When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

Even if I was a bad right wing guy, to the extent of whether my arguments are right or wrong, they're right or wrong independently if I'm right or left.

So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

It seems incontrovertible to me that there is a global warming effect and that it is going to be serious, probably not in the amount of, say, six degrees warming, but it's likely that we'll get two to three degrees warming and that will be serious enough.

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.

Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.