Technological advancement in the 20th century, ironically enough, spawned in many cases miseries in the world even at a greater scale than that century’s world wars.

Man has been inventing ways to systematically destruct the ecosystems under the delusion of progress.

The fall of Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War paved the way for the United States and other advanced countries to give greater attention to scientific research for economic and industrial growth. However the new manufacturing technology proved to be more dangerous than weapons of mass destruction.

Environmentalists have noted with horror that the earth’s natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, threatening in the worst case scenario rendering the earth a wasteland unfit for human existence.

It was under the shadow of such a dismal picture that the Bali conference on climate change was held recently.

A number of environmental scientists and NGOs held demonstrations outside the conferences to press for effective decisions to tackle the problem.

Environmental scientists all over the world have been warning the political leaders of more droughts, heat waves, floods and rising sea levels caused by global warming linked to greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels. The Greenland ice sheet melted at a record rate this year, the largest ever since satellite measurements began in 1979.

“The amount of ice lost by Greenland over the last year is the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps, or a layer of water more than one-half mile deep covering Washington DC,” said Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

One-twentieth of the world’s ice is in Greenland. If it all melted it would be equivalent to a 6.4-meter global sea level rise, the scientists said.

Millions of people in the Third World (who are least responsible for the problem), apparently, are defenseless against the havoc wreaked by the changing climate and consequent rising sea level. The people in several poor Asian countries have not yet fully recovered from the trauma of the tsunami that hit them three years ago.

There are no political or voluntary agencies to give sufficient relief to the victims of climate change in Africa where huge floods kill thousands of people, destroy vast tracts of agricultural lands and create large scale famines besides devastating their infrastructure and utilities.

Egyptian scientists fear that the rise in global temperature would submerge one third of the Nile Delta region, including the northern coastal port of Matruh.

Most of the environmentalists strongly protested the US refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol and its negative stand in the matter of reining in the emission of the polluting gases.

The Kyoto Protocol is a global agreement to the International Framework Convention on Climate Change with the objective of reducing Greenhouse gases that cause climate change. It was agreed on Dec. 11, 1997 at the 3rd conference of the treaty when they met in Kyoto, and entered into force on Feb. 16, 2005.

Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and three groups of fluorinated gases (sulfur hexafluoride, HFCs, and PFCs) are the major greenhouse gases and the subject of the Kyoto Protocol.

President George Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol because he feared that the terms of the protocol would slow down the industrial and economic growth of the United States. (China and India, who rank No. 2 and No. 4, respectively, as the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, have no obligations to reel in emissions under the Kyoto Protocol because they are considered emerging countries.)

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, in a bid to offer greater environmental safety for humanity, donated SR300 million to form a fund for research studies on energy and climate change at the Riyadh summit of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in November.

Let us hope that the US will also make a similar move to save the planet Earth from great calamities dangers.