Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Death toll rises in southern Europe's heatwave

Hot on the heels of the record breaking rains which lashed down on Britain last week, the news from Southern Europe is also bleak with record breaking heat causing the deaths of over 500 people in Hungary, where temperatures hit a record high of 41.9C (107F) in the southern city of Kiskunhalas.

Countries across the Balkan peninsula also laboured under temperatures that hit a historic 43C in Belgrade and 44C in Bulgaria. In an urgent announcement, Greece's weather service predicted temperatures of 45C (113F) and the government urged people to restrict their movements and stay indoors.

With blazes raging across much of the country for a third week, Athens' public order minister said the region was "on a war footing". In Bosnia and Macedonia, where temperatures shot up to 45C - the highest for 120 years - governments declared a state of national emergency.

Romania said at least 12 people had succumbed to the temperatures, pushing the death toll to 30 since June. Authorities said 19,000 people had been admitted to hospital, mostly with respiratory problems. In Serbia, volunteers joined firefighters and the army to help extinguish an estimated 50 blazes.

So we have now had both the extremes which the weather experts predicted would happen as a result of global warming in Europe alone in the space of a single week, and they are also occurring simultaneously across the planet. As Britain suffers unprecedented floods and southern Europe burns under record breaking heat, America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression, and in Australia even climate change sceptic, John Howard, has been forced to admit that climate change exists as the drought there got so bad that Australia was forced to consider cutting the water supply to it's agricultural region.

Bush finally agreed to "seriously consider" a climate change deal in two years time - when we all know he will be out of office - at the recent G8 summit, although even his recent promise to "seriously consider" a proposal that would result in a 50% cut in carbon emissions by 2050 is made on the premise that this reduction can be achieved by new technologies rather than by any actual change to our lifestyles.

The failure of the Bush administration to address this problem early in it's time in office - and it's reticence to even admit that such a problem even existed - will scar the Bush presidency in exactly the same way as Reagan's failure to address the issue of Aids scarred his.

The Bush team campaigned by claiming that the Democrats were overreacting to the entire subject of climate change:
'From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation's waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment - Republicans can't stress enough that extremists are screaming "Doomsday!" when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day.'
Now things have got so bad that even Bush can no longer deny what is in front of his face.

Leaders are defined by the way they react to "events, dear boy, events". Global warming was actually the largest event on the table during the Bush years, it was the elephant in the lounge which Bush studiously ignored for almost his entire presidency.

That failure alone deserves to stand as another pitch black mark on an already toxic presidency.

I am being neither flippant nor funny when I say I think he will be remembered as the worst President in the history of the United States. He has been a modern Nero, fiddling whilst the world burns.

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