By Prem Shankar Jha This is one occasion for the world to act to avert the threat posed to humanity by global warming. All of India is watching the G-8 summit, which started in Hokkaido on Sunday. The reason is simply its expectation that this is where , barring a lat minute failure of nerve, Dr Manmohan Singh will announce that India is signing the IAEA safeguards agreement required by the Indo-US nuclear deal. But the leaders assembled there will be asking Dr Singh an altogether different question: what are you doing about global warming and climate change? And Dr Singh will have no answer. He will have no answer because the much awaited National Action Plan on Climate Change does not even show an awareness of the threat that climate change holds out to India and the rest of the world, let alone address it. Indeed, American sources have not hesitated to let their dissatisfaction with the document be known. Their dissatisfaction is understandable because at the climate change conference in Bali last December, all countries committed themselves to outlining what they would do to avert the threat posed to humanity by global warming over the next two years, so that these could become the basis of a new Kyoto Protocol , to come into force in 2013. But the Indian National Plan makes no reference to Kyoto-2, no reference to the 2009 deadline, and actively shuns suggesting any target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, reading the 52-page document, you do not even know why it was written, because it has only two things to say: the industrialised countries are responsible for the accumulation of greenhouse gases, so they must clean these up. India has a right to develop and therefore to use more, and still more energy. But as a good world citizen it promises to adopt energy conservation measures that will increase its energy use more slowly, and shift some of its energy generation away from fossil fuels to solar energy. For the rest, the report commits India to adapting its agriculture and water usage practices to global warming, so that the food and water base to society does not collapse. Reducing GHG concentrations is someone else's business. Adapting to the damage it is doing, is ours. The insouciance of this report towards the global predicament is breathtaking. The threat that not only India but the whole of humanity faces is not one of impoverishment, flooding, or the disappearance of coastal plains and small island nations. It is the extinction, if not of the human species, then a very large part of it, and will certainly bring down the entire edifice of civilisation in a scramble for living space, famine, war and genocide. What is more, if the evidence gleaned from studies of climate changes since the last ice age is any indicator, the entire change could take place in as little as two or three decades. This is not a prophecy of Nostradamus, but the unavoidable conclusion to which we are driven by the fourth Assessment Report o f the International Protocol for Climate Change (IPCC). The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen steadily from 278 parts per million (ppm) in the pre-industrial age to 386 ppm and is rising by two ppm per year. As hectic industrial development continues, the latest scenarios on energy supply and demand project that it will rise to 550 ppm. That will raise the average temperature on the land surface of the earth by 3 to 4 degrees celsius. Yvo de Boer, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), told a recent World Petroleum Conference that this would have "devastating consequences including global sea-level rise and water shortages for many millions of people'. This was not merely the understatement of the year but a positively misleading one. For, IPCC-4 has also pointed out that temperature increases have been two to three times as great near the north pole as near the equator. Against a global average increase of 1.2 degrees Celsius since 1970 it has already risen by 2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius across the Greenland ice field, and the entire Arctic region. A host of computer simulations done in various laboratories all over the world have shown that the Greenland ice cap will melt when the temperature rise exceeds 4 degrees Celsius. The ice cap is 10,000 feet thick. Two mini ice ages, that lasted a thousand years started in this way, and the change occurred within three decades or less. We are not far from this "tipping point'. That is why chunks of Greenland are falling into the sea, why the arctic ocean is no longer frozen, and why the Alaskan permafrost has melted for the first time in human memory. That is why James Hansen of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, the original prophet of global warming, warned the US Senate on June 23, just one week before India produced its report on climate change, that the world must reduce CO2 concentration to 350 ppm, where it was in 1970, within at most two decades. "Otherwise, we are toast'. Like other predictions of the future, there is always a chance that the IPCC's could prove wrong. Indeed its own reluctance to draw the conclusions that are implicit in its findings, reflects its inordinate desire to cover its flanks. But this is one occasion when it is infinitely safer for the world to act on the assumption that the IPCC's projections are well founded, because the cost of gambling on their being wrong and losing is simply too high to contemplate. There is no time left for playing the blame game. We have all got to take our share of the burden of reducing CO2 emissions. Otherwise we will leave our grandchildren a hell on earth in which to live out their miserably short lives.