Getting warmer ...

Watching "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore's documentary on global warming, was an unsettling experience - unsettling because the climate changes it details seem so enormous, you wonder if mankind has the capacity to adjust and counter this looming crisis.

Seeing the film in Bangkok felt doubly dismal, because although it had Thai subtitles, there was just a handful of people at the Scala when it showed last September. It seemed like the message - a vitally important one on the future of the planet - was almost wasted.

I came out thinking Greenpeace needs to give free copies of this movie to every office and school not only in this country but throughout the region.

And Thailand needs to find a green ambassador to voice the concerns of environmentalists in this part of the world.

Problems are far more acute here, where environmental concerns are often seen as a brake on economic growth and all the hopes and dreams it carries. No surprise, perhaps, that green activists seem thin on the ground and often have an appallingly short life-span.

(With a new national police chief, not tied to the former government and other "vested interests", is there any hope we might see progress into the murders of activists such as Charoen Wat-aksorn, in Bo Nok, June 2004, or Phra Supoj Suwajo, in Fang, June 2005?)

Since emerging from the Gore documentary, it's been starkly apparent that many within this country's elite are sadly distracted by the current political mess - Thaksin, the coup, corruption, the new airport fiasco, writing a new constitution - while clouds are slowly building, bigger and ever darker, for storms more and more powerful.

The debate about global warming has been voiced largely in the developed world, and while countries such the US or Australia may be villains in this drawn-out squabble - for selfishly opposing the Kyoto Agreement to stem greenhouse gases - this issue is too big and too important for Asean countries to ignore.

All Thais, all Asians, indeed all people on the planet, need to become rapidly acquainted with climate change and the potentially massive impact it is likely to have over coming decades.

For a deeper understanding of the crisis, people might like to seek out "The Weather Makers", a best-selling book by Tim Flannery, a relatively young professor recently named Australian of the Year.

"The Weather Makers" has won high praise Down Under, in the US, UK and elsewhere (it was the No 1 seller in Canada recently) as a very readable and detailed explanation of the climate changes the planet is currently undergoing - from the species already disappearing as alpine ecosystems warm, to the melting of the ice caps and glaciers, and subsequent rise in sea levels.

In "An Inconvenient Truth", the former US vice president warns that more than a 100 million people will be displaced by rising sea levels, and that the world will see refugee crises on a huge scale. Many of the people forced to shift to higher ground live in low-lying areas such as Bangladesh. India and Burma and other nearby countries could face huge influxes.

Bangkok lies just above sea level and is one of many cities likely to face a growing impact. As at least one leading Thai thinker has already foreseen, it will, sometime later this century, become a metropolis partly underwater - a "Venice of the East", as it was previously known. The serious flood that swamped much of central Thailand for many weeks late last year is probably a sign of things to come, as weather patterns are predicted to become more severe and extreme.

In his book, Flannery says that 1986 was a watershed year, when the world's population topped five billion and "marks the year that humans reached Earth's carrying capacity and ever since we have been running the environmental equivalent of a budget deficit [by] overexploiting fisheries, overgrazing pasture, until it becomes desert, destroying forests, and polluting our oceans and atmosphere".

By 2050, the world's population is expected to "level out around nine billion" but, unless there are dramatic changes, humans will need "two planets' worth of resources", the author says.

Flannery looks into geological history and the sort of events that spurred changes in eras. He fears global warming could trigger such an impact and lead to widespread extinctions.

Flannery examines three "tipping points" for the Earth's climate - a slowing or collapse of the Gulf Stream (the water current in the Atlantic Ocean), which was dramatised in the Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow"; the demise of the Amazon rainforests; and the release of gas hydrates from the sea floor.

"Given the current rate and direction of change, one, two or perhaps all three may take place this century," he writes.

Vegetation modelling by the Hadley Centre in England has suggested possible scenarios of change in the Amazon basin, said Flannery. "If the [Triffid] model is correct we should start to see signs of rainforest collapse around 2040, and the process should be complete this century, by which time rainforest cover will have been reduced from its present 80 per cent to less than 10 per cent.

"What is so terrifying about this scenario is that it will greatly hasten climate change, making many of its most pernicious consequences inevitable."

Massive amounts of fossil fuels are used to heat and cool homes - 55 per cent of the US's total domestic energy budget, he says. Yet, "a situation may even develop whereby, in order to cool our homes, we end up cooking our planet".

This book needs to be translated into Thai, or a local equivalent written by individuals within Thailand's environmental community, because this country, like many others, faces dramatic changes over the coming decades.

Every citizen needs to know what they can do to cut energy use and carbon outputs. It's all explained in "The Weather Makers". If you can find a copy, get it.