Tuesday, 1 December 2009

Heading for storms in Copenhagen?




It is depressing to see people clutching at straws to deny the reality of climate  change.  This seems to be particularly prevalent in the United States, where there is one of the  biggest  rates of  CO2 emissions per head in the  world…… 20 tons of it per person per  year.
The last climate change treaty was negotiated in 1997.  The United States did not ratify it.
Since 1997, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by 6.5%.  As a result,   glaciers have been shrinking faster than before.  Since 2000, Greenland has lost 1.5 trillion tons of ice.
In the past 12 years temperatures have been 0.4 degrees warmer than in the previous 12  years.
My country, Ireland has been lashed by storms in recent   days.  I believe these  extreme  weather  events  are  related to our  dumping  of  all  this  CO2 and methane into  the  atmosphere day after day . After all, the atmosphere around the earth is quite thin, and the CO2 stays up  there. It does not disappear conveniently into outer space.
I hope we have a serious and binding agreement on  climate change  in the  UN conference in Copenhagen, not  a document  full of loopholes and let out clauses.

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