Do we have the political will to save the planet?

And no prizes for guessing the culprit either. Climate change caused by global warming is again in the news, this time responsible for melting the Arctic ice-cap at an unprecedented rate with potentially catastrophic consequences.

The new study, which involved 250 scientists and is apparently one of the most authoritative ever produced on global climate change, reveals that the Arctic ice is now half as thick as it was just 30 years ago. In the same period, the distribution of ice has shrunk by some 10 per cent.

As each week passes, the environment seems to rise up the global agenda. Mass species extinctions, soaring temperatures causing desertification, floods, droughts and crop failures, storms and rising sea levels are all far more prevalent in the news than a decade ago.

Even the Queen, who is normally scrupulous in her avoidance of passing comment on such matters, or conducting herself in a way which could be construed as political, is planning to convert Windsor Castle to hydro- electricity. Tomorrow, she will also open an international climate change conference in Berlin.

So, there is precious little doubt remaining that our climate is, indeed, warming at an unprecedented rate. But the question is: is there still time to save the planet? That is assuming, of course, that we decide we want to.

Records dating from the mid-1800s to the present day show a steady increase in our global temperature by roughly 0.7C, while ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic reveal that the temperature was relatively static for 1,500 years prior to the industrial revolution. Those same ice cores show that before the industrial age, carbon dioxide () levels were also steady in our atmosphere, averaging around 280 parts per million (ppm). By the mid-1990s, that level had reached around 370ppm.

It is the rise of concentration in the atmosphere that the overwhelming majority of environmental scientists believe is the cause of global climate change. Even Bjrn Lomborg, the now-famous author of the book, The Sceptical Environmentalist, which suggests that most ecological solutions are an expensive waste of resources, states that global warming is "definitely" occurring and that human agencies are involved.

The Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing emissions of by 5 per cent, is largely seen as the cure for this impending disaster. With Russia finally agreeing last month to back the international concordat, the 1997 agreement can now come into force.

But if ardent greens can agree on one thing, it is that Kyoto will not even come within a whisker of solving climate change. Rather, as Claus Toepfer, the United Nations’s environment programme director, said in September, it is "only the first step in a long journey".

Each year we release into the atmosphere nearly seven billion tonnes of which has for millennia lain buried within the Earth. Once released, it will remain in the atmosphere for around a century, trapping more of the sun’s heat.

Most of today’s doomsday scenarios are based on an atmospheric concentration of reaching 550ppm. On current trends, this figure is likely to be reached in the second half of this century. Even if levels rise no higher, this would just be the start. Natural systems such as ocean currents and ice-caps have a huge degree of inertia built into their time-scale, meaning that climatic changes will continue for hundreds of years after levels stabilise.

To quote an article in NewScientist this September: "The bottom line is that only drastic cuts in global emissions of , of two thirds or more, can stop the concentration of the gas rising ever higher and stave off ever more severe climate change. The more quickly the world can make such cuts, the lower the level at which concentrations will eventually stabilise."

But the Kyoto Protocol only involves the most modest of reductions at 5 per cent. The United States does not support it, developing nations such as China and India do not have to make any cuts, and it expires in 2012.

The most important thing Russia’s commitment to the protocol will bring about, then, is a discussion on what to do next.

What the politicians really need to commit to is a move from Kyoto-style piecemeal negotiations on individual national targets to a global plan to cap concentrations of greenhouse gases. Most climate scientists agree 550ppm should be the maximum. This would still lead to substantial climate change, with the average temperature increasing by between 2 and 5C and the sea level rising by 0.3 to 0.8 metres by 2100, but would prevent even more severe changes.

As Nicola Saltman, the environmental organisation WWF’s project leader on climate change, points out, the political will to sort out the problem is gathering pace.

Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, has promised to make the issue a centrepiece of his presidency of the G8 group of rich industrial nations in 2005.

One option being discussed is to propose a ceiling of emissions, so setting a firm and scientifically cogent level by which the success of future negotiations can be measured.

But that would be the easy part. Such a ceiling would put an absolute limit on global emissions over the coming century, but deciding who is entitled to what proportion of those levels would doubtless cause endless disagreement.

Those countries currently classed as "developing" nations are adamant that they would only agree to quotas that are based on population. Furthermore, the United States, which pumps out eight times as much per head as China, rejects such a solution.

But even if an agreement can be reached on quotas, the next phase would be achieving them. An eminent panel in the journal Science recently concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of in the 21st century: not wind, solar or even nuclear power. Simple measures such as improving energy efficiency would help, but would only make the smallest dent. Hydrogen, hailed as the great solution to the "dirty" energy industry, requires huge amounts of energy to produce and as such it is still decades off commercial application.

A totally new technology, such as nuclear fusion, is necessary otherwise very little can be done. To make certain that we add no more carbon to the atmosphere than we take away will require major structural changes to the global energy industry.

Then there is the cost, with many economists saying that it will be a hugely expensive transition to make.

But one thing that can no longer be in doubt is that time is of the essence. For thousands of years, concentrations remained steady at about 280ppm. It took 150 years for those concentrations to rise to 330ppm. It has taken just 30 years to get from 330ppm to 380ppm. On current trends, that figure is rising by 3ppm annually, the consequences of which are clear.