The SNJ (25/02/04) reports the weatherman Bill Giles' predictions that a dramatic change in climate will turn the British Isles into a balmy Riviera. This gross trivialisation dismisses potentially the most serious environmental challenge facing humankind.

 
We face seriously disrupted worldwide weather patterns. Scientists consider this will mean extremely harsh winters and droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, widespread famine, loss of a quarter of land animals and plant species and wars around the world (i). Munich re-insurers predict that the costs of climate change damage will outweigh global GDP by 2060.

 
Even the Pentagon in a leaked report last weekend(ii) acknowledges that climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. They say this threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism. And Bill Giles writes about using more drought resistant plants in the garden?!

 
The Pentagon report also dismisses such predictions of sunny climes for Stroud. They say instead we will be plunged into Siberian temperatures by 2020 when water flowing from the melting ice caps shuts down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe warm.

 
It is clear we cannot say for sure which scenario is most likely, but every way we look the evidence points to serious troubles. Climate change protection measures are infinitely preferable. For example, the government could spend £35 billion saved by scrapping their roads building programme, on 20,000 home zones, Safe Routes to School, bus and rail fare reduction, light railways - the list goes on. The cost of implementing Kyoto does not even register, when faced with the decimation of our natural heritage. Naivity has pervaded policy making for far too long and the results will be absolutely tragic.

Yours David Taylor No 1 Candidate for European elections South-west Green Party

Notes to the Editor;

(i) Researchers at Bristol University have discovered that a mere six degrees of global warming was enough to wipe out up to 95% of the species alive on earth at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago. Green Party news release 19.6.03, http://www.greenparty.org.uk/index.php?oldnav=groupednews&b=0&l=12&nav=news&n=627 The w York

(ii) Observer - Sunday February 22, 2004 - Mark Townsend and Paul Harris