Good News From Copenhagen

I'm not going to call it Global Warming anymore. In case it is summer where you live I would mention that it is cold here, -1C last night and 0C today; plus a wind chill factor of -6C. Now I know there are places where that would be regarded as a balmy spring day but not here on the south coast of England. Not until the Gulf Stream stops anyway. Even though it was bitterly cold we made it down to the Irish pub on the Harbour at lunch time. There another hardy drinker poured cold water on the idea of Global Warming and wondered at the point of all the world leaders meeting in Copenhagen. At first I thought he was joking, using the most important meeting in the history of the world, to add weight to his comment about how cold it was. But he wasn't, he really did think that the planet wasn't getting hotter, how could it be given that this was the coldest day in living memory. Some peoples living memory is shorter than others.

But I wasn't despondent, he was in a pub in Torquay, not in the conference in Copenhagen. The people in the conference, world leaders must be well informed, responsible people with the best interests of their people and their peoples’ children uppermost in their hearts and minds. A steely determination to do the right thing. To go down in history as the group the saved the world. They have known this get together was important. They would have spoken to scientists and advisors learned in their fields who would have been able to explain in detail the effects of the rise of more than 2C on weather patterns around the world and how these changes would effect the world's ability to provide enough food and water to keep the population nourished and what steps are needed to keep the rise in temperature below 2C. They wouldn’t, like me have listened to “the man in the pub”. Optimism will shine through even when there are no logical or even illogical reasons to suggest it is the right frame of mind to switch the evening news on to find out what steps our courageous world leaders had decided on to save the planet or to be a little more accurate, all the living creatures on the planet. (Those bigger than single cell organisms at least).

So this group of people, with all the facts at their finger tips, all the graphs showing this and that, all the projections of what would happen if they did nothing, all got round a very big table and decide that nothing needed to be done. I can not think the side meeting between India, China, S. Africa and that other country will have any effect other than to really, really upset at least 50% of the other countries on the planet. Big Brother putting his foot down again. So Global Warming isn’t happening. Terrible things aren’t going to happen to the weather. People will not starve or die of thirst in their hundreds of millions or even billions later on in this or any other century. A large proportion of plant and animal species aren’t heading for extinction.

Well thank God for that.