Professor Peadar Kirby:

I find this astonishing. In his address last Tuesday, President Obama said that 97% of the world's scientists have reached this remarkable consensus on the serious nature of what we are facing and it is due, by and large, to our human activities on the environment. When I talk about experts, I am talking about hundreds of the world's leading scientists who work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which will produce its seventh report later this year. I am not talking about the Michael Fingletons of this world, so let us not minimise the weight of the scientific advice we are getting. The Deputy noted that I said the scientific advice is changing. It is changing because the scientists are learning more and more that the very complex activities of the global climate are changing in worse ways than they predicted as recently as 2007. Things are getting worse at a faster rate than they would have predicted.

I do not know what "balance" means in this planetary emergency, which is what scientists now call it. The idea that we are small contributors takes away from the fact that we have the seventh largest global footprint of the 200 or so countries that exist in the world. We are a major contributor. We are, of course, a small country, so overall we do not contribute an awful lot, but the way in which we produce goods and services and live our lives is at the worst end of what is unsustainable in today's world. If we talk about balance and about giving our agriculture the chance to continue, then we are basically abdicating responsibility. Any country in the world can say this. Every country has its own individual challenges If the Deputy read the report of the World Bank published last November, entitled Turn Down the Heat, he would know that it was about the effect on food supply in the world if the sort of development that is happening is allowed to continue. It is absolutely devastating.

Moreover, it will be devastating within the lifetime of our children. We need to be serious about food security and dealing with the problem of carbon emissions. Calling for balance given this absolutely urgent and immediate situation is simply abdicating responsibility.