Earlier this year, Texas trial lawyer Stephen Susman told the Dallas Morning News that “You’re going to see some really serious exposure on the part of companies that are emitting CO2.” He added, for good measure, that “I can’t say for sure it’s going to be as big as the tobacco settlements, but then again it may even be bigger.”

Is it not time to recognise that climate change is yet another symptom of our unsustainable lifestyles, which must now become the focus our efforts?

Yet governments, and those organisations who have now assumed the role of combating climate change, subscribe to the notion that climate change is our central problem and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is the cause of this problem.

See Sex sells, but at what cost? also.

Climate scientists have blamed global warming for a dramatic rise in the number of storms in the Atlantic over the past century. Their study showed the average number of storms that develop every year has doubled since 1905.

They suggest the trend is due to the rise in sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, a phenomenon with a well-established link to climate change.

Tropical storms are powered by the energy in the oceans they pass over, with warmer sea surfaces leading to more intense storms. In the past century, the surface temperature of the Atlantic has risen by 0.7C.

The Bush administration’s environment chief drew fire on Thursday from Democratic senators for delaying a decision on whether to let California regulate global warming emissions from cars and light trucks.

Stephen Johnson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has said the government will decide this question by year’s end, two years after California’s first request to set state air quality standards stricter than national rules.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who heads the Environment and Public Works Committee, told Johnson at a hearing she found the delay incomprehensible.

People in Philadelphia would swelter through as many as 30 days over 100 degrees each summer. The entire Northeast ski industry except western Maine would likely go out of business. And spruce and hemlock forests – as well as song birds such as the Baltimore oriole – would all but disappear from New Jersey to the Canada border.

These are some of the conclusions of a two-year study by the public interest group Union of Concerned Scientists of the effects of global warming in the Northeast if current greenhouse gas emission patterns around the world continue unabated. Winters will be on average 8 to 12 degrees warmer by the end of the century, and summers 6 to 14 degrees hotter.