Is global warming the type of creeping environmental problem that can be met with graduated societal responses?
One could argue that global warming is a creeping environmental change. Creeping means it is an incremental change that is only marginally detectable from one year to the next. Today s atmospheric content of greenhouse gases is not much different from yesterday s. Tomorrow s is not much different than today s. However, in a few years, those incremental changes will have added up to a major environmental change. Often, by the time those changes have combined, the environmental change will have turned into an environmental crisis. In this regard, global warming is similar to other creeping environmental changes such as air pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion, soil erosion, deforestation, and so forth. Unfortunately, graduated societal responses to slowly compounding environmental changes may not resolve the problem. Dealing with such problems requires getting ahead of them; leap-frogging over the near future to gain a glimpse of how the creeping changes will likely evolve in the future
