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Whether we like it or not, global warming is shaping up as one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. It is going to drive far-reaching changes in how we live and work, power our homes, schools, factories, and office buildings, get from one place to another, manufacture and transport goods, and even farm and manage forests. It touches every aspect of our economy and our lives, and to ignore it is to live in a fantasy land where nothing ever has to change – and where we never have to accept what science tells us about what is happening to our world.

The first group focuses on climate change science. In the opening chapter of this section, Jerry Mahlman (Senior Research Fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research) describes what he terms the “global warming dilemma.” According to Mahlman, the scientific community has reached an effective consensus that immediate and quite aggressive steps would be required to avoid climatic changes that are large in comparison with those observed in the Earth's geological record. Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, for example, would require permanent emissions reductions of roughly 60–80%. Moreover, the long lags in the Earth's response to changes in the composition of the atmosphere suggests that even this stringent scenario would be insufficient to prevent moderate temperature increases in the coming decades. Based on his reading of the scientific literature, Mahlman concludes that deferring action until climate change has broadly recognized deleterious effects would most likely “lock in” quite profound environmental impacts with effects lasting for centuries and even millennia. In terms of mechanisms, this argument appeals to the view that today's greenhouse gas emissions might use up the Earth's assimilative capacity, thus increasing the length of time that greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere. On top of this, Mahlman notes that most scientific studies have emphasized time scales of one century or less in evaluating climate impacts. But impacts such as sea-level rise, which would be strongly affected by the melting and breakup of glacial formations such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, occur over much longer time horizons with a high degree of irreversibility. This makes climate change an issue of intergenerational fairness that pits present society's willingness to bear significant economic costs against the goal of protecting future generations from environmental harms that are hypothetical and yet potentially catastrophic.

Pleasantly sited on the Inner Harbour, the Hyatt Regency Hotel was the venue for this year's conference. Baltimore was essentially an industrial city until some twenty or thirty years ago. The Inner Harbour area housed warehouses, power stations and such like and could have been described as all that was unpleasant that this description could evoke. By a bootlace‐pulling‐up‐exercise, the city fathers decided that they would rehabilitate this district, and they have succeeded in the way that only the Americans know how to. The most remarkable addition to the skyline is a fantastic combination of art and functional architecture, the National Aquarium of Baltimore. To borrow the expression from the Michelin Guide, it is ‘worth a detour’, and a long one at that.