Evidence submitted to The House of Commons
Saturday, February 17th, 2007
Evidence submitted to The House of Commons, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee for their report “Climate Change: the citizen’s agenda” published on 13 September 2007.
Background and experience
I am Chairman of South Somerset Climate Action, a group established a year ago which has met every month since. In April, we created an audience of 160 people to hear the journalist, Rosie Boycott, and Mayer Hillman, author of How we can save the planet.
All 150 seats at our local theatre were filled for our screening of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth on both 13 Jan and 4 Feb 2007. Both were followed by discussions.
I have a degree in Physics and have had a career divided between teaching and working for youth and third world charities including 100+ presentations to audiences.
The kind of issue I would like to raise
Few parliamentarians appear to understand even quite straight forward scientific concepts. Both the Prime Minister and David Miliband have admitted their lack of scientific understanding and it shows; they do not know the questions to ask nor can they assess properly the information they receive. What is worse, they filter what they hear and ignore “inconvenient truths”. At least the Cabinet Minister responsible needs to have a personal grasp of the science.