And no one thinks I'm a fool. Which brings me back to global warming. Currently, we are spewing about 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually by burning fossil fuels. Unless steps are taken to control emissions, we could be emitting 35 to 40 billion tons of CO2 by the end of the century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause average global temperatures to rise as much as 6 degrees centigrade above present levels.
Possible consequences are a significant rise in sea level, crop failures and extreme weather.
All continents will suffer economic losses, the panel stated, but the developing and island nations will be most affected. Reduction of crop yields in warm countries, decreased water resources in dry regions, widespread starvation and disease are other possible concerns. In the worst-case, doomsday scenarios, ice sheets melt in the Arctic and Antarctic, causing massive coastal flooding. It was as a hedge against these potential disasters that 174 nations signed the Kyoto Protocol, drawn up in Japan in 1997, which commits signatories to collective cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to a modest 5.2 percent of 1990 levels over the next decade. The United States is a signatory to the Protocol, but the Bush administration walked away from it, reversing a campaign promise to reduce greenhouse emissions, and embarrassing his head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Whitman.