COULD it be that the gales of recent days provided a foretaste of what climate change has in store for us? If so, the huge losses sustained by the fishing industry, not to mention the damage to property lashed by high winds, will seem light compared to what would happen if the seas around us start washing over low lying coastal areas.

There is an unprecedented scientific consensus that climate change, or global warming, is already happening.

More than 2,000 scientists from all over the world, represented on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have clearly spelled out what dangers lie in store unless there is a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

If the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are allowed to increase, the scientists have warned that the polar ice caps will melt and sea levels will rise to inundate numerous low altitude islands, such as the Maldives, as well as delta regions in Egypt, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Up to 100 million people might be made homeless.

The increasing spate of natural disasters worldwide is already ringing alarm bells. Of the 25 largest insured catastrophes in the United States alone, 21 have happened in the past decade and 16 of them involved a combination of wind and water. No wonder insurance companies have been waking up to dangers of climate change.

RISING temperatures caused by the greenhouse effect pose other threats, too.

Though the idea of sweltering summers might appeal to some people, as well as the notion that Ireland could even become a wine producing country, one of the real dangers is that a change in climate threatens to bring malaria into our latitudes.

It is against this background that ELI environment ministers are meeting today in Brussels in an effort to agree on a common position. Simultaneously, the ad hoc committee on the Berlin Mandate, which is charged with advancing global negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is meeting in Bonn.

Waiting in the wings are the lobbyists on both sides environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, who want deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and the Global Climate Coalition, representing oil, coal and motor industry interests, which disputes the evidence of global warming.

Environmentalists monitoring the negotiations, which are meant to lead to the adoption next December in Kyoto of a protocol on legally binding cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, believe it is absolutely vital for the EU to adopt a common position on the issue otherwise, they fear, there is little chance of bringing the United States on board.

However, EU member states are now openly bickering about how to deal with the problem, while the US appears to be pulling back from the comparatively progressive position it adopted last June in Geneva, at the second Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention. The prospects, therefore, appear quite bleak.

Although the Dutch, who would be in the front line among European countries if sea levels rise hold the EU Presidency and are pressing hard for agreement, member states are deeply divided on a range of crucial issues including an overall reduction targets, when it should "kick in" and how much each country should do to achieve it.

This issue of "burden sharing" is of particular interest to Ireland. Our carbon dioxide emissions are projected to increase, rather than decrease over the next 10 years or so.

But the Government argues that because the Republic is a small, less developed member state, we should be allowed to get away with this under the EU's "umbrella".

The theory is that our increased emissions would be more than offset by reductions in much larger and more industrialised member states, such as Britain, France and Germany.

OF these, however, only Britain seems on course to reach the UN target largely because of the fortuitous consequences of Tory policies in closing down the coal industry.

Britain believes that the 15 per cent cut in emissions by 2010 being championed by the Dutch is "over ambitious" because it would alienate the Americans and make a Kyoto protocol more difficult. France has complicated the issue by arguing that cuts should be calculated on a per capita basis, because it would find this formula more beneficial.

It seems the politicians, whose time horizon rarely extends beyond the next election, cannot bring themselves to take the kind of action required to protect the planet for future generations.

The lifestyle of their electorates, based on consuming more and more of the Earth's resources, still takes precedence over the science.