Till recently the folk who went around with placards that displayed “The end in nigh” were dismissed as people off their nuts. Their prediction of imminent doom was taken skeptically. Respectable scientists all over the world are now echoing their warnings.

Indeed, there is growing consensus among them that the earth heating up at a faster rate than was hitherto thought and that the underlying cause was a rapid increase in carbon-dioxide emissions, which is a direct result of profligate human activity. Unless the trend is immediately reversed, all sorts of dire consequences lie ahead for our planet and its inhabitants.

Worse, these consequences are expected to manifest themselves not in an indefinite future but during our lifetime. The worse-case scenario envisages a large-scale annihilation of life forms by the end of the century. If the self-destructive species know as Homo Sapiens survives, its manner of existence will bear no resemblance to the way it lives today!

Even the relatively less drastic predications involve a raise in the sea level that will swallow up thousand of islands and a large swathe of coastal areas, and rearrange the coastal contours of all continents. Climate change may result in increased floods, droughts and other forms of extreme climatic events, involving repercussions such as crop failure and consequent mass migration. Even a fraction of these grim forecasts would entail urgent action on a global scale. Yet many years after the Kyoto Protocol, the extremely modest targets set for the control of emissions remain unmet.

The world’s single larges polluter, the United States, which opted for the protocol, has only lately been suggesting that it wishes to be a part only of post-Kyoto arrangements. During the past year, however, there has been considerable movement towards accepting the basic premise of climate change. Many a skeptic now sees a light of realisation at the end of the tunnel.

Few believe that the US will go out of its way to reduce emissions any time soon. It’s also not likely that his successors also will be ever very enthusiastic about combating global warming, because it will involve sacrificing a good number of short-term benefits at national level.

On the face of it, the concern is genuine—- not least because China is expected in due course to overtake the US as the largest polluter on earth. However, it would not be surprising to find China opposed to equivalent restriction on the ground that the US, Japan and Western Europe were not encumbered by any such regulation at a comparable state of their development.

The theories of climate change were for long dismissed as an anti-developmental leftwing conspiracy, and the curbs imposed by Kyoto would interfere with productivity and profitability of the industries in the West which, along with Australia, refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

The production of energy by burning fossil fuels is the main culprit which causes the green house effect, and the recent converts to the cause of combating global warming now tend to focus on cleaner technology, meaning nuclear energy. But in that case the problems of nuclear waste disposal, and the risk of accidental meltdowns, seem to have been underplayed. Alternatives such as solar power and wing farms have not been sufficiently explored because they require huge investments and offer, at best, delayed returns. Had serious explorations of these technologies been launched, say, half a century back, it could be possible to arrest the global warming and avoid all the oil wars fought so far.

Now at this stage, the dangerous prospect is that the neoliberal elite, which has co-opted the argument about global warming, will also appropriate the prerogative of managing the solutions. If the predicated effects of climate change begin to manifest themselves with increasing frequency and fury in the years ahead, the developed world’s immediate interests will take precedence.

While the poorer countries whose contribution to the green house effect has been miniscule, will bear the brunt of nature’s wrath —even though the planet’s fate is effectively indivisible in ecological terms.

In the meantime, overt skepticism about the human role in global warming has not altogether vanished. A diminishing band of rightwing commentators continues to harp on the conspiracy angle. Their doubts are shared by a even tinier concentration of critics on the left, who suspect that much of the alarm has been whipped up with a vested interest in alarmism, as it keep the gravy flowing, and its now being sustained by corporations that has realised that the growing penchant for green solutions can be milked for profit.

There may be no harm hoping against hope that skeptics are right and the climate change is a part of natural cycle that will run its course without causing too much disruption. Yet that complacency is considered unjustified, given the consequence of inaction could be catastrophic.

Brig (retd) Hafiz is a former

DG of BIISS.