IN his book World on Fire: Saving an Endangered Earth, Senator George Mitchell prophesied that:

Climate extremes would trigger meteorological chaos—raging hurricanes such as we have never seen, capable of killing millions of people; uncommonly long, record-breaking heat waves; and profound drought that could drive Africa and the entire Indian subcontinent over the edge into mass starvation .... Even if we could stop all greenhouse gas emissions today, we would still be committed to a temperature increase worldwide of two to four degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of the twenty-first century. It would be warmer then than it has been for the past two million years. Unchecked it would match nuclear war in its potential for devastation.