ARGUABLY, the most important meeting I participated in last year was the October conference at Canning House, in London鈥檚 Belgrave Square, on 鈥淐limate and the Amazon: Consequences for our planet鈥�. According to experts at Britain鈥檚 Met Office鈥檚 Hadley Centre, the rainforest is likely to vanish within a few decades if greenhouse emissions continue to rise.
Lost forest cover, decaying vegetation and overheated soils are expected to release as much as 77 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. This will raise global temperatures significantly more than the UN鈥檚 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts to date. This would swamp the benefits of even full compliance with the Kyoto Protocol 鈥� and that is sadly a far-off dream.
Peter Bunyard, a science adviser at the Hadley Centre, wrote to me recently about the predictions of Hadley scientists and others in these matters. They reckon that greenhouse gases could rise way above levels of 500 parts per million by volume and beyond safety levels. Bunyard said some current projections, including losses from vegetation and soils, are for atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to reach 1000 ppm or more.
Advertisement
The battle to get greenhouse gas levels under control ought to be treated as global priority number one. Starting a major war with Iraq will only make our present pollution problems worse.
AS a member of the MP鈥檚 All-Party Group on Skin, I am becoming increasingly concerned at the damage we humans are doing to the Earth鈥檚 protective ozone layer. The problem is that it is getting thinner and thus not protecting us as much as before from the Sun鈥檚 harsher ultraviolet radiation. Even in gloomy Britain, 2000 people a year die of skin cancer. The National Radiological Protection Board advises us all to cover up on sunny days and wear hats. But some clothing gives better UV protection than others, especially when it concerns babies鈥� sunhats (快猫短视频, 13 July 2002, p 10). So I asked health ministers what they thought.
Hazel Blears, the public health minister, replied that although there are standards for UV protection for clothing in Britain and Europe, there is none as yet for hats. She added that while clothing standards give some sense of the protection offered by the crown of hats, brims and peaks present a greater challenge as they can act both as a shield and a reflector to the face and neck.
She commented that a new European standard, BS EN 13758-2 Textile Solar UV Protective Properties, which replaces earlier European and British ones, requires a protection factor of at least 40, but still covers only clothing. In Australia and New Zealand, AS/NZS 4399:1996 Sun Protection Clothing Evaluation and Classification is a standard that addresses clothing and hats worn 鈥渃lose to the skin鈥�, but not hats with brims as these are considered to be face shades. The AS/NZ standard has four bands of protection 15 to 24, 25 to 39, 40 to 50 and 50+. Although the new European standard has a cut-off of 40 for UV protection from clothing, any fabric with a factor greater than 40 is considered protective. The British Standards Institute has still to research the UV protectiveness offered by hats, admitted Blears.
It is important that the BSI researches a range of hats and gives Britain similar bands of protection to the ones used by Australians and New Zealanders 鈥� but better suited to gloomier climes.
