Global warming: Adapt to a global solution or die

In today's UK Guardian Robert Macfarlane asserts that "Climate change is the most serious emergency the human race has faced".

It continues: "The consequences of a rise of 3C, described last week by the (UK) government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, as "likely", would be calamitous: a worldwide drop in cereal crops of between 20m and 400m tonnes, 400 million more people put at risk of hunger, and 3 billion people left at risk of flooding and without access to fresh water supplies."

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Originally uploaded by SF buckaroo.

In the article it is made clear how difficult it would be for a Tory leader, whose party is wedded to choice, deregulation and a free market, to push through the tough policy measures needed. "A strong countervailing governmental force is needed to work both against the business state and individual self interest."

Climate change "demands nothing less than a total restructuring of the human relationship with nature. In these senses it, it represents at once the greatest threat that the modern world has known and the greatest opportunity."

This echoes the words of superstar sociologist Manuel Castells, who in the second volume of his trilogy The information age put forward the idea that Green imperatives could provide a comeback for communal politics.

Not only will the stark choices push government internal policies away from the hegemony of current laizzes faire ideologies, but it will also force governments to work together with other goverments. In short, the need for global regulation may provides the platform for the first truly global political movement and even, dare I say it, global government. Without it life could get very nasty indeed.

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