Climate change is an incredibly contentious issue at the moment, and the decision of who should foot the bill is more so than anything else. As the world's largest economy and also the world's worst polluter, surely it is time the US stood up and took responsibility for an issue that few now attempt to refute?

Obviously, if global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions was nothing more than a hoax, then there would be little need to make reductions. When Republican Senator James Inhofe tried to reveal global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," (apparently he forgot the rest of the world) only Democrats opposed him. But by 2007 he realised that his position was untenable - few reputable scientists claim that global warming is a hoax anymore, because all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

In 2006/2007 the BBC collaborated with The University of Oxford to run the most comprehensive climate change experiment ever. Over 250,000 people pitched in with their computers' brain power, and the results were remarkable. By the year 2080 Britain is expected to have an average temperature 4 degrees Celsius hotter than today - and parts of the world may be as much as 10 degrees hotter. This may not sound like much, but the dramatic effects on climate can already be seen - the icecaps are melting, the coast of the USA is bombarded by hurricanes, and every year the sea rises by an average of 3mm. As I write the UK is once again braced for more flooding due to torrential rain. If global warming continues it is clear that parts of the world will bake while others melt, and clearly neither situation is good.

The findings of this experiment are further supported by a graph from the RealClimate website based upon GISSTEMP temperature records, showing that not only is the earth heating up, but the speed at which temperature is increasing is also accelerating. Find it here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/0 1/uncertainty-noise-and-the-art-of-model-data-compar ison/

For the technically minded, you can read more about GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) temperature analysis here, but it is not particularly relevant to the discussion: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

In any case, few people doubt that global warming is occurring; it is just a question of the reasons behind it. It is almost certain that the CO2 produced by the burning of fossil fuels is the main culprit, as "greenhouse gases"

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