Over the past two years, Mr Blair, the British Prime Minister, has consistently claimed global leadership in tackling what he described as "long term, the single most important issue we face as a global community", which he stressed "can only properly be addressed through international agreements". In mid-September 2005, sharing a platform with US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, at the meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, he confessed "Probably I'm changing my thinking about this", adding that he "hoped the world's nations would not negotiate international treaties". He justified his volte-face, which reversed the commitments he had initiated at the G8 Summit last July, and effectively pulled the carpet from beneath the IPCC Kyoto meeting currently taking place in Montreal, by saying that "countries would not negotiate environmental treaties that cut their growth or consumption."
Early this morning I received an urgent e-mail form Peter Wadhams, the professor of Oceanography at Cambridge University who has been responsible for monitoring the thinning of Arctic ice and the reduction of the drivers of the thermo-haline conveyor system which powers the Gulf Stream. He drew my attention to an article published three days ago in Nature, which indicated that rising concentration of atmospheric CO2 is leading to increased acidity of ocean surface water. Within decades this will reach levels that will start to dissolve the calcium-carbonate-based shells of plankton, so putting in jeopardy a major element at the very base of the ocean food-chain.
C. I think this is fiction...
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