BMJ  2004;328 (29 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7451.0-g

Editor's choice

Cataclysm and departure

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

You ought to have a theme issue on "America as a global threat to health" suggested one of our correspondents, perhaps facetiously. Imagining the downcast face of our North American editor, the plummeting circulation of BMJUSA, and the wagging finger and circumlocutions of Donald Rumsfeld, we promptly decided against. But this issue could have provided the beginnings for such a theme.

A serious response to global warming needed American leadership. Instead, we got the opposite. The United States, which produces a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, turned its back on the Kyoto agreement. As a result we are not responding adequately to global warming, and our grandchildren will find themselves in an increasingly degraded world. Now the American creativity and flair, which most of us admire, has produced not a solution to the problem but a film to scare us witless.

Our cover picture, taken from the film . . . [Full text of this article]

Richard Smith, editor

rsmith@bmj.com


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