Hit that switch and let spotlight turn on issue of climate change
Saturday, March 28, 2009Saturday, 28 March 2009
Stormont and the Belfast Wheel will be plunged into darkness at 8.30pm tonight as part of Earth Hour, a global event aimed at highlighting change. Environment Correspondent Linda McKee asks whether world leaders be paying attention.
The World Wide Fund for nature makes its point with its illumination of the Giant’s CausewayThe climate change sceptics come out of the woodwork every time Environment Minister Sammy Wilson makes one of his startling pronouncements on global warming — and there do seem to be a lot of them.
You only have to check out the comments on the Belfast Telegraph website every time the controversial minister stirs things up with his views that climate change is not a man-made problem to see that he does attract a lot of support.
And many of these supporters will insist that they are merely the vanguard of the silent majority that thinks tackling global warming is a huge waste of money and that politicians are merely following a climate change agenda set by a small minority because they wrongly fear they will be opposing the view of the majority.
It’s something that could be put to the test tonight when WWF embarks on its global Earth Hour event.
The international green group is hoping to persuade millions of people around the world to switch off their lights at 8.30pm for one hour to highlight climate change and persuade world leaders of the importance of taking action. So far, more than 1,000 cities worldwide have signed up to take part and a host of famous landmarks will be plunged into darkness this evening, including the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Nelson’s Column in London and the Belfast Wheel.
And it’s one of those events that has really caught the imagination. WWF’s head in Northern Ireland, Geoff Nuttall, says Earth Hour was launched three years ago in Australia, where it attracted some two million participants.
Last year the numbers swelled to 50 million around the globe and this year WWF is really going for broke — attempting to entice one billion people to join the cause.
The question is how much will an hour of candlelight reduce our carbon footprint? In the face of such an overwhelming threat, Earth Hour will inevitably be a token gesture, paling into insignificance in the face of the huge amount of emissions we produce by taking our summer holidays and heating our homes.
But WWF is hoping that if enough people make their feelings known, it will send a very clear message to the world leaders congregating in Copenhagen later this year that swift, firm action needs to be taken.
“The UN climate change summit is taking place in December and it’s going to be crunch time for making global decisions,” Mr Nuttall said.
“This is about raising awareness of the fact that we face such a big challenge and it affects everyone in the globe.”
WWF backs the scientific consensus that carbon emissions not only need to be cut by 80% by 2050, but they must peak and begin to reduce by 2020, if a global temperature of more than 2% is to be forestalled.
Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,a coalition of 3,800 leading scientists from more than 50 countries, warn that temperatures of more than two degrees will affect hundreds of millions of people in every continent and Europe will not escape.
“Last year, BP estimated that the global supply of oil has only 41 years left at current rates of consumption — and consumption rates are increasing. This is a problem that has to be solved in any case,” said Mr Nuttall.
It’s the climate sceptics that are in the minority, he insists.
“Theirs is really a minority view within the Assembly as well — it was shown by the Earth Hour motion that the majority of the Assembly agree with us and there are even people with in the DUP who agree,” he says.
“This is a real problem and putting our head in the sand isn’t going to help.”
And the idea of going with the flow and looking forward to a utopia of Mediterranean sunshine is out of the question, said Mr Nuttall.
“The effect on Northern Ireland is not just a matter of getting warmer by a few degrees. It has consequences for changing weather patterns and the way we live and grow our food which has been developed over hundreds of years.
“Climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people because of flooding or drought and that is not going to have a positive effect on them, or on us.
“We will experience not just higher temperatures but a greater degree of heavy downpours which cause flooding and also more coastal flooding.
“We’ve already seen what flash flooding does in the last few years in Belfast — if you want more of that, that’s what we can expect.”
