On Sunday evening I sat down to watch Antiques Roadshow, not normally a great source of climate change advice but I learnt from their furniture expert, John Bly, that climate change ‘is a load of old twaddle’ or something very similar. Next I switched over to Top Gear at least here I expected Jeremy Clarkson’s provocative outbursts and climate denial. Some people say the climate argument is won but this constant drip, drip of ill informed scepticism allows people still to doubt and delays action.

Yesterday Practical Action hosted a briefing in the House of Commons in advance of the Copenhagen summit. My colleague, Gehundra Gurung, spoke about the impact of climate change in Nepal. How the Himalayan ice caps are melting resulting in changes in the flow of water and because of this upsetting the historic pattern of farming and bringing hunger and food insecurity. Most of us have seen ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of mountains with and without glaciers. But the images that brought home to me the realities of climate change in Nepal were more mundane - they showed ’before’ and ‘after’  houses. Traditionally roofs were flat so as to weather the snow increasingly now they are pitched, because there is so much less snow and so much more torrential rain. Gehundra spoke of less rain delivered in more extreme downpours. (You can see the slides of Gehundra’s presentation here as a PDF.)

The Copenhagen summit is about to start – we need as a world to say clearly that Climate Change is happening, it is man made and poor people in developing countries are feeling its impacts first and hardest.

This is not a time for sceptical, ill informed grandstanding – no matter how funny – now is the time for concerted and clear agreement and practical action.

Margaret

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 11:50 am and is filed under Campaigns, Climate Change, Copenhagen 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.