Today is the 27th November.  I have been blogging about climate change for three months. You can read my first blog - Tidal Whisky - here.

This was before the ‘Th!nk About It’ competition started. I had joined the event full of idealistic enthusiasm.  Climate change is clearly a subject of supreme geo-political importance. Here was an opportunity to learn more about it and to help raise awareness about the issues involved. I wrote a couple of practice pieces for the community site straight away.

I thought writing about climate change would be easy.  In  the course of writing my weekly political blog for EUobserver I regularly came across climate change papers. There were also many articles in newspapers, on the internet, indeed almost everywhere you looked.  So writing a blog should have been simple: looking at the latest news or papers from a British perspective and then writing a reflection upon them.

In fact I have found the task far more difficult than I imagined and I’ve been asking myself why?

There have been several reasons I think - but one of them has been that I have never quite been sure who I have been writing for. When I write for EUobserver I have a reasonable idea of the people I am writing for.  The same is true for other articles and blogs I write.  But who is reading this?

But a bigger problem is the sheer complexity of climate change, which I think fools everyone that comes into contact with the subject.  It is like the cosmos.  There are so many dimensions and whatever you choose to focus upon inevitably means that you are losing sight of something else.  The temptation is to focus on the latest twist, the latest news. 'Climategate,' for instance, and not realise that this is just one tiny drop in an ocean of subject matter.

To my mind there are a thousand and one open questions, inconsistencies, unresolved issues in the climate debate; what we know is a fraction of what we don't know. We are like the banker who is observed falling from the skyscraper muttering, so far so good. Of course, he may be attached to a bungee rope, or an aircushion may break his fall. We cannot predict his future, or ours. There are no certainties.  But insurance has always helped us to sleep better at nights.  And Climategate is a poor man's insurance.

So let’s accept for insurance purposes that the world is warming quickly and this has been caused by a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trapping the sun’s rays. Let us accept that unless we act now on a global scale the consequences for human civilisation could be catastrophic.  Let us acknowledge that warming seems to trigger a vicious cycle: as snowfields melt, for example, there is less whiteness available to reflect the sun’s rays and methane escapes from the softening permafrost.

This is the vast canvas I stand before with my blogging paintbrush. A canvas that embraces science, politics, international development, geography, the environment, the land, the sea, industry, how we feed ourselves, human nature and inclination, population, the relative importance of different greenhouse gases, the University of East Anglia and so on.  But really, one can only blog about little corners of this picture as I did in that first blog about generating energy from the tides in Scotland. How then can one make sense of the whole?

Yet scratching about in one corner, picking up a single pebble from this vast beach of shingle, is inherently unsatisfactory. It is like describing an elephant's toenail to an ant. 

Still, faute de mieux, most of us blog about corners and the most popular corner is that concerned with reducing carbon emissions.  The bulk of government action - or at least proposed action - is devoted to limiting carbon emissions. Indeed, whole climate NGOs are based around and named after this single objective.  

It is true this section of the canvas is enormous.  But it is still only one corner of the climate change ‘beach.’  For suppose we could halt all carbon emissions tomorrow - would that be the end of the problem? Wouldn't warming continue? Sea levels rise? Methane escape from bowels, whether of the earth or of cows?

I find it disturbing that so much effort is focused on raising the carbon efficiency of machinery.  It reminds me of the man who at midnight searches for his lost keys under a lamp post.  There he has light; he can see what he is doing. But there is no reason to suppose that his keys will be found there.

From a moderate perusal of the climate change literature a disinterested observer might reasonably conclude that it was carbon dioxide alone that contributed to global warming and that every molecule of carbon dioxide originated in a chimney, an exhaust pipe, a funnel.

Somehow the vast natural carbon flows seem to have been overlooked. We know that the environment - through the respiration of living organisms and through natural processes such as volcanic activity, spews into the air around 200 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year.

Beside this figure our human contribution seems puny - about 8 gigatonnes.  Moreover, the atmosphere contains about 750 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. These are figures from the UN’s Environment Programme.

Of course, what the environment puts out, it also removes. Living organisms are made of carbon.  A tree, a whale, a bank of shellfish, a flock of birds, all are made of carbon and all the carbon in your body and mine has come - at one time or another - from the atmosphere. The environment absorbs about 203 gigatonnes each year.  It makes a net contribution to our happiness.

Yet still we concentrate in blog after blog, proposal after proposal, on eliminating this 5 gigatonne (or so) excess.  But we seem to take for granted that the environment will go on removing its 203 gigatonnes year after year. What happens if next year it only removes 200 gigatonnes?  And 197 gigatonnes the year after?  This is my real worry.

We have on earth not a 5 or an 8 gigatonne carbon problem but a 208 gigatonne carbon problem. That is the measure of it.  Climategate or no Climategate.

I know you will say to me - look at all the projects designed to save the rainforest.  Indeed, I blogged about one just last week. But here the emphasis is again on saving carbon. Burn the forest and carbon dioxide is released, from the incineration itself and from the soil.  There is little emphasis on the biosphere as a vital, integrated whole in which every plant, every animal, every fish and mollusc and bird, every coral and lichen are part of the complex web that creates, year by year, the conditions on which we all depend. Indeed the Biosphere does not even figure as one of our blogging categories.

Carbon dioxide is not a poison (except when it displaces oxygen). Via its compounds it is the fabric of your being and mine. If the environment can remove 203 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere - can it not be induced to remove 204, 205, 206, 207?  Induced by tree planting, by reducing poisonous pollutions, induced by seeding shellfish and corals whose carbonate shells lock away carbon for a million years at a time, above all induced by ceasing all those activities that degrade and trash the environment in the search for short-term profit.

Destruction of habits for oil or logging, destruction of the sea bed by beam trawling, hoovering up vast quantities of krill or sand eels to feed our growing appetite for fat meat products. All these are evidence of our contempt for the environment that sustains our being.

The environment that surely is a web.  Although a stock may appear sustainable, it is not more than a link in a chain. Remove our weaken that link and the whole chain may collapse. We have seen this time and time again.  Is this why the seas are dying?

This is a bigger part of the big canvas. And it is surely at the level of the big canvas that we need to consider actions to combat global warming. Not as pieces of sticking plaster - a more efficient engine here, an environmental label there, a solar panel in the desert - but at the level of life itself.  The biosphere. The complex and interacting mesh of lifeforms on this planet.  As the English poet John Donne wrote in another context.  “No man is an island entire to itself.......so send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

Every tree cut down, every coral that dies, every patch of sea that now is barren and lifeless, every river that is fished out, every field reduced by monoculture to barreness, every insect that disappears, every bird that no longer nests - these are all bells tolling.

And they toll for us.

(The picture is courtesy of National Geographic Magazine)