Global Warming

Sir David Attenborough has called for a return to war-time values as Lewis Smith in today's Times newspaper points out..................................

He hit out at 4x4s, electrical standby facilities and lights that are left on unnecessarily as he demanded a change in moral and intellectual attitudes towards climate change.

He said that even tiny amounts of wasted electricity were immoral because they put “our grandchildren’s lives in danger”.

“I grew up during the war and during the war it was a common value that wasting food was wrong,” he told MPs. “It wasn’t that we thought we were going to beat Hitler by eating every bit of gristle of meat, but it was accepted as wrong to waste food. People felt that widely, universally.”

Such attitudes, Sir David said, should be revived. “There should be a general moral view that wasting energy is wrong. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tiny bit or a big bit. It’s a general attitude to life. We are putting in hazards for our grand- children,” he said.

Sir David made his call for change a few hours after the Met Office announced that 2006 was about to go down in history as the hottest in Britain since records began.

Is Sir David right, or is he scaremongering? After all, the Met Office records only go back 100 years or so? For all we know, climate change or global warming is a naturally occuring phenomenon. I'd also like to ask Sir David how his return to "war-time attitudes" will go down in the USA, the world's major user of fossile fuels, and in the emerging economies of China, India and Brazil?