Global warming, as the term implies, affects the entire globe. That has only one implication: that planet Earth is doomed to overheat.
I am not, by nature, a pessimist. But that's the way I feel this week, seeing the reaction to Sir Nicholas Stern's landmark review of global warming by the nations that rebuffed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Sir Nicholas is a former chief economist of the World Bank.
That pessimism is heightened by the fact that the entire world has never been able to join hands to achieve a common goal.
Sir Nicholas' message was loud and clear: countries have to work together to make dramatic cuts in emissions of the polluting gases that are behind rising temperatures. Whereas we have endured years of impassioned and too-often emotional rhetoric from environmentalists and often dense language from scientists, he cut to the chase by talking about cold, hard cash.
He estimated that shelling out for technologies to clean up our act would cost 1 per cent of annual per-capita gross domestic product. But we will suffer up to a 20 per cent drop from present-day levels if the world doesn't take concerted action.
By putting the argument so clearly, the economist has gone where no other global-warming researcher has gone before - and grabbed everyone's attention in the process. Amplifying his call, a United Nations report revealed that the participants in the Kyoto accord were, on the whole, slipping badly behind on their targeted emissions cuts.
Nothing has changed with the United States and Australia, which have signed, but refused to ratify, Kyoto - on the grounds that it would hurt their economies. Responding to Sir Nicholas' study, Kristen Hellmer, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said US President George W. Bush had 'long recognised that climate change is a serious issue, and he has committed the US to advancing and investing in the new technologies to help address this problem'.