Madam, – Every day The Irish Timescalls attention to the perils of climate change. Two examples in the past week are, "Massive Antarctic ice shelf hanging by 'a thread' " (January 20th) and "US study dispels myth that Antarctica is cooling" (January 22nd). This is why I was surprised that none of your contributors or letter-writers drew attention to the fact that David Bellamy was allowed cavalierly to dismiss climate change on the Late Late Showof January 23rd.
At the very least another scientist should have been invited on to the programme to challenge Bellamy’s position by presenting the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is happening at an extraordinary rate and that, in the main, it is being caused by humans burning fossil fuel.
Climate change theory is not just a vague hypothesis which someone put forward and can be easily dismissed. In science a theory is a coherent body of principles that makes sense of a whole array of data.
Theories such as evolution and, more recently, plate tectonics are well established. Neither of these theories explains everything about evolution or the earth’s crust, but they make sense out of much of the present data and therefore cannot be facilely discarded.
There are more uncertainties about the greenhouse theory than about evolution or plate tectonics, especially about the complexity of the carbon cycle; nevertheless it makes sense of the scientific principles which establishes our planet’s climate. Some of this has to do with data on global temperature which can now be traced back 400,000 years.
Other data involve an understanding of the opacity of atmospheric gases to infrared radiation. Most important of all, we know that if we do not take drastic action soon, the climate of the planet will become inhospitable for many species, including humankind. This is potentially much more serious than the current economic upheaval.
The Nasa scientists James Hansen is so alarmed that there is no time to waste that he and his wife Anniek wrote a personal plea to President Obama and his wife Michelle: “We write to you as fellow parents concerned about the earth that will be inherited by our children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born. But urgency now dictates a personal appeal”. He went on: “There is a ‘profound disconnect’ between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the problem as described by the science”.
Pat Kenny’s decision to give a platform to David Bellamy to reject climate change widens that disconnection and undermines our individual and national efforts to take serious action to prevent dramatic and destructive climate change.
– Yours, etc,