Is India running out of skilled IT workers?

Despite graduating about 400,000 engineers and scientists every year, India is already starting to wonder whether it will have enough in the future to meet the demands of globalization.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

Nasscom, the Indian software industry association, estimates that by 2010, the Indian outsourcing industry could have $60bn worth of global sales, up from $23bn in 2006 - and that would still only be 10% of the potential market.

But if the industry is to triple its revenues, urgent action is needed now to increase the supply of skilled labour, Nasscom says.

It wants the government to rpovide more engineering places at university, and it has started its own scheme for an India-wide certification of IT qualifications.

Pressure on turnover

The tight labour market is already taking its toll on the industry.

The big three Indian software companies alone (Infosys, Wipro, and TCS) are looking to hire 100,000 new graduates this year, as their businesses continue to grow by 30% annually.

The problem is not so much hiring the skilled IT workers - Infosys gets 1.4 million applications a year, and can pick and choose - as retaining them after they have started.

As foreign multinationals continue to flood into India, the competition for experienced IT professionals is heating up.

Companies such as IBM Cap Gemini and Accenture, the main rivals to the Bangalore tigers, plan to transfer the bulk of their worldwide operations to India in the next few years and are desperate to hire staff.

Turnover rates at Infosys and Wipro are about 12%-15% a year - still lower than the Indian average, but rising steadily.

And to retain existing staff, Wipro has had to raise wages twice this year, by more than 20%.

Wipro's chairman, Azim Premji, says he is not worried - his company offers better opportunities than the foreign multinationals.

But industry analysts wonder whether the rising wage bill will eventually make Indian software companies uncompetitive in the world market. After all, lower labour costs are what gave them their initial advantage.

The Indian companies answer that it is their global production systems and their skills, not low wages, that give them comparative advantage.

But they are also hedging their bets.

All the Bangalore tigers have set up development centres in China, where they can employ software engineers for considerably less than they are currently paying their Indian staff.

The broiler: That most under-appreciated of kitchen appliances

The NYT's Mark Bittman on why broilers deserve respect and how to get maximum benefit from it.

The crux of his story:

If I’d told you I had an appliance that could brown like a grill, was as convenient as your oven, and cooked most food in less than 10 minutes, you’d buy it. But you don’t need to.

Campaigning in a YouTube world

This NYT story talks about the pitfalls that the new media might pose for pols, with a particular look at one Hillary Rodham Clinton.

An excerpt:

Some of the nation’s most enduring memories of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton — memories she would happily erase — were etched on television more than a decade ago: She didn’t stay home and bake cookies in her marriage. She wasn’t “some little woman, standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette.” The headband. The hairstyles.

On Saturday, one week into her presidential campaign, the threat of a new, unflattering image surfaced: MSNBC used a microphone to capture Mrs. Clinton singing the national anthem in Des Moines. Her voice was, shall we say, off key. The recording was quickly downloaded to YouTube, the video-sharing Web site, and the Drudge Report — no friend of Mrs. Clinton — was steering readers to watch it. (By Tuesday afternoon, more than 800,000 had.)

Clinton advisers found out about the YouTube video within minutes, and their campaign war room made a calculated decision: not to respond at all. They did not want to draw news media attention to the video; nor did they want to upstage their preferred news of the day, Mrs. Clinton’s debut in Iowa.

“Senator Clinton’s candidacy is not premised on her ability to carry a tune,” said Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser and war room manager. “We did not see it as a significant threat.”

Twenty-four hours later, no news outlets had made a fuss about the video, and the Clinton team privately declared victory.

The video clip may have been trivial, but the brief episode surrounding it illustrated how visual and audio technologies like video streaming have the potential to drive political news in unexpected directions, and how White House candidates are aggressively monitoring and trying to master them.

Putting the arm on U.S. climate scientists

From CTV.ca:

U.S. scientists have been pressured to make their writings on global warming fit with the Bush administration's skepticism on the topic, a U.S. Congressional committee has been told.

A survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found 150 climate scientists had personally experienced political interference in their work over the past five years. The survey had 279 respondents.

At least 435 incidents were recorded, representatives of the watchdog group told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change,' 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," said Francesca Grifo.

2006 Afghan civilian deaths top 1,000: HRW

More than 1,000 of the 4,400 Afghans who died in conflict-related violence in 2006 were civilians, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

It says that the majority of the dead were killed by the Taleban or other anti-government forces.

It says more than 4,400 Afghans died in "conflict-related violence", twice as many as in 2005 and more than any year since the Taleban were ousted in 2001.

The HRW report says that UN figures show that the conflict also displaced around 15,000 families - around 80,000 people - in southern Afghanistan.

"The international security effort in Afghanistan has been hobbled by insufficient resources and the failure to effectively address the security concerns of the Afghan population," the report said.

"Taking into account Afghanistan's population and size, the 40,000 Nato and US-led coalition forces in the country are a small fraction of the security forces deployed in other recent post-conflict areas like the Balkans and East Timor.

"Many are limited by national laws to safe areas in Afghanistan or cannot act to protect ordinary Afghans adequately."

The report says that one year after pledging to improve human rights and basic security, the Afghan government and the international community have not fulfilled their objective.

Here's the HRW report.

'Soldiers of Heaven'

The Beeb with some detail on a messianic Shiite cult involved in a major gun battle in Najaf, Iraq that left at least 200 of its members dead.

An excerpt:

A young Shia leader, Dia Abdul-Zahra, had gathered hundreds of his followers, including women and children, in an encampment a few miles north of Najaf.

They were well armed and had come to believe that Abdul-Zahra - also known as Ahmed Hassan al-Yamani and Samer Abu Kamar - was the Mahdi.

According to Shia belief, the Mahdi is a Muslim messiah who disappeared hundreds of years ago and whose return will usher in an era of peace and justice before the end of time.

Abdul-Zahra and his followers regarded the religious leadership in Najaf as illegitimate.

Iraqi officials say their extraordinary plan was to enter the city in the garb of pilgrims, declare that the Mahdi had returned, and assassinate Ayatollah Sistani and other senior clerics.

All this was to happen on Ashura, the holiest day in the Shia calendar.

Instead, the Iraqi authorities seem to have had a tip-off. According to their account, they attacked the encampment and foiled the plot.

Now, there's been rumours the soldiers have been affiliated with everyone from al Qaeda (who are hardcore Sunnis) to Baathists (Saddam's old crowd).

Iraq's Shia-led government may have an interest in promoting the idea of such an unholy alliance.

It may want to deflect attention from the embarrassing fact that the majority Shia community is riven with factions and divisions.

The authorities may also have exaggerated their own military success.

The signs are that they underestimated the strength of the Soldiers of Heaven and had to call for urgent American air support.

American newspapers pull back from foreign coverage

If you want to be a foreign correspondent for a major U.S. newspaper, you might be 20 years too late. The business people say those resources would be better off spent on local coverage.

An excerpt from the Washington Post column by Fred Hiatt:

Journalist Jill Carroll, studying foreign news coverage for a report published by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University last fall, found that the number of U.S. newspaper foreign correspondents declined from 188 in 2002 to 141 last year. (If you include the Wall Street Journal, which publishes editions in Europe and Asia, the decline was from 304 to 249.)

I find it disheartening that a fine newspaper such as the Globe would feel compelled to diminish itself in this way. But maybe that's the nostalgia of a dinosaur. After all, there are some very smart business people who see no harm in newspapers cutting back on foreign reporting.

Jack Welch, for example, the former chairman of General Electric Co. who has expressed interest in buying the Globe, said earlier this month on CNBC, "I'm not sure local papers need to cover Iraq, need to cover global events. They can be real local papers. And franchise, purchase from people very willing to sell you their wire services that will give you coverage."

Brian Tierney, who bought the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, expressed similar views in a November interview with The Post's Howard Kurtz. "We don't need a Jerusalem bureau," he said. "What we need are more people in the South Jersey bureau."

"I don't see us sending 25 people to do me-too coverage of Katrina," Tierney went on to say. "I can get what's going on in Iraq online. What I can't get is what's happening in this region."

Now, if papers staff fewer foreign bureaus, is that being made up by using more international wire copy? Nope.

After Sept. 11, there was nearly universal acknowledgment that Americans would be better off if we knew more about the world. Yet by 2004 the percentage of articles related to foreign affairs that American newspapers published on their front pages had dropped to "the lowest total in any year we have ever studied," according to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute. (It was 14 percent, down from 21 percent in 2003 and 27 percent in both 1987 and 1977.)

I remember listening to a speech by the Associated Press's Kathy Gannon, who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for the service. She spoke to some U.S. editors in the summer of 2001. One of them asked her, "why should we care what goes on there?" Her silent response? "You'll find out."

Obama target of first 2008 false news frenzy

This NYT story looks at the genesis of a story designed to smear Sen. Barack Obama, candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, over something that allegedly happened when he was seven.

An excerpt:

Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.

But their anonymity has not stopped them from making an impact. In the last two weeks, Mr. Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.

The controversy started with a quickly discredited Jan. 17 article on the Insight Web site asserting that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing an accusation that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had covered up a brief period he had spent in an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was 6.

(Other news organizations have confirmed Mr. Obama’s descriptions of the school as a secular public school. Both senators have denounced the report, and there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign planned to spread those accusations.)

In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks.

The Clinton-Obama article followed a series of inaccurate or hard-to-verify articles on Insight and its predecessor magazine about politics, the Iraq war or the Bush administration, including a widely discussed report on the Insight Web site that President Bush’s relationship with his father was so strained that they were no longer speaking to each other about politics.

The Washington Times, which is also owned by the Unification Church, but operates separately from the Web site, quickly disavowed the article. Its national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading “Insight Strikes Again” telling them to “make sure that no mention of any Insight story” appeared in the paper, and another e-mail message to its Congressional correspondent instructing him to clarify to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama that The Washington Times had nothing to do with the article on the Web site.

“Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of The Washington Times,” said Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Washington Times.

And in an interview, John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said its commentators had erred by citing the Clinton-Obama report. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” Mr. Moody said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

Mr. Kuhner’s ability to ignite a news media brush fire nonetheless illustrates how easily dubious and politically charged information can spread through the constant chatter of cable news commentary, talk radio programs and political Web sites. And at the start of a campaign with perhaps a dozen candidates hiring “research directors” to examine one another, the Insight episode may be a sign of what is to come.

Cutting through the shit about eating

Writing in the NYT magazine, Michael Pollan has the following advice:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

He went on to take some shots at some key players as to why the act of eating hs become so incredibly complicated and confusing:

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

Perky: The duck that refused to die

Perky got shot by a hunter in Florida. The hunter dumped Perky's body in a fridge along with some other ducks. Two days later, the guy's wife opens up the fridge to find Perky staring back at her.

They take the duck to a vet. The vet operates. Perky flatlines twice on the operating table, but is resuscitated.

She now has a pin in her wing but is expected to recover.

More at this Beeb story.

The Great Barrier Reef a potential global warming casualty

The Age newspaper in Australia has obtained an early draft of the second installment of the IPCC fourth assessment, and it doesn't bode well for the Land Down Under.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

The Great Barrier Reef is regarded as the world's largest living organism.

It is Australia's number one tourist destination, attracting a million visitors a year, and is home to sharks, turtles and numerous brightly coloured fish. ...

It warns that the Great Barrier Reef will become "functionally extinct" because of coral bleaching - which occurs when the plant-like organisms that make up the coral die, leaving behind a white limestone skeleton.

It takes at least a decade for coral to start recovering from severe bleaching.

But the reef may not have the chance to recover, scientists warn, as temperatures continue to rise and the sea becomes more acidic. This raises the risk that the coral will die outright.

Tea with a Pakistani Taliban leader

Harood Rashid of the BBC's Urdu service recently travelled to South Waziristan and managed to obtain an interview with Mullah Baitullah Mehsud, leader of a Taliban militia there.

An excerpt:

Baitullah's private army along with other militant groups have imposed a strict Islamic code in North and parts of South Waziristan.

They run a parallel government here. Music and videos are banned while militants claim people approach them for settlement of their disputes.

With a black-dyed beard, 34-year-old Baitullah greeted us in a big room with several of his armed men beside him. We sat on a new colourful quilt spread on the ground.

Baitullah seemed a man with only jihad (holy war) on his mind. During the interview he quoted several verses from the Koran to defend his stance that foreign forces must be evicted from Islamic countries.

"Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfil God's orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world," he says.

The militant leader on several occasions in the past had openly admitted crossing over into Afghanistan to fight foreign troops.

"We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia (a tax in Islam for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state)."

Suicide bombers

Baitullah predicted an even bloodier year for foreign forces in Afghanistan.

"The mujahideen will carry out even more severe attacks. If they [the West] have air power we have fidayeen [suicide bombers]... They will leave dishonoured."

The militant leader, who is suffering from a chest infection, denied an American general's claim that a Taleban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was present in the tribal region and was organising attacks across the border. "This is all lies. They don't have any evidence."

The militants say they don't wish to fight Pakistani security forces because it only benefits the Americans.

"[Pakistan army spokesman] Shaukat Sultan holds the key to this issue," a smiling Baitullah said when asked what they would do if Pakistan continued to bomb them.

Here's a related BBC story by Rashid: Welcome to Taleban country.

IPCC report FAQ

I prepared a backgrounder for CTV.ca on what to expect in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report expected Friday.

Oddball factoid of the night

While looking through some climate change-related photos on Monday evening, one caption for a Reuters photo claimed that 13 per cent of Americans had never heard of climate change.

It didn't say whether 12.999 per cent of Americans live in caves.

China 'fesses up on its environmental failures

From the BBC:

China is failing to make progress on improving and protecting the environment, according to a new Chinese government report.

The research ranks China among the world's worst nations - a position unchanged since 2004.

After the US, China produces the most greenhouse gases in the world.

The Chinese report, prepared by academics and government experts, ranked the country 100th out of 118 countries surveyed.

Some 30 indicators were used to measure the level of "ecological modernisation" including carbon dioxide emissions, sewage disposal rates and the safety of drinking water.

Europe's low-carbon plan going nowhere fast

Seems like only yesterday that Europe was full of brave talk about a low-carbon future (well, 18 days ago, anyways).

About the same time, Van Jolissaint, Daimler-Chrysler's chief economist, told a breakfast meeting at the Detroit auto show how he thought Europeans were being a bunch of nervous Nellies on climate change. He reserved particularly harsh words for the Stern Report, which argues it's cheaper to fight climate change now than in the future.

An excerpt from the Jan. 10 BBC story:

In response to a question from the floor, he said that global warming was a far-off risk whose magnitude was uncertain.

He said that from an economic point of view, it would be more rational to spend lots of money on today's other big problems, and only make small and limited changes in policies relating to global warming, such as a slight increase in gasoline or carbon taxes.


Airlines and factories are being urged to help cut global warming
Mr Jolissaint was particularly scathing about the Stern Report, which urged governments to take urgent action now, arguing that it would be much cheaper to act, rather than face a $10 trillion cost of climate change of not doing anything until later.

Mr Jolissaint said the report, written by a former adviser to UK Chancellor Gordon Brown, was based on dubious economics and did not include a discount rate. Until recently Sir Nicholas Stern was the second permanent secretary at the UK Treasury.

Chrysler's chief economist said his German colleagues at DaimlerChrysler's headquarters in Stuttgart and other professionals in Europe viewed global warming "with much more alarm than we do".

He called on Europeans to deal with climate change "in a step-by-step, rational way, and not play much Chicken Little", referring to the US children's story in which Chicken Little runs around in circles saying "the sky is falling".

If nothing else, Mr Jolissaint's remarks illustrate the yawning gap between mainstream opinion on climate change among the educated elites of Europe and America.

But they are also consistent with the cynical view held by some in the US environmental lobby that announcements by car companies about the future development of green vehicles are nothing more than window dressing.

The BBC followed up with a Jan. 12 story: EU plans attack on car emissions.

However, check out this Jan. 24 BBC story: EU stumbles on low-carbon road:

Environmentalists have expressed grave concern that the European Commission could be about to drop plans to ensure that new cars produce a quarter less carbon dioxide by 2012.

The Commission had been expected this week to announce plans to force car makers to meet this tough target, despite warnings from the industry that it would push up prices and put jobs at risk.

The move would have been a concrete step towards the "post-industrial revolution" the Commission called for two weeks ago, to tackle climate change.

But sharp disagreements within the Commission have led to the postponement of the announcement, and environmentalists fear the plan will not survive in its original form.

Officials say Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso still favours ambitious legislation - but green lobbyists say they have privately heard the opposite.

It's worth reading the whole story. Some very good charts and whatnot, if you're into that sort of thing -- and who isn't? :)

Davos discusses nuclear power as a least-worst option

This NYT story looks at the corporati at Davos are discussing how Europe is considering giving nuclear power a second look.

An excerpt:

At a time when industrialized countries are wrestling with how to curb carbon dioxide emissions, nuclear energy has one indisputable advantage: unlike coal, oil, natural gas, or even biological fuels, it emits no carbon dioxide. That virtue, in the view of advocates, is enough to offset its well-documented shortcomings.

“It has put nuclear back into the mix,” said Daniel C. Esty, director of the Center for Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University. “We’re seeing a new balancing of the costs and benefits.”

But being in the mix does not mean nuclear energy will shove aside fossil fuels any time soon. In a way, the revival of interest in nuclear power illustrates the lack of palatable choices to combat global warming.

Renewable energy, while growing steadily, has limitations. Windmills don’t turn when the wind isn’t blowing; solar power and geothermal energy are not yet economical enough; hydroelectric dams can be disruptive themselves.

That leaves nuclear power as a “clean” alternative to fossil fuels. It already generates one-sixth of the world’s electricity, but it fell out of favor in the West two decades ago after the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents. The previous German government, in fact, pledged to shut down its last nuclear power station by 2022.

But now Germany has also committed to deep reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the next decade, and its new chancellor, Angela Merkel, rekindled the debate over nuclear energy by saying, “We should consider what consequences it will have if we shut off our nuclear power plants.”

That comment was a reference to Europe’s increasing vulnerability as an importer of foreign fossil fuels. Just as the United States worries about disruptions in the supply of Middle East oil, Europe worries about Russia’s penchant for using its gas and oil pipelines as a political weapon.

In a recent report, Deutsche Bank declared that Germany’s energy policy was untenable. “Far from reducing carbon emissions and securing future energy supplies,” it concluded, “current policies would increase both emissions and Germany’s dependence on foreign gas imports.”

Even in the United States, which has not ordered cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, there are more voices in favor of building nuclear plants. “The question is, how do we produce enough electricity?” said James E. Rogers, the chief executive of Duke Energy Corporation, a major energy supplier. “We need to put our money on nuclear.”

Critics point out that nuclear reactors are astronomically expensive, and take a decade or more to build, even if environmental groups fail to block construction altogether.

Given the entrenched opposition in parts of Western Europe and America, some experts say that if the world does turn to nuclear power, most of the new plants will be in China, India and other developing countries.

They also point out that the issue of security cuts both ways. Building more plants may reduce a country’s reliance on imported oil and gas, but it also creates more targets for terrorist attacks. And there is the nuclear fuel cycle: North Korea and other countries are already suspected of diverting enriched uranium to try to make nuclear weapons. Those dangers would only multiply with an increase in the global demand for nuclear power.

A breathtakingly honest freelancer!

NYT public editor Byron Calame wrote about the ethics of freelance contributors in his Jan. 28 offering.

I note this sentence with a raised eyebrow:

"THE ability of The New York Times to maintain its ethical standards among its far-flung outside contributors continues to be a major concern of mine. As these freelancers fill column after column at a lower cost than full-time reporters, readers have a right to expect that editors ensure the integrity of that journalism."

However, the second-last of these grafs made me smile:

In a push in the right direction, the (Jan. 16) memo (from Craig R. Whitney and William E. Schmidt, two assistant managing editors) requires editors to ask freelancers if they are “familiar with our ethics rules” the next time each is given an assignment — and to “make it clear that continuing to contribute to The Times depends on observing those rules.” If a freelancer “deliberately disregards” the paper’s Ethical Journalism guidelines, “we stop giving assignments to that person,” the two editors warned.

So how did the freelancer conflicts on these stories escape detection before publication?

The freelancer who took the Samsung junket, John Biggs, had responded to the online ethics questionnaire for outside contributors in May, shortly after it became a requirement. “Have you accepted any free trips, junkets or press trips in the last two years?” one question asked. His negative response was accurate at that time, according to Mr. Whitney, who is also the paper’s standards editor.

After taking the October junket, primarily to write for CrunchGear.com, a blog about electronic gear, Mr. Biggs told me, he “simply forgot” about updating his ethics questionnaire response so Times editors would be aware of his conflict of interest and not assign him any Samsung stories. His editor doesn’t share his vague recollection that he mentioned Samsung’s role in his trip. In any case, comments he posted on CrunchGear on Oct. 17, the day he arrived in Seoul, make it clear to me that he understood the unethical aspect of junkets. “I’m here with Samsung,” he wrote, “suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom.”

Unfortunately, The Times’s online ethics questionnaire system requires updating of freelancer responses only every two years. Mr. Biggs, who in recent months has been writing brief articles almost every week for the business section, wasn’t asked to update his responses before writing the two stories about Samsung products in November.

Davos and the colour Green

BBC Online business editor Tim Weber with his take on the bouyant enthusiasm for the climate change issue among the business elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

An excerpt:

... When hundreds of participants voted on what the world's most pressing issues were, a large majority said "climate change", and also found that the world was not ready to tackle it.

It's difficult to say what caused the change.

German supermodel Claudia Schiffer says that seeing Al Gore's film on climate change An Inconvenient Truth made her support the LOVE campaign, which hopes to do for climate change what Bono's Join Red initiative does for Aids in Africa.

Green issues for global leaders

As it happens, there are plenty of chief executives who also point to the former vice president's film as a turning point.

Others are more sober, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel highlighting in her speech the Stern report on the economic impact of climate change, which was commissioned by the UK government.

"It's fascinating how green issues such as climate change have gone mainstream in the past six month," says Richard Punt, a managing partner at consulting firm Deloitte.

But he also has a word of caution: "I don't know whether the discussion here in Davos is actually moving forward or whether it is stagnating."

Regardless, "there is a spirit of enthusiasm across the business community, a sea change on green issues," says Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

But enthusiasm alone does not solve the problem, and the bosses know it.

"It is probably too late to counter climate change," say a number of corporate leaders.

With climate change inevitable, we have three options, they say: mitigate, adapt, or suffer.

When an environmental expert argues that we will have to face up to all three options, but that it is up to us to determine the mix, many heads in the room nod in agreement.

My usual blog can be found at ...

http://www.billdoskoch.blogware.com