Climate change brought about by global warming and the threat it poses to humanity were chosen as key themes for exploration at the British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual Festival of Science this week.
Dozens of public talks, exhibitions and research papers emphasised the central importance of global warming and the danger it represents to all on this planet. It has been a talking point since the 1970s and yet the process that spawned it began more than two centuries ago. Emerging industrial development and transport systems required prodigious amounts of energy and industrialists began making extensive use of coal, wood and, since the late 1800s, oil. The discharge of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide was a consequence and continues apace today in road transport, production of electricity and in heating our homes and offices.
This same invisible gas now threatens all of us. It is a powerful greenhouse gas, helping to trap heat from the Sun close to the Earth's surface, gradually increasing average temperatures. It is now scientifically beyond question that carbon dioxide and other important greenhouse gases, including methane, are a direct cause of the rising temperatures we describe as global warming.
It is shocking that the public and the world's governments remain astonishingly indifferent to this threat. Many of the presentations at the science festival described the consequences of a warming world. Sea levels will rise as polar and glacial ice continues to melt, thus swamping low-lying countries and altering the geography of rich and poor countries alike. Those in the developing world will be less well able to cope with the rapid pace of change, resulting in mass displacement of populations and the health implications this entails. Disease will be an early manifestation followed by the misery of hunger and shortages of clean water and food. Irish coasts will change and the seaside fringes of many of our cities will become uninhabitable. Destabilisation of the global economy and threats to the continuity of energy supplies will also hit us hard given our open economy.
It is therefore surprising that governments continue to foot-drag on their responsibilities in relation to global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, agreed in 1997, bound its signatories, including Ireland - but excluding some of the world's largest carbon dioxide emitters, including the US and China - to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to levels lower than those emitted in 1990. Imposing the limits set by Kyoto are a minimum action meant to forestall the onset of self-sustaining global warming, and yet most countries are failing to meet the limits.
Ireland is well adrift of its commitments, with our only chance of meeting our targets available via "carbon trading". While an agreed world approach, this is tantamount to buying our way out of trouble by attaching carbon discharge to countries where carbon release is lower. It allows us to pretend that we are acting while, in fact, we continue to store up trouble for the future.