The World in 2030

24 The World in 2030
cut down sharply on the deliberate emission of any gases
which increase heat retention. Plastics have a major role
to play in combating climate change, both in reducing the
weight of components in cars and planes and reducing the
weight of cargo itself. Plastics will also make an increasing
contribution to insulation and energy efficiency in building
construction and in the manufacture of energy generation
and distribution systems (see the later section ‘The Future
of Energy’).
Because there are so many variables in the science of
climate change, and because human response to the problem
is a matter of social and political will, it is impossible for any
futurologist to predict how the climate itself will be behaving
in 2030. However, it is possible to predict that climate
change will still be one of the most pressing problems facing
humankind (no matter how efficacious global political
response to the issue is over the next twenty-five years)
because there is a time delay built into our atmosphere’s
responses to heating.
In his influential 2006 book ‘The Weather Makers’,
environmentalist and zoologist Tim Flannery (Australian of
the Year 2007 32 ) writes:
As our planet heats up it takes the surface layers of
the oceans about three decades to absorb heat from
the atmosphere, and a thousand years or more for
this heat to reach the ocean depths. This means that
our oceans are currently reacting to the gases we
pumped into the atmosphere in the 1970s. 33