There is a dense cloud of smoke hovering through the fog and filthy air. The warning, advanced by the United Nations a month ahead of the climate-change conference in Poland, is a grim prologue to the swelling tide of environmental degradation.

Greenhouse gases, that heat the climate have reached record levels, specifically with carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide soaring far above pre-industrial levels with no sign of a reversal of the rising trend. It is, therefore, a forbidding agenda that will be of riveting concern at the high table.

“The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3 to 5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2 to 3C warmer and the sea level was 10 to 20 metres higher than now,” is the grim prognosis of the World Meteorological Organisation. The world alas is yet to react to the dire phenomenon though the warning signals have been emitted for quite a while; the periodic conferences have been almost invariably infructuous.

Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have an increasingly destructive and irreversible impact on life on Earth. The window of opportunity for action is almost closed. This is the distressing truth that the stakeholders will have to countenance and address, not the least the likes of Donald Trump who has gone off at a tangent on an issue that concerns the Earth, to which the world belongs. The righteous pledges have had little or no effect in tangible terms.

The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to a global average of 405.5 “parts per million” in 2017 ~ almost 50 per cent higher than before the Industrial Revolution. Levels of methane, a potent greenhouse gas responsible for about 17 per cent of global warming, are now 2.5 times higher than pre-industrial times owing to emissions from cattle, paddy and leaks from oil and gas wells.

Nitrous oxide, which also warms the planet and destroys the Earth’s protective ozone, is now over 20 per cent higher than pre-industrial levels. About 40 per cent of nitrous oxide is generated by human activities, including soil degradation, fertiliser use and industry.

All three gases are substantially responsible for climate change; and yet are rising upwards. It seems the urgency and extent of the actions needed to address climate change have not been suitably grasped by the polluters, and the blame-game between the developed and the developing world will lead nowhere, except further degradation of the environment.

Direly imperative, therefore, is the use of low-carbon technologies like wind, solar energy, and electric transport. The antediluvian polluting fossils need to be phased out rapidly. That sense of urgency is far from manifest. For humanity, the consequences will be severe. The world can scarcely afford despair, hopelessness, and complacency.