If we don't act now, it'll be too late

Someone, somewhere may be trying to tell us something. For the floods - the worst for half a century - have arrived, with uncanny timing, at the beginning of what is likely to be the most fateful month ever for the future of the world's climate.

Someone, somewhere may be trying to tell us something. For the floods - the worst for half a century - have arrived, with uncanny timing, at the beginning of what is likely to be the most fateful month ever for the future of the world's climate.

The appalling pictures of the flooded homes of York, Worcester and elsewhere will be fresh in the public and political mind when Gordon Brown rises to make his pre-Budget statement on Wednesday - and does much to decide Britain's strategy for tackling global warming, as well as the Government's response to the fuel protesters.

The day before, the United States will have chosen between a presidential candidate who has made combating climate change a political trademark, and one who believes this would interfere with the God-given right of Americans to drive gas-guzzlers to work.

And a week tomorrow - the very day that the fuel protesters' deadline runs out - vital international negotiations will open in the Hague. These will decide whether the world implements a painfully negotiated treaty to begin to cut the pollution that is causing the world to heat up.

It may well be that our children and grandchildren, living in a much more inhospitable climate, will look back on November 2000 as the month when Britain, America and the world failed to take the last, best chance to bring global warming under control. But nature seems to have decided that it will not let this happen without first having its say.

Ministers may have kept shamefully silent about the environmental case for fuel taxes when the protests struck in September. Environmentalists, equally reprehensibly, may have failed to speak up for their convictions. But two bouts of dreadful floods in less than a month have abruptly altered the political context - even bringing the environment near to the top of Tony Blair's personal agenda.

Nor are they the only examples of what our forefathers would have hailed as signs bearing an urgent message. This summer the fiercest wildfires on record blazed through the drought-stricken western United States, incinerating 4.3 million acres of the country, with flames up to 80 feet high.

The summer before, an unprecedented heatwave hit the east of the country, and a tropical disease, West Nile fever, began killing people in New York. Yet even under Clinton the US has remained the most reluctant to agree on international action on global warming. And in the year between, the news was punctuated by appalling floods in Mozambique, Venezuela and India, and droughts in Kenya and Ethiopia. All in all, the cost of damage wrought by the weather has been five times as great in the 1990s as in the previous decade.

Even if none of these events can in themselves be ascribed to global warming, "a pattern" - as Michael Meacher, the environment minister put it last week - "is beginning to develop". And it is one, moreover, that is entirely consistent with what scientists have long said would happen as the climate got hotter.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - on which the scientists serve - habitually minces its words. Five years ago, in its last report, it could bring itself to say only that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate". But now it concludes that pollution has "contributed substantially" to the proven warming of the climate over the past half-century.

Worse, the scientists conclude that the world, over the next century, may heat up almost twice as much as they had previously estimated.

The report is also a landmark in the long scientific debate on climate change. For the most outspoken and distinguished global-warming sceptic, Dr Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helped to compile it. And while he denounces its summary as "waffle words", he now admits both that warming is taking place and that we are at least partly to blame. "There has to be a human component to the change that's under way," he concedes.

The scientists on the panel say that the world's people must cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 per cent if global warming is to be kept under control; even then, the inertia of the world's natural systems is such that the climate will go on heating up for decades, and the seas will continue to rise for centuries.

By comparison, the commitments enshrined by the Kyoto Protocol - agreed three years ago as the world's bid to cut the pollution - are paltry indeed: they would require industrialised countries to reduce their emissions by just 5.2 per cent over the next decade.

Even if the protocol were fully implemented, it would reduce the 2C temperature rise predicted for 2050 by only 0.06 of a degree. As things stand, this looks unlikely. Only Britain and, perhaps, Germany are on target to meet their promised reductions. And it seems as if the Hague conference will fail.

The issues on the table are technical and complex: trading in pollution permits, questions of how far the growth of forests (which absorb carbon dioxide) can be set against emissions, measures for taking action in developing countries where it may be cheaper to get results. But they boil down to a clash between the Third World and the United States.

Developing countries say that the industrialised nations, which are responsible for almost all the pollution, must take action before they commit themselves to controlling their emissions. The United States says it will not do anything unless the Third World acts too. Europe - led by Mr Meacher and John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister - is trying to break the impasse. In fact developing countries such as China and India are making huge strides: China has cut its use of coal by 16.8 per cent in the past two years alone, while India has the world's biggest wind energy programme. But the US, by far the world's biggest polluter, remains adamant that it will not stir.

In fairness the problem does not lie with the American people. A recent public opinion poll showed that four-fifths of them want the administration to take action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and two-thirds think that it should do this regardless of whether other countries do.

No, the obstacle is the US political class. It is Congress - notoriously dominated by the energy industries - that is refusing to ascribe to the Kyoto Protocol until it is satisfied that the Third World is doing enough. And the Republican platform of George W Bush - scion of Big Oil - monstrously suggests that implementing the treaty would force "Americans to walk to work".

The good news is that industry is ahead of the politicians, with even huge oil and motor companies - such as BP, Shell and Ford - developing technologies to beat global warming. They are investing in solar and wind power, and in cars that will burn much less petrol and, eventually, non-polluting hydrogen.

But real progress depends on governments implementing the treaty. Small though its planned reductions may be, they are an essential first step. Most important of all, it would be a signal to business that the world is going to change, and that future profitability depends on recognising this. It was only after the agreement of the Kyoto Protocol that the American car industry stopped arguing that its provisions would drive it out of business and unveiled plans for less polluting vehicles.

So it's back to Mr Brown, the newly elected President, and their counterparts all over the world. Let's hope they are listening to Mother Nature.