ABSTRACT
Climatic change is a topic of endless fascination. Day-to-day variations in weather conditions are a staple of conversation in many countries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the terms ‘greenhouse effect’ and ‘global warming’ came into everyday use and there was a tremendous upsurge of interest in climatic change. In the early 1980s the rising concentration of various greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their possible effects on climate, at both a regional and global level, began to attract increasing attention from scientists in a range of disciplines and concern began to be expressed about the potential human impacts of such changes. During the 1990s, notably at the Rio summit in 1992, global warming appeared increasingly on political agendas, though real progress has been slow. The media are geared to short-term news stories and find it hard to sustain interest in long-term topics such as climatic change.
