Dead Heat argues that the battle against global warming is key to the larger battle for global justice, and that the outcome of this battle may be as decisive politically as it will be ecologically. It argues, moreover, that there can be no workable climate-control regime without a historic compromise between the rich world and the poor, a compromise in which the two come rapidly to share the Earth's limited atmospheric space. The problem is time. Today, the global average surface warming is only .6 degrees Centigrade, and already the climate is changing fast. But the latest science shows that any future in which we hold the warming to a maximum of 2? C (and 2? C, by the way, would likely mean massive suffering and destruction) would require decisive global action; something like a "global Marshall Plan" but tuned, particularly, to sustainable energy development. It comes to this: the emissions trajectories and climate sensitivity indexes show, in mercilessly numeric terms, that even if we move quickly to cap global carbon emissions, the "impacts" of the warming will soon become quite severe, particularly for the poor and the vulnerable, and that in the more pessimistic case, the one where the fossil-fuel cartel remains in power, the impacts will verge on the catastrophic.
