Although the fact is unwelcome and not yet widely acknowledged, the process of global warming will eventually transform both the physical and the institutional operating conditions of human societies in some combination yet to be determined.

The basic reasons are known with reliable certainty. Carbon dioxide is currently being added to the atmosphere at a rate at least 10 times greater than any that occurred in the entire 65 million-year climate record prior to the rise of human societies. The resulting thermal impulse to the earth's ecosystem will have to be balanced in some manner.

The consequences will assuredly be large, presumably unprecedentedly large. The timing, magnitude, location and even basic character of those consequences cannot be predicted in reliable detail, but climate disruptions can be expected to occur with increasing severity and frequency for at least the next half century.

At some point during that time, the threat to the ultimate viability of human societies is likely to become evident and imminent enough to motivate a truly serious effort to alter energy generation and consumption on a global scale. 

At that point, it will also become starkly apparent that holding greenhouse gas concentrations to a level that will preserve the physical operating conditions of human societies cannot be accomplished without a dramatic expansion of nuclear power generation. Efficiency gains and alternative technologies can contribute but will not alone be sufficient.

It will also be apparent that for reasons of safety and security the necessary expansion will require the development of new reactor designs, consolidated management of the entire nuclear fuel cycle and fundamental revision of current security relationships.

All that is feasible in technical and economic terms. For those prescient enough to see the situation there is a great deal of money to be made. And the productive investment involved would drive global economic growth.

The primary impediment has to do with prevailing attitudes, and that is the dimension in which the principal drama will play out.

If global energy transformation is to occur, national competition will have to be subordinated to international collaboration. Presumptions of inherently conflicting and potentially hostile national interests will have to yield to overriding common interests.

The traditional calculus of power and prestige will have to yield to basic principles of equity. Access to financing, to relevant technology and to operational information will have to be shared. Mutual reassurance will have to become the primary operating principle of security.

For the current national security establishments, who think of themselves as defending sovereign territory against hostile intrusion, those changes in attitudes and in operating principles are both unimaginable and unacceptable. But as the societies that sustain those establishments are subjected to overriding common threats, as they eventually will be, defense of global ecology will necessarily become the dominant imperative. 

If humanity is to avoid ultimate extinction, our organizing attitudes will have to evolve.

We presumably still have some generational distance from the point at which a common threat forces us to act, but that is the relentless trend we and all of our ancestors have set in motion.   

The author is the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn