So “the final word”, to quote Tony Blair, is out. The 700-page ‘The Stern Review’, a report on global warning commissioned by UK Chancellor Gordon Brown and prepared by Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, sounded a severe warning: “Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world... access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms.”

With the warning, also came “optimistic” prescriptions as well: chiefly, carbon taxing and the promotion of low-carbon technology.

Thankfully, nobody denies the phenomenon of global warming any more. But questions remain as to how, if at all, we can control the weather. Climate is governed by millions of variables — from greenhouse gases and water vapour to atmospheric dust and solar activities. Scientists know about some of these factors but not about how exactly they influence the weather. And there may be many factors they just don’t know about yet. So is there a single weather model that can be called complete? The answer to this question is important.

We have, besides, a tendency that Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, describes as each successive generation’s craving for its own Noah myth — one that says we have sinned... that we could have saved the world but didn’t. Scott argues that, historically, there have been sharp rises in temperature over very short periods. For example, in 1200 AD, Europe was 2 degrees centigrade warmer than it is today and agriculture flourished even in Greenland.

... contd.