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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 515
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WCL 515 May 2006
God help them!
Since August 1945, when the destruction of two cities in the space of a few minutes proclaimed the peril in which the human race stood, the clamour for a different direction for our governments has been regular and persistent.
It has been led in the right direction by the world citizens and world federalists who have more than any others, recognized that we must abolish war or war will abolish us. What is more, they have further recognized that nothing less than human political unity will give the possibility of joint action to avert our growing peril.
But during the ensuing sixty years, despite a few encouraging moves In the right direction, the world's leaders have concentrated on other aims.
The priorities have been stocking the world with weapons - nuclear and other. The potential for deliberate destruction of civilized life have risen to a capacity of thirty to forty times what would be necessary to destroy all our present structures. And the nuclear arsenals have never been controlled, let alone diminished, while proliferation has continued apace so that there are now a dozen governments with power to unleash such devastation.
According to figures published early in May, a rise of 3 degrees in the temperature of the globe is more or less in the middle of scientific forecasts by the more cautious forecasters. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has spelt out the details and its accompanying implications. These include the likely loss of half the world's nature reserves; and corals will be gone. But the prophecies of disaster are worse - more precise and more alarming. A temperature rise of over seven per cent is mooted.
Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are expected to be at their highest for 650,000 years. As the draft report has been leaked by the US government, it seems clear that even the Bush administration has accepted that human activity is responsible for these changes to our environment. But the worse effects predicted are really frightening: the melting of the Greenland ice-cap will raise global ocean levels everywhere by at least three and perhaps as much as seven feet. The island of Great Britain will shrink drastically and like many other countries will be utterly transformed.
Not for the better. With half the UK gone, drains, houses, underground systems and temperaments will not cope: six inches of snow will see to that, alternating with temperatures of 21 degrees and winds of 55mph.
Other prospects include cement-eating termites and malarial mosquitoes breeding in Britain. Wider world prospects are that a billion people will starve. We cannot welcome such a future for our grandchildren and descendants - even if they can survive.
There have been many attempts at coping with the new threats, but they have largely been vitiated by their acceptance of the competition between sovereign states, especially the military powers, in trade, spying and weapon development. The pollution by US military aircraft, that has been unremitting for 60 years, is simply the tip of the iceberg. The near universal pursuit of power and wealth has been irrespective of damage to the environment or global resources. We are all on the point of paying for such recklessness.
And although awareness of other dangers has grown, it has not stopped the concentration upon lesser objectives. Survival has been relegated to the worries of think-tanks without power: instead the rush for wealth and comfort has occupied the minds of the already wealthy countries. A doubling of the standard of living every generation has been hailed as a triumph, while the doubling of the world's total population in the same time has brought nearer the day when nothing will save the planet from a culminating tragedy that will end our civilization and perhaps human life on the planet altogether.
John Roberts
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