Madam, - Brendan Newman, formerly of the Met Office (August 14th), cites the recording of a temperature of 95.6° Fahrenheit in Mullingar in 1955 as proof that global warming is nothing but the latest apocalyptic warning from the usual prophets of doom.
The reality is that it is the world's leading scientists, and not doomsayers, who are alerting us to the crisis that we face. If only those frantically trying to hose down the overheating nuclear power plants in France last week could be reassured by the fact that things were just as hot in Westmeath in the 1950s.
Air samples taken from frozen glaciers high in the Andean mountains show that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere never increased above 300 parts per million over the past 400,000 years. Indeed, the scientists involved believe the level remained below this ceiling for the last 35 million years. They also believe that even small changes in the level of CO2 had a pronounced effect on the advance and retreat of ice ages over that period. The level of CO2 is expected to rise to 500 parts per million over the next 30 years. This rise will come even if we start to act now as there is a time lag between the burning of fossil fuels and the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
If we do not change our ways it is expected that the level of greenhouse gases will have trebled by the end of the century. The atmospheric system is akin to the human lungs for our planet. In the industrialised West we are burning oil like a heavy smoker on 60 Marlboro a day. The first problem in kicking s habit is, of course, one of denial. - Yours, etc.,
EAMON RYAN, TD, Dáil Éireann, Dublin 2.