More and more people in the UK believe that the severe flooding which has affected large swathes of Southern England from the Somerset levels in the west to the affluent towns and villages in the Thames valley near London, are the result of climate change.
For once the words of a politician were extremely bold and clear. The warning was brutally stark. In a keynote speech on climate change in Indonesia, Secretary of State, John Kerry, likened global warming to a weapon of mass destruction and dismissed climate sceptics as members of the “Flat Earth Society”.
This is getting embarrassing. Another month, another crude by rail accident in the US. Yesterday a 120-car train carrying tar sands oil derailed in western Pennsylvania.
Over the last few years an increasing number of influential investors, climate scientists, analysts and activists have been arguing that we cannot afford to burn all the fossil fuel reserves due to climate change.
California remains gripped in a vice-like drought, with last year being the driest on record in the state. Last month, the situation was so bad that it prompted Governor Jerry Brown to declare that the sunshine state was in a drought emergency. "We ought to be ready for a long, continued, persistent effort to restrain our water use," Brown said.
