Leading Article: A chilling assessment of global warming

WE ARE used to predictions of doom from environmental pressure groups - it is their stock-in-trade, after all - but there is something chilling about yesterday's warning from Dr Klaus Topfer, head of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), that the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty that is the first painful step the world has taken to confront the catastrophic threat of climate change, may fail.

Dr Topfer is a German politician, but not a member of Germany's vociferous Green Party, and by no means given to extravagant premonitions. He is a 61-year-old Christian Democrat economist who for seven years was the respected Environment Minister of the Federal Republic and more recently has taken charge of Unep in its Nairobi base. He is the very model of a sober and responsible UN administrator.

All the more remarkable, therefore, that he should so brutally puncture the optimism to which the Kyoto agreement gave birth a year last December. World Saved, the headlines as good as said then. World Not Saved At All, said the good doctor yesterday, and he went even further: all the indications are, he said, that it may already be too late to stop the process of global warming.

But Dr Topfer was merely reflecting a hard reality: reaching an agreement at Kyoto was one thing; delivering it is another thing altogether.

Will Californians stop driving their cars? Will the Chinese find an alternative to coal-fired power generation? These questions go to the heart of the matter. To make cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that are destabilising the global atmosphere will involve real changes in lifestyle. But the political will to make such drastic changes is a long way off, in Europe, Japan and above all in the US, by far the world's greatest emitter of CO2.

The problem is that global warming is perceived as something distant, something that does not affect people's immediate interests, something that does not affect Me Personally. Yet it is now accepted by the international community that climate change will affect the very basis of life for most of the people in the world, with sea-level rises that are likely to swamp many countries, crop failures, increased disease and more large-scale natural disasters - even as the world's population soars past six billion and ever upward.

The more Dr Topfer can make people think hard about that, the more he does us all an invaluable service.