Foreword
This seminal book was first published in 1977, having been written the previous year while the author was on sabbatical leave from the Foreign Office as a Fellow at the Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University. It was published by the Centre and the University Press of America. The second edition, which represented a substantial revision and update, was published in 1966.
Much of the human condition results from the ways in which men divide their talents and energies between short-term, parochial problems and less urgent but more seminal threats to the continuation of global society. Perhaps the most pernicious consequence of the rapidity of change that marks the modern era is its mobilisation of human thinking to deal almost solely with day-to-day accommodations to change; it ensures that tactics dominate strategy, that quick reaction triumphs over unhurried conception.
Yet through the miasma of temporal preoccupations some contrary trends are taking shape. Surely the view of the loneliness of the planet Earth as seen by space travellers, and now the desolateness of the Martian landscape, teach us of our total dependence on the thin biosphere we inhabit.
Some of industrial man's assaults on the biosphere are reversible, some are not - at least within centuries. It is increasingly evident that the most vulnerable aspect of the biosphere may be its climate. Over the ages, the temperature distribution in the biosphere has been maintained with only moderate fluctuations by a critical balance. Radiation coming from the sun and heat coming from inside the earth have been nicely balanced by the energy returned to space so as to energise the biosphere.
A shift of 20ºC in mean temperatures leads either to ice ages or to melting of the polar ice caps, either of which would now destroy much of present civilization. Lesser changes will convert farmland to deserts. The inadequacy of our understanding of the causative steps leading to this degree of change is alarming. This intensifies when we realise that the artificial production of energy at the earth's surface is now rising to the point where it can affect this delicate balance, and it is doubling every fifteen to twenty years.
We are in Crispin Tickell's debt that he has sensed the magnitude of possible climatic changes and inquired into their meaning for earth dwellers and their societies in the time scale of the human life span.
Paul Doty
Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry
Director, Program for Science and International Affairs
Harvard University
