Global warming is becoming part of the present. The 1990s was the hottest decade in the millennium - and 1998 was the warmest year. Bizarrely, the weight of the evidence required for policymakers around the world to act decisively is not great enough for the world's greatest polluter, America.
On gaining office, the Bush administration, with its roots in oil and big business, withdrew unilaterally from the biggest international commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions - the Kyoto protocol. To gain some scale of how reckless this act of political vandalism was consider this: if US states were independent nations they would comprise 25 of the top 60 nations that emit greenhouse gases - Texas's emissions alone exceed France's.
Washington has deployed a mixture of indifference to the pressing nature of climate change and incredulity that anybody else was prepared to do anything about it. This was, and is, a dangerous act. Kyoto has still not come into force - Russia has yet to sign up. Even worse is that new data suggests Kyoto, designed when climate change was thought be less destructive, will be out of date by the time it becomes effective.
Guardian UK August 6, 2003
