Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-07-04-Speech-3-258"
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"en.20010704.6.3-258"2
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"Mr President, there is a great temptation in politics to consider everything to be a matter of negotiation which can be agreed on amongst people. So that we might remember what we are dealing with, I will reiterate a few facts about climatic warming. I would like to remind you that there is now ample scientific proof regarding this matter, and that climatic warming is a hard fact. There is just one party we have to negotiate with, and that is nature, which does not make compromises. It just is.
The latest time series analyses of seawater temperatures say the same as what we have known about air temperatures for a long time. During the last hundred years the seas have warmed up by 0.6 degrees, and the trend is accelerating. In terms of average temperatures this is a very great change. Glaciers are melting; 85% of them are receding at a very fast rate, as much as several tens of metres a year at their worst. The Andean ice caps are in danger of disappearing altogether. The polar icecaps have shrunk by 25% in the last three years. In northern areas of continents the permafrost is melting at a dramatic rate, especially in central Siberia and Alaska. This also has large-scale effects on the exploitation of natural resources in these regions.
If we allow global warming to continue, the dreaded, worst-case scenario in northwestern Europe may well take place. Warming could divert North Atlantic sea currents, causing northern Fennoscandia to have a far more severely cold climate than it does now as a result. As the glaciers melt, the so-called Atlantic pump will cease working and the warm Gulf Stream coming up from the tropics and its extension, the North Atlantic Current, will stop flowing. This could result in the whole of northwestern Europe becoming colder, which palaeo-oceanographic studies show could happen suddenly, with catastrophic results.
The same facts reveal themselves in every direction. Just recently the Red Cross confirmed what other aid organisations have been saying: experience of an increased number of natural disasters shows that the change can be put down to global warming. Unless we act quickly and, furthermore, put pressure on others also to act quickly, these new phenomena will increase exponentially. Bonn needs to be a success."@en1
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