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12/2/09

The Independent: Time to confront the invisible enemy that threatens us all - by Michael McCarthy

For the complete report from "The Independent" click on this link

How are we to relate the evidence of our own senses to what we are told is happening, when the one in no way supports the other? Here we have the central difficulty that our society faces in dealing with the potentially catastrophic threat of the warming climate: it takes place in the future. Unique is a much overused word, but climate change is unique in the long history of grave human vicissitudes – war, disease, starvation, societal collapse – for a simple reason: in this case only, the future is known. Nobody knew the Thirty Years' War was coming, or the Irish potato famine. Nobody in Europe foresaw the Black Death before 1348. But we know what will happen with the global climate in the course of the 21st century if we carry on as we are – at least, it is known in so far as it is predicted through supercomputer programs of the world's climate, and the effect on that of pouring out an inexorably increasing amount of the trace gases that retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere, principally carbon dioxide (CO2) from industry, transport and the cutting down of forests.

Let it be said at once: every government in the world – from the US to China, from Norway to Brazil, from Ireland to Indonesia – accepts those predictions, in so far as they assert that an unremitting increase of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause an inexorable rise in global temperatures. You may think commentator X or blogger Y has a point when they opine that this global warming business is all hugely exaggerated, all so much hot air, driven by scientists seeking research funding, but it's worth remembering that no government now thinks that, anywhere. By the end of 2007, not even the US administration of President George W Bush, for so long the climate sceptic supreme, thought that. Are the governments the ones out of step?

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