Since 1988, hundreds of renowned scientists have been organised under the aegis of several United Nations agencies to study global climate change. The team, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which embraces 2,500 scientists from over 130 nations, produces an assessment every few years determining what climate change will do to the planet. Their most recent report - released yesterday in Paris - makes salutary, if also worrying, reading.
The report predicts that global temperatures will rise by anything from 1.8°C to 4°C this century and that the world has just 10 years left to reverse the effects of surging greenhouse gas emissions that could cause runaway climate change and make many parts of the planet uninhabitable.
If - as the IPCC predicts - the world is heading for 2°C of warming in the next few years, this is the tipping point at which most scientists agree major eco-systems begin to collapse.
Time is not on our side. The world has entered a period of climatic instability likely to cause widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation. Sea levels could rise, submerging vast areas of low-lying coastal land. Temperatures and rainfall patterns would shift in unpredictable ways. There could be water shortages for billions of people. As the Stern Report in Britain demonstrates, the economic consequences of not tackling global warming could be catastrophic. The only way we can ensure we do not precipitate accelerating climate change is for the world's nations - principally the richest - to cut their greenhouse gas emissions substantially.
Can Malta escape the Apocalypse?
We all recognise intellectually the likely effects catalogued by the IPCC with such persuasive objectivity, while being unwilling to acknowledge that our own lives would be profoundly different if climate change goes unchecked. The reality is that Malta will not be spared.
Climate change will make Malta's temperatures so unbearably hot that its attraction as a tourist destination will be destroyed. There will be extreme water shortages as rainfall over the central Mediterranean area is drastically reduced.
The biggest impact of this will be to exacerbate our problems with our diminished water table. This will lead to increasing reliance on our desalination plants at a time when energy supplies to run them are under threat and likely to be exorbitantly expensive. Lack of water in the soil will lead to increased soil salinity and alkalinity, thus accelerating the process of "desertification". The rise in sea levels will destroy all low-lying Maltese coastal areas.
Malta as we know it will cease to exist.
What can we do?
We can, for a start, try to put our own house in order. Alternative, renewable energy sources must be identified, and energy demand reduced through increased efficiency and energy-saving measures. Trapping rain water and more cost-effective ways of desalination must be found. Above all, we must make our own contribution to reducing greenhouse gases, essentially by curbing our reliance on the car. And Malta must strongly support diplomatic efforts to reduce global warming and join the concerted international action urgently required to save the planet from catastrophe.
Global warming is no longer a theoretical phenomenon, its victims no longer an abstract proposition. There are roughly 260,000 people aged 50 years or under living here today. Global warming is a problem likely to affect all of them in their lifetimes. The world in which unrestrained climate change threatens the conditions that make human life possible is the world into which they will grow old.