Help ameliorate global warming

A LETTER from Roderick Harrison displays a worrying lack of understanding about the power of humans to alter the Earth system and particularly its climate.

The recent very well documented rapid rise in global average temperatures, and concomitant changes in sea level, snow and ice cover, ocean heat content and acidification, phenology, etc., have been largely driven by a 40 per cent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations since 1800, much of which has occurred since 1970. Human activity through burning fossil fuels and changing the land use of the Earth’s surface has been shown to be behind this rise in carbon dioxide and in other greenhouse gases.

If emissions of greenhouse gases and land-use changes, such as major deforestation, continue unabated, then concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will continue to rise and to exacerbate global warming.

The result will be detrimental effects on human populations by the end of this century and beyond through, for example, rising sea levels, declining food security, increasing occurrence of extreme weather events, negative impacts on health, intensifying water shortages, and greater migration and potential conflict.

Rather than blithely dismissing the results of an enormous volume of research by highly qualified climate scientists in many different countries, institutions and disciplines as ‘Project Fear’, or adopting a ‘Que sera, sera’ attitude towards climate change, we should recognise the problem and support measures to ameliorate it. Future generations will not thank us for sticking our heads in the sand and doing nothing.

As Roderick Harrison suggests, the biggest threat to our future is indeed the human race.

However, this threat will not materialise through becoming increasingly dysfunctional in the way we treat each other, but rather by being ignorant of our impacts on the Earth system, of which anthropogenic climate change is but one element. Professor Bruce Webb

Exeter, Devon