Paris promises much, but it won't be enough - Michael McCathy

I

t is now 27 years since the danger of climate change burst upon the global consciousness: in June 1988, in the middle of a drought so fierce that the Mississippi seemed to be drying up, Dr James Hansen of Nasa told a US senate committee that global warming had begun, and his words covered most of the front page of the next day’s New York Times.

Since then we have seen the issue become one of the world’s principal preoccupations, with increasingly refined science suggesting that if we continue to emit the carbon dioxide produced by our factories and motor vehicles, the Earth will undergo an atmospheric temperature rise this century that will destabilise the planet and human society with it.

Read the piece in The Independent by Michael McCarthy - “The Paris Climate Conference will bring change - but I doubt it will be enough.”