It is now nearly a decade since the former US Vice President, Mr Al Gore, correctly identified climate change as the most serious environmental threat facing humanity. Were Mr Gore in possession of the White House today, the US might at least be acting to try to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions, instead of disowning the only international instrument which offers any hope - the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
With Mr George W. Bush in charge, that is exactly what the US has done. As a one-time Texas oilman, whose campaign was heavily backed by fossil fuel interests, Mr Bush's isolationist response might have been anticipated. But it is fatuous in the extreme for the US President to say, as he did last March, that the scientific evidence for global warming is "incomplete".
Two months earlier, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - made up of more than 2,000 scientists from all over the world - said there was no longer any doubt that pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere "is changing the global climate", with potentially catastrophic consequences.
As the largest single polluter, the US must not be allowed to evade its responsibility. But Europe and other parts of the world cannot afford to wait until Miami and the Florida Keys are flooded by rising seas from melting polar ice caps before the US wakes up to the scale of the problem and rejoins the international effort to deal with it.
The worst possible outcome to the UN's crucial Climate Change Summit in Bonn this week would be a further watering down of commitments already made to reduce emissions from industrialised countries by an average of 5.2 per cent on their 1990 levels by 2012. The EU, in particular, must firmly hold the line and seek to persuade other major players to uphold Kyoto and ratify the Protocol, even without US participation.
The attitude of Japan will be crucial and it has indicated it believes more time may be needed to get the US on board. Meanwhile the EU delegation is suggesting that the US may be seeking to persuade others - including Japan - to ditch the Kyoto agreement.
Ireland may be Lilliputian on the worldwide table of greenhouse gas producers, but our emissions are well up on the 2012 target due to unparalleled economic growth.
Nearly nine months have passed since the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, published his National Climate Change Strategy, yet there is no evidence that this ambitious blueprint to decouple greenhouse gas emissions from the growth of the economy is actually being implemented.
The real test for Ireland's credibility on climate change will be the next Budget. Unless the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, makes a belated move towards "greening" the tax system by imposing measures aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, we will be bracketing ourselves alongside the US and other countries that prefer to adopt a Canute-like posture towards the inexorably rising tide.