LETTER: Are we ignoring core issues of climate change?

SIR -  It would be wrong, or certainly unfashionable, to challenge the motives of Ms Hayes Vincent and those who similarly champion the cause celebre of limiting climate change with its ever growing lexicon of techno-jargon.  I, nevertheless, contend that, as with so many topical discussions, the rhetoric is concentrated within the subject’s fringes, whilst perhaps ignoring the core issues?

Published statistics reveal that the USA represents some 5.1% of the earth’s landmass, ie roughly one twentieth, and its population is increasing at the known rate of 3,600 per day every day, based on there being a birth every 8 seconds and a death every 12 seconds. 

Thus the world number could be reasonably expressed as some 70,000 per day but, to avoid being over-sensationalist, one could say between 50,000 and 70,000.

The, thankfully, outgoing Prime Minister in the UK recently published a statement of intent that she was to reduce carbon emissions to 20% by 2050 by which time, even at the lower of the above two figures, and making no allowance for any compounding effect, there will be some 550 million additional people on the planet.

Remembering that the increase figure is births minus deaths, each new arrival will need some form of living space for which materials will have to be produced. 

He or she will need food and all the raw materials required to sustain life, so projections of this level will either be questionable or total nonsense?

To visualise Earth of the future is mind numbing, if only because there will be nowhere to which the surplus population can go, and the planet’s a big place.  Cabbage fields on the moon may still only be a dream.  However, if one can imagine modern day Ireland if emigration hadn’t been possible since, say, the famine, the prospect for our planet in those terms isn’t too rosy, whatever the campaigners achieve?

Nick Turner,

Drimoleague.