"Apocalypse now! How mankind is sleepwalking into disaster"

Exeter / Zeeburg, 6 februari 2005 - Op de website van het Britse Metoffice een artikel met als titel: "The world cannot wait". Het betreft hier een emotioneel "verslag" van een klimaatconferentie van het Metoffice/Hadley centre begin dit jaar waar veel toonaangevende wetenschappers op het gebied van de klimatologie aanwezig waren.
De schrijver lijkt zich af te vragen hoe het mogelijk is dat de wereld ondanks alle kennis die inmiddels verzameld is over het broeikaseffect en de gevolgen daarvan passief blijft en gewoon doordraait onder het motto "business as usual".

"At the Meteorological Office's headquarters in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter last week, the world's climate scientists peered into the abyss. As Geoffrey Lean, our environment editor writes, most of them will have felt their children or grandchildren standing at their shoulders.
Global warming, as the product of human activity, is now established as scientific fact more firmly than ever, and the consequences are worse, more certain and closer than previously thought. Previously remote possibilities, such as the melting of much of the Antarctic ice cap, the collapse of the Amazonian rainforest and deadly acidification of the world's oceans, are becoming ever more likely.
This is a challenge to the whole of humankind, and it requires global agreements and institutions to respond. It is, in particular, a vast and historic challenge to political leaders all over the world."

"Apocalypse now: how mankind is sleepwalking to the end of the Earth! Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow."

"Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster - destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to flourish over the past 11,000 years - they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded."

www.zmag.org: Apocalypse Now / How Mankind Is Sleepwalking To The End Of The Earth

www.commondreams.org: Apocalypse Now / How Mankind Is Sleepwalking To The End Of The Earth