g varied from strongly-positive to weakly-negative.
More recently, Martin Perry of Oxford University has said that "Unexpected changes cannot be ruled out. There are potential surprises out there, both in time and in place. This ignorance is a risk in itself. We don’t know when these unexpected impacts could occur, or where." Nobel prize-winner Paul Crutzen suggests, ominously, that global climate change will bring "unpleasant surprises."
The threat of global warming, then, is real. The response to it, as yet, however, is not. At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the world’s governments signed a treaty agreeing to combat global warming. Industrialised nations promised to "aim" (the crucial word) to level off their emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000.
The United States signed this treaty in the full knowledge that its carbon dioxide emissions were projected to rise by 13 percent by the year 2000, with its multinationals providing the lion’s share of $1,000 billion investment in the search for oil over 10 years. George Bush once said he would use the "White House effect to counter the greenhouse effect: and then, when elected, adopted the "wait and see strategy" favored by big business, despite the fact that, as the Ocean Flux and other studies have shown, the environmental systems under investigation are of such complexity that certainty is impossible and waiting never ends.
Four years later, we know that almost no Western countries will meet the modest targets set at the Earth Summit. The International Energy Agency estimates that by the year 2000 global greenhouse gasses will be 17 percent higher than in 1990; by 2010 they will have risen by 49 percent. Similarly, the World Energy Council reports that combined emissions of Western countries have actually increased by 4 percent between 1990 and 1995. Only Britain and Germany are on track: Britain, because it happened to change from coal to gas for political reasons (the destruction of the coal industry was not motivated by a desire to protect the environment); Germany, because it shut down the inefficient industries of the east. Genuine action to combat global warming has been minimal. Indicatively, the British Energy Conservation Trust set up to take action has received only a tenth of its planned funding. Energy minister, Tim Eggar, cites accidental pollution cuts as justification for opposing other measures. Eileen Clausen, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for environmental issues, admitted the obvious truth that governments were "in disarray" over climate change. There was "no clear policy direction," and "little thought" had been given to implementing and enforcing any policies adopted.
If the world has done little to date in the face of all this, what are the prospects for change? Will the world continue to play Russian Roulette with the climate? An idea of the sort of economic and political forces arrayed against change can be gained by considering the response of those same forces to an earlier "threat."
@HEAD 1 = In Deepest Peril
@PAR AFTERJ<@191>UB = In April 1950, the U.S. National Security Council Directive 68 (NSC68) stated that "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose absolute authority over the rest of the world." The citizens of the United States, the report went on, "stand in their deepest peril," being threatened with the "destruction not only of this Republic but of civilisation itself." (Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power)
U.S. hysteria about Soviet plans for world conquest was matched in Britain. For David Watt, former Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Anglo-American special relationship is "conditioned on Britain’s remaining the single most effective adjutant in the task of containing the Soviet Union and its allies."
It is significant that whereas there is now overwhelming scientific evidence for the reality of global warming, there was always plenty of evidence to show that the Soviet threat was a fantasy. In reality