David King, Chief Scientific Advisor to Her Majesty's Government, Office of Science and Technology in London, asserts that "climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today - more serious even than the threat of terrorism" (King, 2004). He notes that storm surges in the North Atlantic of sufficient magnitude to employ the Thames Barrier to protect London from flooding have increased in frequency from less than once per year in the 1980s to a current average of six times per year. Projecting these changes out to 2080 on the basis of simulated climate change under a range of greenhouse gas emission scenarios indicates that "...flood levels that are now expected only once in 100 years could be recurring every 3 years."
King (2004) concludes that "we in Great Britain are attempting to show leadership, and may other countries, including some our European partners, are also in the vanguard. But we cannot solve the problem in isolation. The United Kingdom is responsible for only around 2% of world's emissions, the United States for more than 20% (although it contains only 4% of the world's population).
"The United States is already in the forefront of the science and technology of global change, and the next step is surely to tackle emissions control too. We can only overcome this challenge by facing it together, shoulder to shoulder. We in the rest of the world are now looking to the U.S.A. to play its leading part."
Reference
King, D.A., 2004: Climate change science: Adapt, mitigate, or ignore? Science, 303, 176-177.