Sir, Two authoritative warnings about the disastrous effects of global warming have been published recently in the foremost scientific journals.

In Science, Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientist, urges immediate action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (report, January 9; letters, January 22, etc): “delaying action for decades or even just years is not a serious option.” Sir David deplores the US refusal to participate in remedial action now or in the future and urges the US and all other countries to get involved “in what is truly a global problem”.

In Nature, Professor Chris Thomas and his colleagues estimate that the higher temperatures to be expected by 2050 will cause the loss of more than one million plant and animal species (report, January 8).

The evidence is completely convincing that the future of life, human as well as all other, depends on slowing and ultimately stopping global warming. The crucial question is of course: can it be done? Even if governments pledge action, and even if the US Government can be made to toe the line, what can be achieved from the top down is surely limited.

That is because of the almost universal and total dependence on the internal combustion engine: cars, buses and lorries, indispensable for work, food, health and leisure, accounted for about a quarter of all carbon dioxide emission in the UK in 2001. In the UK every sixth job has to do with motor transport; and the Government relies hugely on road and fuel taxes. It is difficult to imagine how any government, democratic or autocratic, would be able to stop or even slow down the car pandemic, not to mention having to cope with the unimaginable social upheavals.

For my physicist father Max Born and his generation the most frightening prospect was nuclear warfare. Fifty years on, global warming is an even more frightening prospect because, unlike atomic weapons, it is insidious — no mushroom clouds, no dead cities — and, on the evidence so far, even more difficult to control.

Alternative sources coming into use can have little effect within Sir David King’s time limit so that their short-term influence on global warming can only be mininal: a case of too little, if not too late.

Yours truly,
G. V. R. BORN,
The William Harvey Research Institute,
Charterhouse Square, EC1M 6BQ.
January 23.

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