At the second United Nations Earth Summit in New York, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, President of the Republic of Maldives, warned that if the planet continued to heat up at its present rate due to global warming, his island nation would become "totally submerged" by the run-off from melting polar ice caps. Indeed, Gayoom warned, his nation may not even still exist by the time the next Earth Summit met. But in his speech delivered at the U.N.'s General Assembly Hall, Gayoom offered a possible solution to the impending crisis—one that would not only stem the rising tide of the earth's oceans and save his nation, but an opportunity to create in the process "a shared, a just, a prospering people's world." The Maldives would need more "resource mobilization," additional "technology transfer," increased "capacity building for the promotion of sustainable development," all in the context of "global cooperation."

Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, echoed the need for "international cooperation" with his country, "particularly in the areas of trade, debt relief, provision of financial resources and technology transfer." Saifuddin Soz, Indian minister of environment and forests, also called for increases in foreign aid, while denouncing "efforts to prescribe equal obligations and liabilities on unequal players," a reference to developing nations' often egregious pollution record.

[Ed.: Not only is there no scientific consensus concerning the existence of global warming, but there is also disagreement about what would happen if there were such a trend. One study supporting the warming thesis credibly suggests that increased evaporation would cause ocean levels to drop, with increased precipitation over polar regions causing more water to become sequestered in glaciers.

Sherwood Idso, agriculturalist at the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona, has also concluded that man's substantial increase to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide—a gas that is pivotal to plant growth and often in short supply—would likely cause a "global greening" effect, a sustainable world-wide agricultural boon.]

†