We've no choice but to clean up our act

So far, so good, it seems. Now let us take a look at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued on Nov 2. Its key points are: we have to phase out fossil fuel by 2100 to limit the impact of climate change; human influence on changing climate is clear; the period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30 years in the last 1,400 years in the Northern Hemisphere; atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (major GHGs) are unprecedented in the last 800,000 years; delaying action will substantially increase the challenges to limit global warming below 2 C, relative to pre-industrial levels; if temperatures were to rise above 4 C (which appears likely given our business-as-usual attitude), risks include substantial species extinction and global and regional food insecurity; emissions can be substantially reduced through changes in consumption patterns and adoption of energy savings measures.

Of the seven key points, the last three are of special importance with the last being directly related to the first. Of course, we can believe big-business and fossil-fuel proponents' assumption that the warnings are just empty talk by "out-of-their-mind", anti-business climate scientists. But we are already experiencing the impact of climate change on food production - droughts in some parts of the world and floods in others.

One of the catchwords of the capitalist world is, every crisis comes loaded with opportunities. Many world leaders believe in it, and rightly so. But if those opportunities mean finding new ways to make more profits on the pretext of protecting the environment, then we can jolly well start preparing to welcome doom. Money is at the heart of the environmental, and the greatest human, crisis. Until political leaders the world over end the game of keeping ahead of the rest of the economic pack or catching up with the leaders, the future seems bleak.

What is really disheartening is that governments, probably at the behest of big business, do not take initiatives to keep the rise in temperature below 2 C when it is possible to do so at a low cost (0.06 percent of world GDP), and instead leave the world to pay a much, much higher cost to cope with the effects of a substantially warmer planet in the future.

The author is a senior editor with China Daily. oprana@hotmail.com