ICE caps may melt. Coasts may disappear. A smaller Ireland may come to have the weather of late 20th century Bordeaux. Yet any attempt now to forecast climate change in the next millennium is doomed to fail, an EU conference heard in Brussels yesterday.
Accurate predictions over the next decades - even a century - are as impossible to call as "the position of a ball at any given time" in a football match Prof Willy Dansgaard of the University of Copenhagen told the European Commission's conference on climate and ozone.
"One can explain the ball's location afterwards, but, like long term weather charts based on "pure coincidence", a match's final score is the result of "countless preceding coincidences", the Danish professor maintained.
Warning against apathy, he called for a reduction in emission of greenhouse gases through fuel saving, and support for developing countries to apply such measures. The explosive growth of the world's population should be halted by decent means" rather than "leaving the job to starvation and disease", he said.
He also called for further research into global warming and depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Prof Dansgaard is an expert on the Greenland ice core project, which aims to reconstruct and understand the recent history of the earth's climate.
Agricultural waste burning in developing countries is a significant contributor to ozone layer depletion, Prof Paul Crutzen, last year's Nobel Prizewinner for chemistry, told the conference. Prof Crutzen, who lecture at the Max Planck Institute, said that such emissions were increasing, due to population growth and agricultural/technological developments. However, substances we know nothing about may be destroying the layer, he said.
Ozone depletion has been traced mainly to the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in fridges, and the manufacture of synthetic foams and, aerosols. The Antarctic ozone hole was confirmed in 1985, and the Arctic ozone hole, over Ireland and Britain in March, was the deepest ever in the northern hemisphere.
International agreements have cut production of many ozone depleting chemicals, including CFCs, but western countries are reluctant to pay for supportive measures in developing countries, and it was only last December that the UN's InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted the human influence.
Opening the conference yesterday, former Irish government Minister and academic, Prof James Dooge, who is president of the International Council of Scientific Unions, called for greater partnership between natural scientists, social scientists and engineers in research.
Chronicling improvements in co operation between international scientific bodies, Prof Dooge noted the freedom of science was widely recognised in the last century, and scientists were able to meet, even in time of war. The last 40 years had seen the remarkable development of a "new architecture" in international scientific partnership, he said.
Prof Dooge is an opponent of Ireland's membership of the Western European Union, because of its nuclear capability.
