Warming Is Only Part Of The Problem

It's also about changing wind patterns and changing water conditions and current deviations. It's about collateral impacts of precipitation changes and desertification, air, soil and water pollution, overpopulation and fresh water depletion. It's about resource consumption and exhaustion. It's about the extinction of species and the collapse of ecosystems. It's all of these things - and more - coming together, each building on the others. There's the real face of global warming.

The Greenhouse Gas or GHG issue is a major component in the overall environmental challenge that we must confront. It certainly is the one that has our attention at the moment. But we run a risk if we fail to recognize the need to address all the other, collateral factors.

Are we going to try to find ways to prevent major population migrations by, for example, developing means of adaption and coping strategies for the people of the regions that will be first and hardest hit by global warming? If we don't, their problems will eventually become our problems at the very point where our constructive options may be foreclosed.

The fiasco in Iraq has demonstrated what can happen to even the most powerful nations if they allow themselves to become so obsessed with one issue that they become blind to the several other dangers they unleash in the process.

Global warming is a global problem. It has to be solved globally or it won't be solved at all. It isn't enough to settle for national policies. We need to start seeing what is happening and about to happen in regions such as Africa as our problem, our threat. If we don't, these seemingly distant tragedies will become ours eventually.