Found a new twist to the doorstop canvassing game this afternoon, on a road of Georgian terraces split into multiple, some of them very multiple, flats fitted with video intercoms. This is also a very busy road, with lots of buses and trucks, and generally noisy traffic. And rain – of course – I’m the rain god of canvassers – was making it worse.

So one presses the buzzer, assumes a polite but friendly expression, and tries not to look like a would-be Big Brother contestant while delivering a friendly explanation of your presence. But what to do after you’ve finished the initial speel? Your only hope of hearing their response is to stick you ear right up to the speaker, so that the person inside is getting a really attractive view of your ear canal.

Mmmm… still trying to work that one out.

But for a relatively unpromising part of Regent’s Park got some really positive responses to the Green Party message, and got posters into a couple of really brilliant placed windows, so it was worth an afternoon in the rain.

I do try to find good environmental news, really I do, but the bad news keeps coming thick and fast.

First, finally, the Labour Government is having to admit its much-trumpeted environmental policy is in tatters:

Labour had set a target of reducing CO2 levels by 20% by 2010, but Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, will say it is no longer possible. The totemic policy has been an important weapon in Tony Blair’s claim to be a world leader willing to go further than others on climate change…
Publishing the government’s much delayed climate change review today, Mrs Beckett will say the government believes the UK can achieve only a cut of between 15% and 18% of the 1990 UK emissions.
Ministers will say this still means the government will reach its separate commitment under the Kyoto protocol of cutting CO2 emissions by at least 12.5%. But even reaching the 15-18% reductions depends on the outcome of complex EU negotiations on caps on emissions by heavy energy users in industry, including the electricity generators.

And in Africa, one of the areas where all of that heating is likely to cause the most immediate damage, a lake that is an important hippo habitat is threatened by supermarket demand for out-of-season vegetables and flowers in the West:

According to scientists, the increasing demand for water to irrigate Kenyan farmland is draining Lake Naivasha and destroying the habitat of the hippos that live there.
They say that within five years the lake may be nothing more than a putrid, muddy pond, and that most of its hippos could be dead.
In the past two years hippo numbers have slumped by more than 25 per cent because of the fall in water levels. In 2004 there were 1,500 but this year there are only 1,100.

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But the good news: there are plans for a contraceptive pill that will reduce cancer risk AND be designed for a life without menstruation. Sounds brilliant to me. That’s provided, of course, the anti-abortion types don’t manage to scuttle it, because it happens to contain the same drug as that used for chemical abortions.

Hello! You don’t want abortions? That means you need contraception … (Although of course what you really want, we know, is to stop people having sex, except when they are planning babies, and then only in the missionary position, with no pleasure for the woman whatsoever… because you think that is what a white-bearded man in the sky wants.)
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Finally, a fascinating, if sad, piece about a woman who lived as a man for two years, after having allegedly kidnapped her children after a custody dispute. Until the 20th-century this could be surprisingly easy – as cases from Hannah Snell to James Barry show, but today, with largely androgenous clothing, it must be a lot harder to carry off.

This is being billed as a “test of the systems”, and it is good to know that the systems are being tested, but it is hard not to also see it as a prediction:

A perfect storm is about to gather off the east coast of Britain, whipping up the sea and menacing the coastline with gales and torrential downpours. Before long, it will head south and make landfall, sending a wave of water up the Thames estuary, battering the hotchpotch of flood defences erected since Victorian times.
The surge will trigger an alert to raise the Thames barrier, but downstream widespread breaches and floods are expected. Where the most vulnerable areas will be is anyone’s guess….
The virtual storm lies at the heart of an unprecedented £5.5m experiment involving the Environment Agency, the Met Office and eight universities to test cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems designed to foresee dangerous storm surges.

Of course Britain might be able to manage such a thing, but you can’t but wonder about Bangladesh, or most African states, or indeed when you look at say Thailand and the tsunami, even apparently relatively developed Asian states.
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The law has been changed to give the state responsibility for children who are in care until the age of 21. (Previously they were on their own at the age of 16.) But it seems the reality is different.
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Now men should be warned: you may find this next item distressing – a South African woman has invented a female condom that would attach itself to a rapist that could only be surgically removed. Well it is pretty distressing to women, too, that rape should be considered such a danger that someone might even consider this. (And how the rapist would react when he discovered he’s been “caught” doesn’t bear thinking about.)
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But finally, a touch of schadenfreude – an “Egyptian 1,300BC statue” has been reidentified as having been made in Bolton in 2003. As I’ve been told before, such identifications are often an art not a science.

This first link must come with a health warning – some could find it distressing. Karen Armstong provides an account of her mother’s horrific, slow, struggling death.

She found it increasingly difficult to speak, but the one thing she said frequently and with clarity was that she wanted to die. It was her last – indeed her only – wish. Thirteen years ago, when in good health, she had made a living will, which stated that, when the time came, she did not wish her life to be prolonged artificially.

Yet the hospital could not let her go… So often the story you hear. The only reassuring thought is that this is going to have to change, given the rapid advances in medical science that otherwise will see vast numbers of people in this situation. The hospice movement has shown the way, but it either has to rapidly expand (tough since it is still – scandalously – largely funded by donations) or else hospitals are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it is time for some people to die, and to let them go, peacefully.
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Getting the bad news over together, there has been a rapid increase in the number of glacial earthquakes at both poles, suggesting the ice is melting and breaking up faster than has been predicted:

The annual number of glacial earthquakes recorded in Greenland between 1993 and 2002 was between six and 15. In 2003 seismologists recorded 20 glacial earthquakes. In 2004 they monitored 24 and for the first 10 months of 2005 they recorded 32.
The latest seismic study, published today in the journal Science, found that in a single area of north-western Greenland scientists recorded just one quake between 1993 and 1999. But they monitored more than two dozen quakes between 2000 and 2005.

But some good environmental news – showing what is possible. This is an oddly written story, but the basic message is that simple conservation measures have reduced Japan’s water consumption by 10 per cent in just five years. Surely a model for what you could do also for electricity…
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Finally, a preview of what is sure to be a good old historical row: Tristram Hunt’s view of how the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain should be celebrated. John Prescott has been put in charge.