There are words that wake us up -- like "free" or "prize" or "espresso" -- and then there are words that put us to sleep. Unfortunately, the latter group includes most of the working vocabulary of some very well-meaning people: "environment," "global warming," "greenhouse gases," all the way up to the incomparably sedative "joint emissions targets." "Flexibility mechanisms" and "sink enhancement" have probably done more to cure insomnia than to avert climatic doom. For all their armory of statistics, acronyms, technical jargon and cliches, the scientists and bureaucrats who are working so hard to "save the planet" have a terrible record when it comes to capturing public attention.

They captured it last week, however, with a headline calculated to jolt the sleepiest polluter awake: "Beaches may be gone by 2080s," as this newspaper summarized the local aspects of a report released Tuesday by the World Wide Fund for Nature. "Beach," with its pleasant aura of sun and surf, is in the gold-medal league of attention-getting words, so most readers probably paused long enough to learn that, if global warming continues unchecked, the sea could swallow all the beaches in Japan by the end of the next century. This is a worst-case scenario, but even the most optimistic computer simulation sees half the country's beaches under water by the 2080s.

Cynics might interject here that a) they didn't know Japan had any beaches, in the classic sense of "a stretch of sand unencumbered by ugly cement structures," and b) nobody would care anyway, since they already visit beach-enhanced theme parks all year round. But these are frivolous responses to a potentially calamitous situation that the WWF and other environmental groups are only just learning how best to publicize.