The Eleventh Hour

Twenty years on from the wake up call to end all wake up calls: the planet's health continues to worsen, the privileged few get richer and richer, and the warning signs stack up like logs in a newly felled forest. For one hundred thousand years of pre-industrial history, Medieval Warming Period and all, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere never reached more than 300 parts per million. At the start of the Industrial Revolution the figure was 280 parts; by the end of World War II it had gone up to 300; in 2003 it had risen again, this time to 360; Tim Flannery predicts that the next set of data will show us passing 455 parts per million. Whatever the truth of that, the figures are heading in only one direction. All part of the natural cycle, no doubt.