The Stern report

A former senior economist at the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, publishes a 700 page report on global warming tomorrow. It is the first comprehensive look at the consequences of the impending climate change by an internationally respected economist, making the argument that global warming will be potentially disastrous for the global economy, unless billions of dollars are spent immediately on reducing emissions. Stern argues that nations must address the issue via a set of international agreements, using a mixture of green taxes and carbon off-setting measures. As an article by Mark Lynas in a recent New Statesman suggested, the planet is around one degree centigrade away from being in unknown territory - never having been as hot as this in millions of years, it is difficult to predict what will happen. What is looking likely is that our children will reach adulthood in a world without an Arctic ice cap (it is predicted all the ice will melt in the next couple of decades).

This comes only a few days after a report that the Gulf Stream - the current that keeps Northern Europe at a relatively warm and wet climate instead of the cooler and drier one it would have without it - stopped for a few days last year. Oceanographers and climatologists still cannot work out why such a huge volume of warm current flowing at millions of litres per second could stop. The worst-case scenario is that in time, the Gulf Stream will halt, leading to dramatic climate change across Europe.

The question is not how much Britons will feel the crunch on the domestic front, as it becomes increasingly expensive to drive a car (especially a big car), as the price of all-year round fruit and veg from the local supermarket rockets upwards and foreign holidays become more expensive etc. but whether the American government embraces the report's findings. So far, I've found nothing in the US press about the report. In stark contrast to the British Press, the US media seems to be oblivious. And yet hyper-consumptive gas-guzzling America is where the really dramatic change in lives is going to have to come. Let's see if the report gets any airplay stateside in the next few days..