Sir, – It was daunting to see a photograph of myself taken almost 23 years ago (“The Times We Lived In”, Magazine, January 5th). To answer Arminta Wallace’s question in the piece accompanying Joe St Leger’s photograph, it was indeed purely a publicity stunt to promote Earthwatch’s then upcoming conference on global warming, Ireland’s first such, incidentally. Happy days; the scientific consensus was fairly new but pretty solid and, marvellous to relate, we knew how to tackle the problem: emissions reduction, energy efficiency, renewable energy.
All the better that the measures that needed to be taken were our environmentalist wish-list anyway. It would just be a matter of getting the information out there and, as with ozone depletion, after a brisk battle the global community would take the relevant steps and we could all go onwards and upwards into a bright future.
Well, I was 20 years younger but a lifetime more naive. The global community, rather than solving the problem, has been working very hard to ignore it. Such little matters as the central role of fossil fuels in the economy and the profits to be made from those fuels have postponed action to the extent that now, as Ms Wallace wrote: “It’s finally beginning to dawn on us that rising water levels are a reality”. Unfortunately that reality means that the comparatively straightforward response of 1990 is no longer an option. Emissions have not only soared but are climbing faster than before; the politics of global agreement are a quicksand and, it is widely agreed, our window of opportunity is closing fast – if it hasn’t actually slammed shut already.
Oddly enough today’s environmentalists seem to be stuck in a time warp, offering the 1990 solution to a 2013 problem. Time to wake up and smell the greenhouse gases, folks; emissions reduction isn’t going to happen any time soon, efficiency is still boring (bizarrely) and renewables are still being blocked by the old guard of coal, oil and gas. Yes, progress has been made but not enough and, crucially, not quickly enough. So, what can be done? Geo-engineering options are being put forward in seemingly ever-increasing numbers and variety. I have long argued that at least some of these options – for example, the Salter-Latham cloud ships and Phil Kithil’s ocean pipes, being natural, non-polluting and reversible – are ecologically sound and should be endorsed rather than condemned by some environmentalists. – Yours, etc,