole materialist, growth-oriented, SUV-driving way of life. For this reason, he argues that people like Tim Flannery are actually dangerous. “He gives people the impression that putting solar panels on your roof is actually a solution to the problem. And it's not.”

Here's another thought from Yale's Robert Mendelsohn. “The mistake Al Gore and others are making is to look at the cumulative effects of all the emissions over the next 100 years if we do nothing. And they say that will be really bad. And they may well be right. But the economics of this is that the damage from emissions now is quite small. So what we ought to be doing now is relatively mild things that don't cost very much. You should start slow and get increasingly strict over time.”

Mark Jaccard agrees. In fact, he argues that if we start to do the right things now, we will scarcely notice because adjustment will be gradual. The important thing is to get started. Now.

So what can a worried citizen do? “Lobby the politicians to put policies in place immediately that put a value on the environment,” he says. “Drive your car to Ottawa if you have to. The most important thing is to get policies in place that are intelligent.” And go ahead and ride your bike to work. At the very least, it will be good for your health.

As for Al Gore, here's one prediction you can bank on: Even though much of what he says is dubious or just plain wrong, he's going to win that Oscar anyway.


26/01/07, Jeffrey Simpson, Climate-change scoffers have seen their day, (Back).

Climate-change scoffers are now as rare as defenders of the invasion of Iraq.

Reasonable people, in Canada and abroad, can differ over the means to combat the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that produce climatic changes, but only a dwindling few now deny changes are occurring — and that more will occur, with mostly negative effects.

Reasonable people, too, can differ over the severity and effects of climate change. Even the best scientific evidence, asked to predict climate patterns decades from now, contains large margins for uncertainty. There will always be anomalies and outlying events. The scoffers immediately seize these to debunk the entire theory of climate change.

But these are anomalies, as in, the extreme northeastern corner of Canada has been getting colder. Yes, but the rest of the country has been getting warmer, especially the much larger area of the northwest and west. Or, one glacier in the Arctic is growing (in the northeast corner), whereas glaciers everywhere else in Canada are receding. The anomalies, in other words, make good copy but they are swamped by the pattern.

Next week, the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the distillation of the work of about 2,000 scientists, might bring more precision to previous forecasts. Even so, there will be a margin for uncertainty, although there will be no doubt about the general direction of the climate.

The planet has been warming, especially in the past 50 years, largely from human activities, notably the burning of fossil fuels for heat, electricity and transportation. If current trends continue unchecked, the warming will intensify with consequences everywhere, including Canada.

In Canada, the remaining scoffers use a variety of arguments to debunk the reality of climate change, starting with alarming forecasts of economic costs. These have been the business community's hardy favourites for 20 years. The scoffers are right: There will be short-term economic costs, depending on the imposition on business to change practices. What business scoffers almost never do is assess the costs of the alternative: doing nothing or very little.

There are costs from acting, and costs from not acting. By not acting, we mean essentially what Canada has done for two decades: rely on voluntarism and normal improvements in energy efficiency.

Under this approach, some industries, mostly in manufacturing and services — chemicals, construction, metals — have reduced emissions as sound business practice; in other industries — utilities, petroleum and related products, transportation — emissions have soared. Consumers, too, have not changed habits, despite futile government blandishments and incentives.

This approach, therefore, has resulted in a roughly 30-per-cent increase in Canadian emissions since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997. That record is among the very worst in the industrialized world. Knowing this, the scoffers shift to the 2-per-cent argument. It goes like this. Canada only produces 2 per cent of the world's emissions, so why should we impose burdens on ourselves when our contribution is so small?

By this logic, Canada would roll up the oceans and nestle into a comfortable, but rather parochial existence. Why give foreign aid when Canada's contribution can't really eradicate disease and poverty? Why be in Afghanistan when we have only 2,500 troops to contribute? Why participate in many international institutions when there are so many other, larger and more powerful countries?

Yes, insist the scoffers, but even if we did our share, it would mean so little in saving the atmosphere. This is the classic argument that leads to the tragedy of the commons.

If no one person, institution or country contributes enough to be identified as principally responsible for degrading a commons, such as the atmosphere or oceans or a grazing pasture, then no action will be taken by anyone. And the commons will keep getting degraded. Canadians, of all people, saw the tragedy of the commons at work — or at least every Newfoundlander did. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for the decline of the northern cod stocks. Every interest pointed fingers at other interests. Every interest said their take of fish was not the source of the problem. They would keep fishing until other fishing interests changed their ways. Until the stocks disappeared, and everyone suffered.

But, say the scoffers, what about, China, India, Brazil and George W. Bush's United States? None of these countries are in the Kyoto Protocol that Canada ratified. Why should we impose burdens on ourselves when they do not? To which, in one sense, the answer is: If Canada and other likeminded countries do not impose burdens on themselves, what suasion could they conceivably muster on others to follow an example? And, after all, most of the greenhouse-gas buildup occurred during the post-Industrial Revolution period, from which a handful of European and North American countries disproportionately benefited.

This scoffer's argument is a variation of the tragedy of the commons: Some countries are acting, but unless and until every country acts, then we should do nothing. Or at least the bare minimum.

The scoffers have had — and continue to have — a field day with the ineptitude and hypocrisy of most governments in Canada.

Governments have often talked from both sides of their mouth. They have spent — wasted — billions of dollars on ineffective programs. They have watched governments talk big and act small. They have observed governments running from the tools almost every economist has suggested might allow progress against emissions.

This argument of the scoffers is not really about ineffective means — for there are many more effective ones at hand — but about ends. The scoffers fundamentally do not believe climate change is a problem, except in a kind of polite-conversation fashion, because the science is too uncertain, the effects too unknown, the changes too diffuse.

A few have studied the matter carefully, and lean against the weight of worldwide scientific opinion. Others just enjoy the sport of being contrary. Not much is going to change their views or their sport.

As with the defenders of Iraq, their numbers are in sharp decline.


29/01/07, Steven Chase, Wary Tories rip Dion in TV ad blitz, (Back).

'They're running scared,' Ignatieff says of attempt to discredit Liberal Leader.

OTTAWA — With polls still denying them a shot at a majority government, the Harper Conservatives are launching a TV attack-ad campaign aimed at discrediting Stéphane Dion and erasing any appetite the Liberals might have for an early election.

It's a bid to buy more time in office by eroding support for the Liberals and thus preventing Mr. Dion's party from working to topple the Tory government when Parliament votes on the 2007 budget, expected to be tabled on March 20.

Three English-language TV ads begin airing Monday morning, attacking Mr. Dion's environmental credentials, portraying him as indecisive and trying to link him to former Liberal government scandals.

The Liberals said the negative-advertising campaign shows the Harper Conservatives are desperate because Mr. Dion is considered strong on the environment, a top-of-mind public worry today.

“They're running scared,” Michael Ignatieff, the deputy Liberal leader, said in an interview.

“They govern like an opposition. Instead of ... doing their job, they spend their time attacking the previous administration.”

Canadians will see through the negative messaging Mr. Dion said. “Harper has nothing positive to say about his own record,” he told CBC Newsworld.

“Being unable to say anything positive about [himself], he wants to spend all this money to try to attack me in a very negative way.”

Strategic Counsel pollster Allan Gregg said the negative ads may prove effective for the Tories in reducing faith in Mr. Dion's environmental credentials, even if they damage the political system.

“That said, first, they [negative ads] communicate extremely well. People know exactly what they are saying,” Mr. Gregg told CTV's Question Period.

“Secondly, ... it feeds into both the general cynicism and the belief that no political party has got a particularly good agenda on the environment. It's probably smart politics. I don't know if it's good public policy.”

The average federal minority government in Canada lasts a little less than 18 months and today, at roughly the 12-month mark, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he has no interest in an early election.

“What would be the point of an election, especially if it would just result in another minority anyway,” Mr. Harper told The Canadian Press.

Mr. Dion, elected Liberal Leader late last year, is still a relative unknown to many Canadians and the Tories appear eager to capitalize on that by defining him themselves.

The English-language TV spots will air on various shows for the next few weeks, from the Feb. 4 Super Bowl to specialty channels in a bid to blanket the country with the message.

“We want to demonstrate the only thing green about Stéphane Dion is his inexperience as a leader,” said Jason Kenney, Secretary of State for Multiculturalism.

“You'll be seeing these ads on shows a lot of people watch. We're just looking for high exposure to our message.”

The Tories say they'll release a second wave of advertising that includes French-language TV spots aimed at Quebec in the near future.

Mr. Kenney refused to discuss the Tory budget for this negative-advertising campaign, saying only that his party will spend “as much as it takes to drive our message home.”

He said the Tories don't want an election any time soon, not surprising in light of polls showing the Tories and Liberals are nearly tied for voter support. A January Strategic Counsel survey pegged Liberal support at 35 per cent compared with 31 per cent for the Tories.

The ads that start running this morning are very simple spots that combine footage from last fall's Liberal leadership race with screens of printed text and a voiceover, using criticism from Mr. Dion's rivals to drive home the message.

They play on the fact that Mr. Dion served for nearly a decade in the cabinets of the two former prime ministers, noting that greenhouse-gas emissions jumped rather than fell during the 1990s.

One ad features Mr. Ignatieff criticizing Mr. Dion on the party's environmental record during a Liberal leadership debate. “We didn't get it done,” Mr. Ignatieff says. Ken Dryden, another former leadership rival, adds: “What stopped us? Why didn't we do better?”

The ad concludes by saying: “The Liberals had 13 years to get it down. Let's not go back.”

Another ad shows Mr. Dion lashing out at Mr. Ignatieff's criticism during a leadership debate, saying: “This is unfair ... do you think it's easy to make priorities?” A voiceover says: “Leaders set priorities. Leaders get things done. Stéphane Dion is not a leader.”

A third ad keeps repeating a shot of Mr. Dion saying “Liberals, we need to go back to power as soon as possible” with references to various scandals that dogged the former Liberal prime ministers he served.


31/01/07, Martin Mittelstaedt, The fallout of global warming: 1,000 years, (Back).

In stark terms, scientists confirm that climate change is 'unequivocal'.

Humans have already caused so much damage to the atmosphere that the effects of global warming will last for more than 1,000 years, according to a summary of a climate-change report being prepared by the world's leading scientists.

The draft, seen by The Globe and Mail yesterday, also says evidence the world is heating up is now so strong it is “unequivocal” and predicts more frequent heat waves, droughts and rain storms, as well as more violent typhoons and hurricanes. It concludes the higher temperatures observed during the past 50 years are so dramatically different from anything in the climate record that the last half-century period was likely the hottest in at least the past 1,300 years.

Moreover, 11 of the past 12 years rank among the warmest since humans began taking accurate temperature measurements in the 1850s, a record of extremes so pronounced it is unlikely to be due to chance.

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, melting of snow and ice, and rising sea level,” says the draft, which is being reviewed in Paris before its formal release Friday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The draft also makes projections of how the climate is likely to change over this century:

-- Sea ice will shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and late summer sea ice in the Arctic could disappear almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century;

-- Heat waves and storms involving heavy precipitation will continue to become more common, as will droughts;

-- The number of hurricanes will decrease, but the ones that do occur will be more powerful;

-- Ocean currents responsible for such things as the Gulf Stream will slow, possibly by as much as 25 per cent. The report said it's “very unlikely” that currents will have abrupt changes during the 21st century, but longer-term alterations “cannot be assessed with confidence.”

-- Global temperatures in 2090-99 are likely to be 1.7 degrees to 4 degrees warmer than the period from 1980-1999;

-- Current models suggest global warming of 1.9 to 4.6 degrees would lead to a “virtually complete” elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a rise in sea levels of about 7 metres, if sustained for millennia;

-- Sea levels will probably rise from between 0.28 metres and 0.43 metres, although there is a chance the increase will be larger if Greenland and Antarctic ice discharges continue to grow.

The IPCC report is the fourth to be issued by the UN-organized group of scientists, and draws on contributions of about 2,000 top experts from around the world, including many from Canada.

The panel's findings have evolved since the first was issued in 1990, becoming more confident over time that human activity — mainly the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and large-scale agriculture — have been causing profound changes on the climate.

The first report suggested global warming might be happening. The second, in 1995, said it was likely to be under way, while the third, in 2001, had a tone that indicated scientists were pretty sure they were seeing humanity's fingerprints on changes in climate.

Given the stark tenor of the draft scientists are now considering, they seem absolutely sure that climate change is happening.

The projection that human influence on the atmosphere during the 21st century will contribute to warming for more than 1,000 years is based on estimates for how long it will take nature to remove global-warming gases from the air.

The draft says evidence of warming is now being found almost everywhere in the world, from the tops of mountains, where glaciers are in retreat, to ocean deeps, where the average water temperatures have increased all the way down to depths of 3,000 metres because of the warming effect of a hotter atmosphere.

Some environmentalists are predicting that a strongly worded IPCC report will dispel any lingering doubts that global warming is really happening, and are calling on politicians to start taking more sweeping action to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for climate change.

“There is no more reason to delay,” said John Bennett, spokesman for the Climate Action Network Canada. “We need the policies, regulations, and programs to reduce emissions and we need to do it with the same kind of urgency that we would use to fight a war.”

The United Nations' top environment official is calling for an emergency climate-change summit later this year.

The IPCC report will be issued in four instalments over the course of the year. The first section, now being prepared, deals with all new scientific evidence assembled since 2001 on how the world's climate has been changing. The others will deal with specific topics, such as how humans can adapt to climate change and mitigate its effects.

The draft says concentrations of two main greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, “far exceed” anything seen over the past 650,000 years, based on data that reconstructed the atmospheric composition of earlier times using air bubbles contained in ice cores.

The changes to the atmosphere are so large the scientists estimate that warming due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are at least five times larger than natural changes caused by normal alterations in output of solar energy from the sun.

Although the draft doesn't mention Canada directly, it says average Arctic temperatures have experienced a far sharper rise than elsewhere on the planet, increasing at a rate over the past 100 years that is double the global average.


31/01/07, Brian Laghi, Harper sought money for 'Battle of Kyoto', (Back).

Plans to kill accord set out in 2002 letter obtained by Liberals.

Stephen Harper tried to kill the Kyoto accord in Parliament five years ago by characterizing carbon-dioxide emissions as an indispensable component of life, according to a letter aimed at raising funds for his former party.

In the letter, obtained by the federal Liberals, Mr. Harper also called the accord a socialist agreement that would only suck money out of the world's wealthier economies.

Mr. Harper wrote the 2002 fundraising letter when he was leader of the Canadian Alliance, one of the two parties, along with the Progressive Conservatives, that founded the Conservative Party. Federal Liberals unearthed and circulated it yesterday in an effort to discredit Tory policies on reducing greenhouse gasses.

The letter was an effort by the Alliance to raise funds to fight the "battle of Kyoto" in Parliament just as the Liberals were moving to ratify the deal.

"For a long time, the Canadian Alliance stood virtually alone in opposing the Kyoto accord," he wrote.

"Jean Chrétien [then the prime minister] says he will introduce a resolution to ratify Kyoto into Parliament and get it passed before Christmas. We will do everything we can to stop him there, but he might get it passed with the help of the socialists in the NDP and the separatists in the BQ."

In the body of the note, Mr. Harper says the accord is based on "tentative and contradictory scientific evidence."

"It focuses on carbon dioxide, which is essential to life, rather than upon pollutants."

Carbon dioxide is one of the chief gases being blamed for global warming. Humans emit it simply by breathing, and it is a key food for plants, which transform the gas into oxygen.

While no scientist disputes that carbon dioxide is key to sustaining life on Earth, the concern is that the increasing density of carbon in the atmosphere is trapping heat and raising the Earth's temperature.

At one point in the letter, Mr. Harper also says the oil and gas industry will be crippled by the accord and that Third World economies will be the ones that are helped.

"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations."

The letter asks party members to contribute between $100 and $500 to fight the battle.

"We can't stop Kyoto just in Parliament. We need your help at all levels," he wrote.

"We need you to inform yourself about Kyoto, to discuss it with your friends and neighbours, and to write protest letters to newspapers and the government."

Liberal MP Mark Holland ridiculed the letter in the House of Commons.

"When it comes to Kyoto, is this the Prime Minister's version of getting the job done?" he asked.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office, who asked not be identified by name, said Mr. Harper wrote the letter five years after Canada signed Kyoto, and was pointing out that the Liberals had no plan to meet the targets.

"We're going to reduce greenhouse gases and it's not going to take us 10 years to start," the spokesman said.

The spokesman would not comment on the specifics of the letter, such as Mr. Harper's questioning of the role of carbon dioxide in contributing to climate change.

(Back)

25/01/07, Gary Mason, Living large on a small planet

VANCOUVER -- While Mayor Sam Sullivan's Eco-Density initiative hasn't produced much excitement locally, it's drawing attention elsewhere.

The program, which promotes increasing density as a means of reducing our collective impact on the planet, is the subject of a lengthy and mostly positive examination in a recent issue of Planning, a highly influential magazine put out by the American Planning Association.

Densification, of course, is not new. It has been tried elsewhere in North America with mixed to little success. People have become accustomed to their sprawling single-family dwellings and don't like the idea of anything cramping their lifestyle. But because of the debate now raging around climate change, the timing may be right for densification initiatives that are predicated on the need to reduce our "ecological footprint."

The term refers to the amount of land and water a human population requires to accommodate the resources it consumes and the waste it produces. The concept and formula by which a city's (or country's) ecological footprint can be measured was created by William Rees, an ecological economist at the University of British Columbia.

There was a minor buzz around Prof. Rees's idea in the late 1990s, mostly upon the release of a book he co-authored on the subject. Now, however, fresh momentum seems to be building behind his work, momentum being used to justify hard-to-sell initiatives such as densification.

Chalk it up to the greenmania sweeping North America.

Canadians currently require a per capita average of 7.25 global hectares of land to support their lifestyle. Globally, the average amount of productive ecosystem is 1.8 hectares a person and the average ecological footprint is currently about 2.2 hectares.

In other words, we are living as if our planet were 20 to 25 per cent larger than it actually is. Or, in the words of men like Prof. Rees, we are in a state of "overshoot."

According to the Living Planet Report of 2006, the United States had an ecological footprint in 2003 of about 9.5 global hectares a person. Given that the planet's remaining supply of productive land and water is, as mentioned, about 1.8 hectares per person, the United States would need four more planets to sustain its current standard of living.

Greater Vancouver's 2.1 million residents have a per capita ecological footprint of 6.7 hectares. Or put another way, the total ecological footprint of the region is almost 300 times its geographical area. Despite all its claims, Vancouver is far from being a sustainable city.

The primary components of a city's ecological footprint are personal transportation and the construction and operation of buildings -- residential or otherwise. Running buildings of any type requires huge amounts of energy.

In an earlier study, Prof. Rees found that moving from a single-family home to either a three-storey walkup or high-rise resulted in a 40-per-cent reduction in the ecological footprint related to transportation and house maintenance.

Density is good for the environment. Anything that is good for the environment has become a much easier sell politically these days. This is why Mr. Sullivan has rebranded the city's densification efforts under the Eco-Density banner.

Vancouver has been a leader in densification over the past 10 to 15 years. However, it has mainly consisted of building residential high-rises on unoccupied brown sites. The process gets harder now as the city tries to densify neighbourhoods of single-family homes -- a group that has historically resisted such efforts throughout North America. The word "livability" has always led city planning efforts here. Consequently, Vancouver is one of the most livable cities in the world. But under Eco-Density, the degree to which new projects achieve ecological sustainability will be the new measure and definition of success -- not livability.

Brent Toderian, the city's new director of planning, agrees that Prof. Rees's notion of an ecological footprint is a concept whose time has come."There is no question it's gaining traction," Mr. Toderian says. "The ideas of livability and sustainability have been two things that have for a long time been very subjective.

"The power of the ecological footprint is that it takes away some of that subjectivity. It gives us a way to measure and quantify things. You can now calculate your own personal footprint and I can tell you it can be shocking when you see it."

Vancouver is experimenting with many options to eco-densify, including converting single-family houses to three-dwelling units without changing the facade of the home. Otherwise known as invisible density. The city has appealed to residents for their own ideas of how to densify intelligently.

"I don't think there is a city better positioned to have this discussion," Mr. Toderian says. "Vancouverites, better than most, can make the connection between their living patterns, density patterns and issues like climate change."

Which is an issue that seems to be framing every discussion we have these days.

John Ampan

25/01/07, Klaus Brinkbäumer, John Ampan's Four-Year Journey from Ghana to Europe

John Ekow Ampan's trek from Africa to Europe is a tale of desperation. During his four-year journey from Ghana to Spain, he was deported and imprisoned several times, and yet he remained determined to reach the European Promised Land.

There are journeys that change a traveler, that transform him into a different person. And there are travelers who, by the end of their journey, want nothing so much as for life to return to the way it used to be. But they discover that there is no turning back, that their world has changed irrevocably.

For John Ekow Ampan, Africa was his home throughout his journey. Then he lost his security -- his friends, his customers, his language and his laugh. He wanted to become a European. Today he dresses like a European, works like a European and buys European TVs and washing machines.

"But I'll never be one," he says.

Ampan, 46, wears his hair cropped close to his head and sports the crescent-shaped scar of the Fante tribe on his left cheek, a mark of belonging the Fante slice into their children. Wearing a green T-shirt, grey Levis, a blue cap and headphones, John is returning home with gifts for his children -- they fill many, many plastic bags.

ABOUT THIS SERIES:
People flee from wars and famines, but often it is the search for a better life that drives hundreds of thousands of people from poor countries to set out abroad each year. During a trip that lasted seven weeks, SPIEGEL reporter Klaus Brinkbäumer, 39, and photographer Markus Matzel, retraced the odyssey of 46- year- old John Ekow Ampan, a Ghanian father of three, to Europe. Before he managed to reach Spain, on the promised land, the European continent, Ampan numerous setbacks and even arrests on a trip that took four years to complete. Accompanied by SPIEGEL, Ampan made the journey once again -- retracing his route through Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco and all the most important stations in his journey. Brinkbäumer documented his journey in a new book published in Germany this autumn, titled "The Dream of Life." Three days ago, John called his wife Vida in Ghana to tell her he was coming home. "No," she said, "don't play games with us, and don't make that kind of promise. I'm not telling the children anything. I don't want them to waste their time hoping for a father who disappeared 14 years ago." For more than a decade now, the African family's connection to their father has a been, at most, a once-weekly phone call lasting perhaps all of one minute, e-mails and the €200 a month he sends from his home in Europe to the Ghanaian capital of Accra each month.

Those 14 years will come to an end on a Monday evening at 6:12 p.m., when John's flight touches down in Accra. Alice, his youngest daughter, has never met her father, never played with him. Letters and phone calls have been their only link. But she knows that the €200 he has been sending, month after month, are the reason she is able to go to school.

John goes to the baggage claim, takes his bag and walks, without smiling, to the exit. A poster proclaims: "Germany 2006, we're on our way" -- a reference to Ghana's national football team, which will be greeted with enthusiasm in Europe.

Europe is decidedly less welcoming to those who are now leaving West Africa. They embark on their journeys filled with a mix of despair and hope, but few ever reach their destination. Most end up in jails or camps, fall ill or die, or fail because they run out of money or are turned in to authorities. Some have almost made it but, after traveling about 5,000 kilometers (3,107 miles) cross-country, their inflatable boats sink during the final, 14-kilometer (9 mile) Mediterranean crossing, and no one ever learns that they made the trip in the first place.

Africa, with its population of 910 million, is home to 14 percent of the world's population. Seventy-one percent of Africans are younger than 25. In sub-Saharan Africa, 45.7 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Of the 38 countries the International Monetary Fund (IMF) classifies as "highly indebted poor countries," 32 are African. For every 1,000 children born in the countries south of the Sahara, 102 die before their first birthdays. The average life expectancy in these countries is 46 years, and the most common cause of death is AIDS. There are 30 million guns in circulation south of the Sahara.

More than 17 million Africans are migrants or refugees.

No one could be better qualified to serve as a guide for anyone hoping to understand this mass migration than John Ampan, who experienced everything there is to experience on his four-year journey. Living in the Spanish region of Andalusia for the last ten years, he now helps those who arrive here from Morocco. He is also willing to retrace his steps and embark on his journey a second time, from Ghana, through the Sahara Desert and to the Mediterranean coast.

He walks to the exit and the doors open to a blast of hot, heavy and humid air from outside. "Finally," says John, quietly.

Station One: The journey begins in Accra, Ghana

They stand facing each other, unable to speak, John on one side of the fence and his wife, Vida, on the other. A matron in a yellow dress, she wears her hair in a bun, a towel stuck to her cleavage to wipe away the sweat -- and she smiles.

Alice, their 14-year-old daughter, is at her side. She wears a short blouse with narrow straps on one side. And she wears headphones, which she doesn't remove.

Glenn is also there to greet his father. The 18-year-old soccer player is nicknamed "Pelé," after Abédi "Pelé" Ayew, a Ghanaian sports legend. Glenn wears knee-length jeans and a T-shirt, smiles guardedly and is silent and unmoving.

And then there is Eva, a 20-year-old college student, her slim body squeezed into tight jeans. She raises her arms as if to stretch her spine, adopting the pose of an adolescent showing her father how beautiful she is.

John approaches his family, opens his mouth as if to speak and then closes it again, and his wife closes her eyes. The two raise their arms to embrace but then drop them to their sides again.

They stand facing one another. Vida and the three adolescents smile shyly, the youngest extends her arm but drops it again, and John pushes his baggage cart and approaches his family. They stand there, silent, as he embraces his wife. They stand there as strangers, the children not recognizing their own father. Who is this man?

"Dad?" Alice asks.

After five awkward minutes, they begin making smalltalk -- chatting about the luggage, who will take which car and where to find the taxis.

The Ampans live in the port city of Tema, 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Accra, in a neighborhood called Community 5. Tema, population 100,000, is a city of crumbling buildings and sandy streets. The family owns a small stone house with a small roadside bar Vida runs in the front -- a simple place with yellow walls, a white ceiling and a bare concrete floor. The sparse furnishings include a portable gas stove with two burners, two laundry lines running diagonally across the room and two plastic bowls where Vida and her daughters wash glasses. The boom box at the entrance, which helps attract customers, was the first present John sent from Europe.

"I missed my father all those years"

They live relatively well. The children go to school and Eva, the eldest, attends college -- all paid for with the money John has been sending home. And Vida does what women do in any crisis region: She controls the crisis by controlling daily life. The Ampan's circumstances are not that uncommon here in Ghana. The husband sets off to reach Europe, and the wife stays at home, where she'll get up every morning at 5:30 to make Coco, Ghanaian porridge, wake the children and send them off to school, open the bar at 8:00 a.m. and close it at 11:00 p.m.

John spends five days with his family. Glenn, his son, is taciturn and constantly walks away. When his father sits downstairs, Glenn finds an excuse to go upstairs, and seems to stay away for as long as he can. He says: "I don't want his money and I don't need his clothes. I missed my father for all those years. "

It doesn't take long for the quarreling starts over who owns the house. "Come to my house tomorrow at one," says John. "Our house," says Eva. "Your house," says John.

Then he looks at his daughter the way fathers look at their daughters, tenderly and proudly. "I used to hold her on my arm for so long. Until she was four years old," he says.

"Six. I was six, Dad, when you went away." "So you were six," he responds. "From then on, other people loved me more," says Eva.

John Ekow Ampan is a cousin of football player Samuel Osei Kuffour, nicknamed Sammy, who played for German football team Bayern München for many years before switching to Rome. John paid his cousin a visit in the spring of 2000, when Bayern München was playing a match in Madrid. He has a photo that shows him posing with German football legend Franz Beckenbauer. In the photo Beckenbauer stares fiercely into the distance.

Opportunities for everyone in Europe

The two cousins' mothers came from Kumasi, a town 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Accra. There was a man in Kumasi who they called "Hamburger" because he worked in Germany.

"It's so cold in Germany that you don't need a refrigerator. You set your beer on the windowsill when you go to the toilet. When you come back from the toilet it's frozen." These were the kinds of stories Hamburger told. He drove a Mercedes 230 with a horn that sounded like a cow mooing. Hamburger told the villagers that he had started out as a dishwasher and that he was working three jobs now. He also told the villagers that there were opportunities for everyone in Germany. Then he brought the first color TV set to the village and a leather ball for the boys.

Hamburger infected everyone with his stories about Europe. John says that every African village has its own Hamburger, and that these men make a stronger imprint on people's minds than the rumors of inflatable boats sinking in the Mediterranean, tragedies for which there are no images.

John attended elementary school and then learned the trades of carpentry and upholstery. He met Vida in northern Ghana where, at 17, she was helping her mother in the family store, selling paper, sweets and beer. "She was so pretty and funny and nice," he recalls. He asked a friend for advice. The friend spoke with Vida's older sister, who spoke with her mother, and a meeting was arranged to discuss marriage between John and Vida. It wasn't especially romantic, it was very African.

Barely married, Ampan left to find work in Nigeria. In the summer of 1993, when the couple had been together for several years, Vida Ampan received a message from John, who had been doing jobs as a guest worker in Lagos, Nigeria, for the past year and a half. John wrote that he needed to see her -- not at home, but at a location 125 kilometers (78 miles) outside the city.

At 9:00 p.m. on the day of the arranged meeting, John was waiting in his hotel in a town called Sogakope. It was a flat, white building with a terrace and a stairway leading down to the rooms. At about €10 per night, or four for those who knew how to haggle, the rooms were cheap at the Volta View Hotel. Located as it was on the main road, it was noisy here at the Volta View -- flooded by the constant sounds of engines, horns, drums and music that would continue well into the night. John waited, and soon Vida arrived with the baby he hadn't even seen yet -- Alice, age one.

The couple had only one night together, but neither of them slept.

Vida was against the idea. She knew if he went it would be a long time before she saw him again -- and this might even be the last time. He said that they were married, which meant he had to take care of her and the children, something he felt he couldn't do in Africa. "No," she said, that wasn't true. The reason they married was so that they could be together. She wept and she shouted. She knew nothing about Europe, but she did know that she was terrified of what might happen. John remained uncharacteristically tough and resolute. He had $1,000 in debts in Accra, money he said he would never be able to repay. He said he wanted to fight for his family's future, and that there was no future here in Africa.

They lay there together, embracing and talking, and at dawn he left the hotel and, after catching a bus to Lomé in Togo, was soon far away.

Asked today if she understood the odyssey John was about to embark on, Vida answers: "No, not then."

Asked if she can understand 10 years later why he left, Vida doesn't respond.

She plays with her bracelet, and John says: "She's doing well. She's happy." Vida says that the school costs 100,000 Cedi a month for each child, or about €9. The school fees are due every three months, and when parents don't have the money their children are quickly expelled. The €200 John sends home each month are worth about 2.2 million Cedi, enough to meet the family's needs. Vida says: "Families who have no one in Europe don't make it. I understand him today."

Draining the continent

We drive along the coast. We pass the Konkomba market, where they sell fruit and old German clothes that become second-hand, third-hand or even fourth-hand goods here in Africa. We pass the Wind Star Night Club, a shack consisting of a couple of counters and two sofas on the side of the road. "I don't recognize anything," says John. "My home is a foreign place to me." We drive to Cape Coast to visit one of the 37 former slave forts on the Ghana coast.

It's a green and hilly coast. Back in the days of slavery, the British developed a triangle of commerce between Europe, the New World and Africa. They imported rum for the chiefs and glass beads for the people in Africa, and as masters they exported gold and what they believed to be an inferior species from Africa to the New World. The Europeans and North Americans made off with about 29 million Africans, and another 29 million are said to have perished under four centuries of European rule. The Europeans tossed the unwanted into the sea -- the sick, the pregnant, the rape victims, the rebellious ones. Anything they saw as nothing but useless human flesh they tossed overboard into the Atlantic.

The history of slavery is a core element of African history, and it has a lot to do with the history of migration. The continent we see today is one that was robbed in the days when Europe and America were still developing, coming up with inventions and educating themselves. It isn't exactly surprising that Africa is having such a difficult time keeping up in the age of globalization and high technology. After all, it was already torn apart when this age began.

John says that things today are no different from the way they used to be. Europe decides and Africa obeys, Europe takes care of itself but Africa hardly stands a chance. "We have to go to Europe if we want to live," says John. Today, as in the past, it's the young and the strong who leave, forming an exodus that is draining the continent once again.

Ghana, a former British colony, gained its independence in 1957. Its 21.1 million inhabitants speak English, Akan, Ewa or Gã. There is no national healthcare system. Fifteen thousand children died of malaria in 2005. Health insurance is nonexistent and wages are lousy because there are no jobs. Here in Accra and its suburbs, like everywhere in Africa, unemployed young men sit idly in the dust, not knowing what to do with their energy. Teachers earn €200 a month, and the many who stand on the side of the road trying to sell beverages earn €2 a day -- if they're lucky.

And when someone manages to build something -- a small computer business or a telephone shop, for example -- a family member envious of his success will almost invariably find a way to pull the successful one back down to the common denominator of poverty. This has helped fuel a brain drain from the country, as doctors and lawyers, electricians and engineers and those lucky enough to land a spot at a foreign university leave Ghana. Their motives are always based on the same conviction: Life at home is hard, and life abroad will be better.

Glenn Ampan has a football game, and his father, who has never seen his son play, has promised to attend. John doesn't make it, and Glenn's team loses 0:1. "I played badly," he says. John was stuck in a traffic jam.

Vida pulls out her album of family photos, pictures of a younger John, thinner and sporting a moustache, and the obituary of Jacob Ebenezer Ampan, born Dec. 26, 1925. Mr. Ampan, the obituary reads, "offended no one" and "was a true gentleman." Fifteen children mourned the family patriarch when he died in 2002. His mother died in 2004. John wasn't there, but he paid 4,000 for the funeral and to feed the mourning relatives for days.

When we leave Ghana at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, the children stay at home. Only Vida stands in the parking lot, constantly repeating the same sentence: "Have a safe trip."

John Ampan's African truths:
In our society, you are worthless without a wife and without money. No one listens to you. You simply don't count without a family. But the most shameful thing of all is when someone is unable to take care of his parents.


Stage Two: Benin, 348 kilometers into the journey

It takes hours before John Ampan is able to speak again. As he sits in the back seat, staring out the window, the tears rolling down his face, our vehicle, a Nissan, travels eastward along the coastal roads from Ghana to Lagos.

It was a Ford Caravan back then, when he made the journey the first time, and four men sat on a bench in the back. Each had paid the equivalent of €10. They didn't know the driver, the man who was taking them into a future; nor did they know where that future might be.

When he manages to speak again, John says that little has changed. He feels the same emotions, the same inability to verbalize his feelings, the same physical rigidity he experienced on a morning 14 years ago, when his wife held him and wouldn't let go. In the end, he says, he simply turned around and got into the van. It's easy, he says -- you just go. But what you don't realize is that you are about to become the loneliest of human beings.

ABOUT THIS SERIES
The search for a better life drives hundreds of thousands of people from poor countries to try their fortunes abroad each year. During a trip that lasted seven weeks, SPIEGEL reporter Klaus Brinkbäumer, 39, and photographer Markus Matzel, retraced the odyssey of 46- year- old John Ekow Ampan, a Ghanaian father of three, to Europe. Before he managed to reach Spain and the promised land of the European Union, Ampan experienced numerous setbacks including deportations and arrests on a trip that took four years to complete. Accompanied by SPIEGEL, Ampan made the journey once again -- retracing his route through Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco and re- visiting all the most important stops on his quest for a better life. Brinkbäumer documented Ampan's epic journey in a new book published in Germany last autumn, titled "The Dream of Life." John stares out at the slums on the border between Togo and Benin, at the billboards that read: "God Loves You."

African border guards have a lot of power, and they routinely abuse it. They symbolize everything that is wrong with the continent. They use arrogant hand gestures to shoo away people as if they were pesky flies. At a typical border crossing -- a rope tied to a post at one end and held in the border guard's hand at the other -- they sit, their legs spread out in front of them, chewing on toothpicks and spitting on the ground.

When an attractive woman comes along, a bucket of water or a bale of cloth balanced on her head, the all-powerful border guards pull the rope taut, forcing the woman to stand there in the midday heat. "Turn around," they say. The woman turns around. "Again." She turns around again. "What do you have under your skirt?" they demand. She lifts her skirt. The powerful stand up, walk away, return with a bag of drinking water, bite off a corner, spit it into the dust, drink and stare at the woman's legs. Then they wave her away, telling her to get out of their sight.

They collect bribes from anyone who looks as though he might have some money. We pay the man standing on the trunk of our car €15, and for another €15 he agrees not to force us to empty our pockets. They want John to pay €30 before they'll even look at his passport. When he refuses, they place the passport on the table and allow the next person to cross the border. After an hour John pays the bribe, the guards wave us through and John tells us about his continent.

John Ampan's African truths:
Corruption will destroy Africa. It would have been possible to fight corruption decades ago, but now it's too late. Everyone takes, everyone pays, every favor costs money. Corruption is part of our culture and our daily life. It eats away at us.

Stage Three: Lagos, Nigeria, 469 kilometers into the journey

It will be dark in 20 minutes, and we have to be in our hotel by then, because this is Lagos. "This is Lagos!" John keeps repeating. What he means is that there are no more rules here, that nothing here is the way it is in other cities.

Lagos is a miserable city, a city of filth and garbage and mud and paths consisting of nothing but a few boards thrown over sewage so you can at least stay halfway dry -- boards they call "major roads" here. Children sit in front of oil drums and play with sticks floating in the muck, as piles of garbage grow in front of huts.

Everyone here has empty eyes. The people are unloved, unneeded, not encouraged and unwanted. In fact, they are completely superfluous. They have no schools, no insurance policies and no books. They have no clean water and the stench they breathe can hardly be called air.

Every license plate reads: "Lagos: Center of Excellence."

Lagos is a city of 15 million and its population is expected to jump to 25 million within the next 15 years. But this city will never point anyone in a better direction again. Its mountains of garbage will never shrink, and its people will never see a better life. It's too late for that.

Everyone here asks about Europe. How do I get there? White man, will you take me with you? Do you want to marry me? Will you take along my sister? My daughter?

Bribes are necessary every step of the way in Lagos. Nigerian police officers are nothing more than highway robbers. After all, outside of collecting money, there is little point to their jobs. There were 17 checkpoints along the 100-kilometer (62-mile) stretch of road from the border to Lagos, and every checkpoint was manned by policemen wielding batons. Two hundred naira here, 1,000 there -- everything here seems to revolve around extracting as much money as possible from anyone who can pay.

What it is, really, is legalized theft. They place tree trunks or planks covered with nails across the road, forcing drivers to stop, and when they want you to pay, you pay. The bribery process here is called, euphemistically, "to settle" -- to solve a problem. The Nigerian police's motto, displayed on every police car, is: "To serve and protect with integrity."

Ultimately ungovernable

Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas has called Lagos the "paradigm of the postmodern city," and Axel Harneit-Sievers, who heads the local office of the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, says that Lagos is "ultimately ungovernable."

The lack of personal barriers, the all-encompassing sense of being assaulted and the constant aggression, pitting everyone against everyone else -- this is Lagos.

When Ampan, born in 1959, left Ghana for the first time, he was 22 and had only recently married. There was no work in Accra, but it was 1981 and Nigeria was a country where everything seemed possible. New oil money meant new construction everywhere -- houses, office towers, palaces. Ampan stayed in Lagos for five months, where he worked for Osmat Construction, a local company under contract to Strabag, an Austrian construction company. He lived in the Ghanaian ghetto, where wooden huts were built on stilts over puddles and riverbeds, and where he shared a space of about 8 square meters with another man. The men would share the hut according to their shifts, with the man who worked the night shift spending his days in the hut, and vice-versa. Garbage was piled around and below the hut, rats were common, mosquitoes were everywhere and gangs would set fires to the huts of anyone who refused to pay protection money.

"I never had a peaceful night there," says John. He returned to Lagos a second time in 1992, at the beginning of his journey to Europe.

This time he found work at the oil company Mobil. John was a well-spoken man, and he soon became the chauffeur of Mobil's local manager, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He was convinced that he had made it. His job consisted of driving his boss into the city, waiting in the Mercedes and occasionally driving the boss's wife when she went shopping. But one night Tinubu gave a large reception, during which thieves entered his villa. The thieves apparently knew the way and marched directly into the bedroom.

Hard time

Every employee with access to the house was sent to jail.

Lagos's Ikoyi prison is a brown building with black marks on its walls. Wrecked cars stand in front of the building, where women sell moldy white bread and power lines suspended from poles drag in the mud. A Nike poster on a nearby building proclaims: "Don't fail!"

In the prison, 120 men were crowded together in a space measuring about 12 by 8 meters. The toilet was a hole in the floor in the middle of the cell. The 120 men formed gangs. They raped each other. They robbed each other. They listened to the screams of prisoners being tortured. John prayed. They called him "chaplain" because he read the Mass for the others, and at some point a brawny fellow from Benin City took John under his wing. The man's name was Bob Izoua. Life became easier for John. Bob Izoua's family would send minibuses filled with soap, clothing and bread, which Izoua would distribute among his supporters.

John was released after six months. He never saw an attorney, he was never given a court hearing, he was never accused of a crime. It was time to go. He missed his wife, and he hesitated for a moment before choosing the opposite direction -- north.

Endless waiting

Are you going to Niger? Spain? Europe? North, at least to Morocco or Libya? Migrants are shy when it comes to asking questions, shy and quiet because what they're envisioning is a journey into a gray zone. Everyone knows the deal, but everyone also knows it's forbidden. Much depends on how much they're able to pay, and even if they can pay, their ability to continue the journey depends on the capriciousness of police officers, who could just as easily send them back, send them to prison or subject them to beatings. Young couples, families and young men sit by the sides of the major roads or at bus terminals, negotiating and waiting. The daily lives of migrants are made up of successive periods of waiting. They travel light, usually carrying no more than one bag so that they can remain flexible. Of course, they have few possessions because they have already sold as much as possible to raise money for the trip. No one carries books. Those who are fleeing to find a better life aren't people who read.

Most sit motionless under trees, dozing and expending as little energy as possible. Occasionally they wave off a few mosquitoes, and then they become rigid again.

And they wait.

There will be a truck tomorrow, someone says, or definitely the next day. This sort of information is a commodity in the world of migrants. But then the next day dawns and the middleman says: "No, not today, and not tomorrow. The truck will leave at the end of the week, definitely, but unfortunately the prices have changed. We need the extra money for your security." What this means is that policemen have to be bribed, and for the migrants it means renegotiating what has already been negotiated and agreed upon -- and spending a few more days sitting under a tree.

And waiting.

As we leave Lagos, we pass Prayer City. It's an area filled with stadiums and arenas, where hundreds of thousands come on the weekends to beg for God's blessing from preachers like Reinhard Bonnke, a German who claims he can heal diseases like leprosy.

The road takes us north in the direction of Europe. It's a four-lane highway peppered with potholes and interspersed with roadblocks, forcing vehicles to stop again and again.

A policeman knocks on the window. His eyes are bloodshot and he seems unsteady on his feet.

The police officer says: "I love you." We say: "Good afternoon, officer." He asks: "What you got for me." We give him 200 naira. "You can go," he says.

The three phrases -- "I love you," "what you got for me?" and "you can go" represent a typical Nigerian relationship in three sentences.

John Ampan's African truths:
Africans are greedy and excessive. We lack the basic virtues to develop further. "Diligence" and "punctuality" are foreign words in Africa.