Letter: Flood warning

Sir: The 20,000 dead in Venezuela's biblical floods join tens of thousands killed by the "super-cyclone" in Orissa, India. Last year, Honduras was reduced to ruins by Hurricane Mitch. In the last ten years there have been more extreme weather events than in the previous hundred. Global warming is a factor in them all.

If these catastrophes had been the result of nuclear terrorism, the work of some "evil empire", the press would be providing massive coverage featuring endless calls to immediate action. On global warming, however, the facts that agreements on greenhouse gas reductions reached at Kyoto were trivial, that big business has been fighting tooth and nail to stall any action and that governments are in the pocket of big business are allowed to go all but unnoticed.

Humanity will pay an unimaginably high price for this deadly silence in the next century.

DAVID EDWARDS

Bournemouth