Royal Society President - Bush = Nero - The Independent

[hatrack]

"One of Britain's most eminent scientists has attacked President Bush for acting like a latter-day Nero who fiddles while the world burns because of global warming. Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said the Bush administration must accept the case has been made about the link between man-made pollution and climate change. Continuing to deny the impact of human activities on the environment may ultimately have catastrophic consequences for everyone on the planet, he said.

The Royal Society has calculated that the 13 per cent rise in greenhouse gas emissions from the United States since 1990 will dwarf the cuts resulting from all other countries that will follow the Kyoto protocol. In a speech to policy-makers in Berlin today, Lord May will also castigate elements within the British media who promote "misleading" opinions about the true nature of the scientific uncertainties surrounding climate change.

"If the public are misled into thinking climate change does not pose a serious potential threat, some policy-makers could more easily find an excuse not to act. The United States administration has shown that this is the case," Lord May said. "All countries must accept the case has been made ... We need to ensure our own leaders and opinion-formers in the media are not allowed to act as modern-day Neros over climate change, fiddling while the world burns," Lord May said.

"There is a real problem and the solutions aren't easy but it doesn't help at all to have people, for one motive or another, running around misrepresenting what we do and don't know," he told The Independent. "One thing we do know for sure is we are changing the composition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that is going to have effects unless, by some implausible miracle, everything cancels out," he said."

EDIT

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=617595

[NNadir]

1. Nice image. A correct one too.

Not that there isn't lots of fiddlers...

Some of them are us.