The US Vice President, Al Gore, has written a book based on the above premise. The UK Government has sponsored a television advertisement warning of 'catastrophic' impacts if nothing is done. And more than 160 governments have signed the Framework Convention On Climate Change, which commits them to stabilise carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at levels that pose no danger.

A major driving force behind all this concern is an assessment by the world's best climate scientists. In 1988, the United Nations established a scientific group - the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - to investigate the science of human induced climate change in order to advise world leaders on how to deal with the problem.

The IPCC released its first report in May 1990. The panel concluded that human-induced climate change is real and that levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing. The main contributor is carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas. The report noted that the planet faces probable temperature increases unprecedented in human history, but stated that the first signs of climate change might not emerge for at least a decade.

Greenpeace has been monitoring scientific and news reports of major extreme weather events and natural climate-related disasters since the IPCC's first warning in 1990. Greenpeace believes the only conclusion that can be drawn from this 'catalogue of disasters' is that global warming is now detectable and the first impacts of human-induced climate change are in fact already being felt.

Climate change means much more than higher temperatures. It will mean an increase in average global temperatures, but some regions will warm more than others, and some may in fact cool. Impacts will vary considerably. Changing rainfall patterns will bring more droughts to some regions but more floods to others. Many plants and animals will face extinction. Water supplies will become less reliable in some regions, particularly in those already vulnerable. There may be more hurricanes in the tropics, and more windstorms in Europe. Entire island countries in the Pacific may disappear under the sea.

Yet if action is taken, unmitigated disaster is not inevitable. We have international political agreement on the need to protect the climate - the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Now we must set targets and timetables within that convention to reduce emissions. Solutions to global warming do exist - the clean energy alternatives and the energy saving processes only require political will to be implemented.

We can save the climate - but the longer we delay action, the more extreme that action will have to be.