Policy makers have to recognize the long time scale inherent in climate change.
That came from Dr. Robert Watson, who chairs the intergovernmental panel on climate change, together with a scientific group, which has established what is happening and what may happen. He told a startled group of journalists we have found from computer modeling that if you double the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content over seventy years the sea level continues to rise, not for ten more years, not for a century, but for the next thousand years. In the coarse of the 21st century the global temprature is expected to increase by somewhere 1.5 and 6 degrees celcisus. That may not sound like very much, but only 4 degrees separate us from the last ice age. The effects will be variable, with some places warming and others cooling.