The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), fresh from sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore, has now produced an easily digestible, pocketbook synthesis of its Fourth Assessment, which was published in three more weighty documents earlier this year. And although every line was parsed and even challenged by nay-sayers, notably the US and Saudi Arabia, the facts adduced by some 3,000 scientists collaborating in the panel's work could not be set aside.
"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal", they say, adding that this "is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level". Furthermore, the warming trend "could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of climate change".
The IPCC's latest report also warns that, "with current climate change mitigation policies and related sustainable development practices, global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades". And even if their concentrations in the atmosphere were to be stabilised, further warming and sea level rise "would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes".
However, it emphasises that there is substantial economic potential for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades that could offset the projected growth of emissions or even reduce them below current levels by deploying "a portfolio of technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commercialised in coming decades". In other words, there is still plenty we can do in the short to medium term to avoid a planetary environmental catastrophe.
It is no coincidence that the IPCC's synthesis report has been released just two weeks ahead of this year's UN Climate Change Summit in Bali. Every one of several thousand delegates representing more than 190 countries throughout the world will have a copy. Bali needs to mark the start of serious negotiations involving all of the world's industrialised countries - including fast-developing China and India as well as developed nations such as the US and Australia, which spurned the Kyoto Protocol - to reach agreement on making deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the current treaty is due to run out. A "do nothing" approach is almost unimaginable, given the serious weight of scientific evidence.
No country can escape its responsibilities to protect the planet, including Ireland. Indeed, measurable progress in cutting our own greenhouse gas emissions will be the real acid test of the Green Party's participation in the current Government. As Dr Pádraic Larkin, deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency, said last week: "We simply cannot afford to ignore the problem or pass it on to our children to deal with. The time for action is now."