A chara, – Despite the 14 million people displaced by the flooding in Pakistan; the inhabitants of Moscow struggling to deal with record temperatures and rampant forest fires; villages being buried under landslides in China and the Petermann Glacier in Greenland splitting in two over the past few days, causing fears of chaos as it drifts south, there is still a notable lack of joined up thinking in Irish media reporting of these events. Nobody, as yet, seems to have made explicit the connection between between all of the above.
Climate change is upon us, with all its enormous consequences for human life at every level. Freak weather is increasingly becoming the norm, as people from as far afield as east Galway, the Swat Valley, the cities of Berne and Krakow and the island of Madeira and northern Tanzania know only too well.
The financial meltdown that we have experienced over the past two years, something which has impacted on all our lives, pales into insignificance in comparison with the environmental meltdown that is just beginning. As with the financial crisis, it is those who have contributed least to the problem that are bearing, and will continue to bear, the brunt of the consequences. – Yours, etc,