Americans may still have their heads in the sand, but one Russian ecologist warns that global warming can no longer be stopped. The Earth is heating up and he believes we have dilly-dallied too long. There is nothing we can now do to reverse a looming devastation of our planet's delicate ecology.

A recent issue of the Russian publication Pravda quotes Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, leader of the Russian Ecological Union, as threatening that the planet is heading for a warm-up that will eventually make life as we know it uninhabitable. He said that all we can do at this point is work to "diminish climatic changes caused by civilization's negative effect.

"It is too late to speak of preventing antropogenic climatic changes," Danilov-Danilyan said during a press conference held in Moscow.

He urged the world to work to reduce the human effect on climate-forming factors and especially: stop the destruction of ecological systems and cut the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"Man has unbalanced the climatic system; it is looking for a new balance, and the system's characteristics during a transition period are always much wider than in the state of balance," Danilov-Danilyan told reporters.

He warned that climatic changes will affect all nations of the world.

The World Meteorological Organization reports that the air temperature on the planet could increase by two to six degrees by the end of the century, which Danilov-Danilyan says will have catastrophic consequences.

The Russian ecologist appears to be the first in the scientific community to make this dramatic conclusion public, although he is not the first to think it.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, in a speech last year in Edinburgh, England, said he fears global warming or an "accident" might wipe out all life on Earth. In another appearance during CNN's Larry King Live, Hawking said he believes the planet is in danger of reaching a point in which the heating begins to intensify without additional help from human produced waste. "The atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until (the Earth) will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid" and uninhabitable, Hawking warned.

In their book The Coming Global Superstorm, radio personalities Whitley Strieber and Art Bell described a complex series of deadly Earth changes that they believe are already in progress. They say these changes threaten to turn this planet into a hot, barren place where we can no longer live.

Strieber, in a story that recently appeared on his web site, noted the following:

"Dr. Robert Watson of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is saying that the earth's temperature is rising twice as fast as thought ten years ago. In another story, scientists are saying that methane is building up in the atmosphere for the same reason it did 14,000 years ago, in an event that (we) believe resulted in the last superstorm. At the same time, Nature Magazine has published a paper saying that ocean currents are slowing down, and other scientists have announced that climate change is likely to be sudden."

If they are right, Strieber said we should expect a dramatic warming during the next few years. He said temperatures in the tropics could exceed 130 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing a human exodus north and south into more temperate areas. Also fierce storms can be expected to continue to ravage Europe and North America, increasing in violence with each passing year. Excessive flooding will be more and more common all over the world.

There is dramatic evidence that all of the above events are happening even as I write these words. Super localized storms, with straight winds clocked at 100 miles-per-hour and higher, are more and more common. Areas that normally see moderate rainfall are parched. Forest fires are ravaging large areas of the planet due to abnormally dry conditions. Some parts of the globe that are usually arid are getting flooded with too much rain. Flowers are blooming in barren desert areas of the Southwest.

The year 1998 holds the distinction as the warmest year in recorded history. The 1990s were acclaimed the warmest decade and contained the warmest three years of the century. The 12 warmest years of the 20th Century occurred since 1983. The average temperature of the world increased by 0.6 degrees centigrade during the 20th Century. The planet is now heating by a fifth of a degree every decade.

These changes may not seem significant when we live in areas where temperatures can rise from extremes of minus degrees below zero in winter, to 100 degrees in the summer. But the overall temperature of the planet, which remains relatively constant, is extremely important to keep the delicate balance of nature intact. For nearly all of human history, we have enjoyed the moderate weather necessary for the subsistence of life.

Now this moderation of weather seems to be going away.

According to a report on the Web's Far Out News, "the worldwide scientific consensus says that warming during this century could be as high as six degrees Celsius. That means that the Earth will have gotten hotter within a hundred years than it was colder during the last ice age. This is known as the worst-case scenario and is the stuff of nightmares."

The story noted that during the last meeting of the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a report based on statistics known as of 1995 indicated a worst-case scenario of three degrees warming, with a best scenario of slightly less than two degrees. "So the worst just doubled," the story said.

Since that meeting, the article said, a scientist at the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre, determined that other elements than carbon dioxide emissions can come into play after the planet gets warm enough.

As the planet heats, the scientists warn, the tropical forests start dying and eventually turn that part of the world into desert. All the carbon in the trees and soil would be added with that already present in the atmosphere, pushing temperatures up about another two degrees. Also millions of tons of methane, also a potent greenhouse gas, would be released from the world's oceans as they heat.

If Danilov-Danilyan is correct, the Hawking scenario of a world heating system getting out of control may become reality in our lifetime. That means many of us may live to experience indescribable horrors.

We have only ourselves to blame for this nightmare. We humans have destroyed the spaceship Earth. And even now, with these kinds of dire warnings, American industrial leaders prefer to continue on as if nothing is wrong. Even with 165 nations recently approving the rules of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the United States is not among them. President George Bush said during his campaign for office that he did not believe there was enough scientific evidence to support global warming. Now he says he won't go along with it because the Kyoto agreement would be too costly and unfair to American industry.

Under the circumstances, these arguments are unacceptable.