Are you doing enough?

national | environment | opinion/analysis Sunday September 17, 2006 00:15 by lumsk

Are we as people living in Ireland doing enough to avert the climate catastrophe that faces us all across the globe?

Are you doing enough?

Jim Hansen, the leading climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, issued a now-or-never warning to governments around the world, including his own, telling them they must take radical action to avert a planetary environmental catastrophe. He said it was no longer viable for nations to adopt a "business as usual" stance on fossil-fuel consumption. (Independent newspaper 14th September 2006) So is separating your aluminium from your plastics, your glass from your composts; your paper from your landfill enough? No it is not. It might make you feel better, like your doing your bit, but seriously, world wide, we have got ten years to radically reduce emissions by 70%. Yet Ireland is still progressing the use of fossil fuels, inviting shell to drill for oil and gas of our west coast which will have devastating environmental fall out. The lucrative prospects of making billions of euros have blinded those that we have voted in. Peat is still milled in the midlands on an industrial scale. Peat provides a massive carbon sink, which means when in it is milled and exposed, it releases huge amounts of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in to the atmosphere, Carbon Dioxide is a gas which exacerbates the green house effect increasing global warming. Our efforts, inspirations and money should be looking towards alternative technologies like wind farms, bio fuels, and wave energy. We take it for granted that we can switch on our lights, run our home cinema systems, fire up our oil powered central heating. As consumers we need to start realising that these every day occurrences are not sustainable. We need to be responsible, we need to be looking at alternatives. If Jim Hansen is right, and all the data suggests that he is, then a drastic reduction in the energy that we consume, together with alternative energy solutions, is what it will take to save our planet.

Hey that sounds really serious. Well it is and it is meant to scare you. The Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrank by 14 per cent in just 12 months between 2004 and 2005.

The overall decrease in the ice cover was 720,000 sq km (280,000 sq miles) - an area almost the size of Turkey, gone in a single year. So the question remains are you doing enough. Answering for myself I have to say no. We need to lobby our politicians, we need to put climate change on the top of the agenda, we need to be taking direct action, we need to realising that this is the fundamentally most important issue to be effecting our lives, the environmental and climatic ramifications are immense. The problem with debating these issues is that climate change is not tangible, your all sitting there thinking what a fantastic couple of hot summers we have had. Look a little deeper, think why that is, think what effects these hot summers have had on the rest of the world, millions of acres of farm land in India laid to waste through drought. The mighty Amazon river reduced to a trickle, force 5 tornados becoming a regular occurrence and that is only a fraction of the environmetal catastrophes occuring. The physical evidence is all there, we just need to wake up and see how closely it effects our lives. Take some time to do a little research of your own, look at the websites below then see if you can honestly answer if you are doing enough. It really nearly is to late.

www.risingtide.co.uk
www.foe.co.uk
www.corribsos.com
www.platformlondon.org
www.lowimpact.org