Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

Biking Between Venues in Bali

The first week of the UN Climate Conference is over in Bali, with just six more days until the meeting should wrap up on 14 December. During the middle weekend, there are multiple events in various hotels scattered around the Nusa Dua area of Bali. However, the organizers have installed a fleet of pick-up and drop-off bikes that you can ride from venue to venue. In the photo above, I'm heading from the Grand Hyatt where there was a cool side event on current US climate legislation, down the road to the Ayodya Hotel to attend some sessions at Forest Day.

It may be that today is the busiest day we have ever had with IISD Reporting Services. With a team covering the ongoing negotiations at the Bali Convention Center, another group over at the Bali Grand Hyatt reporting on the side events, writers attending the sessions at Forest Day and another bunch of reporters at the Development and Climate Days at the Conrad Hotel, we are scaled-up about as far as we can ratchet. What a wonderful team! Everything is going smoothly, people getting along fine, no missed deadlines, no frantic calls from panicked team members, no late nights for the writers and, best of all, no angry encounters with delegates who have been misinterpreted in print.

The earthquake last night certainly rattled things around here. Reported as a 5.4 and located about 120 miles south of Bali, I was chatting with Pam online when the bed started shaking.

12/7/2007		6:46:04 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		Oh, big earthquake!!!
12/7/2007		6:46:09 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		the whole place just shook
12/7/2007		6:46:10 PM		Pam in NYC		Kimo in Bali		what?
12/7/2007		6:46:10 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		really
12/7/2007		6:46:13 PM		Pam in NYC		Kimo in Bali		wow
12/7/2007		6:46:14 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		still shaking
12/7/2007		6:46:22 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		that was a surprise!!
12/7/2007		6:46:22 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		wow
12/7/2007		6:46:38 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		Oh, you make my world shake!!
12/7/2007		6:46:42 PM		Pam in NYC		Kimo in Bali		:)
12/7/2007		6:47:01 PM		Kimo in Bali		Pam in NYC		I'll have to look up that one on the Internet
12/7/2007		6:47:09 PM		Pam in NYC		Kimo in Bali		I knew you would do that

No damage, no one injured, hardly anyone noticed.

Things will only get wilder here in the next week, and things should get shaken up for real. The High Level Segment will be attended by the President of Indonesia, the UN Secretary General, lots of ministers and an assortment of big-time politicians and movie stars. As the signs held by protesters say, "The Whole World is Watching." Should be big time!!

United Nations Climate Change Conference Opens in Bali

On Saturday, 1 December, after stops in Frankfurt, Dubai and Bangkok, I landed in Bali for a two-week stay during the United Nations Climate Change Conference. There are seventeen of us on the ground, with another seven people around the planet providing translations (Tunis, Tokyo and Buenos Aires), editing (Buenos Aires and New York), desktop publishing (New York), operations management (New Jersey) and accounting (Winnipeg.) We'll be producing one website, one blog, a daily 2000-word report on the negotiations in English, French, Spanish and Japanese, a daily four-six page report in English and on the web on the side events, plus special coverage of two events over this coming weekend. Big production! Content is flying around the planet at various stages in the production, originating here in Nusa Dua, out for translation in Africa, South America and Asia, over to New York for final desktopping, then up to Winnipeg on the Canadian prairies for upload to our lists and website.

The first few days have been busy setting up our huge office, making sure everyone has arrived safely, getting accredited and our traditional team dinner.

But, this morning the meeting opened to overflow crowds.

Without a doubt, Australia stole the show today, announcing that the new government would ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Howard Bamsey, on the left, looks pretty giddy about the whole thing.

Still rushing a bit, getting our institutional blog off the ground today. Our online coverage is at http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop13/ and the new blog should be at http://www.iisdrs.org

Although we haven't worked out the details, we will be providing content to several blogs, including Alexia Park's Votelink blog More on all this later, when we get ready to turn our new IISD Reporting Services blog "live" (our CNAME change for domain mapping is still working its way through the DNS servers.)