Panel tells Bush global warming is getting worse

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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/07/science/07WARM.html?pagewanted=print

June 7, 2001

Panel Tells Bush Global Warming Is Getting Worse

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE with ANDREW C. REVKIN

WASHINGTON, June 6 — A panel of top American scientists declared today that global warming was a real problem and was getting worse, a conclusion that may lead President Bush to change his stand on the issue as he heads next week to Europe, where the United States is seen as a major source of the air pollution held responsible for climate change.

In a much-anticipated report from the National Academy of Sciences, 11 leading atmospheric scientists, including previous skeptics about global warming, reaffirmed the mainstream scientific view that the earth's atmosphere was getting warmer and that human activity was largely responsible.

"Greenhouse gases are accumulating in earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise," the report said. "Temperatures are, in fact, rising."

The report was requested by the White House last month in anticipation of an international meeting on global warming in Bonn in July but arrived just before President Bush leaves next week for Europe, a trip that includes talks on global warming with leaders of the 15 European Union countries in Goteborg, Sweden.

European leaders expressed outrage in March when Mr. Bush rejected the global warming pact known as the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and the subject has been building as an important test of the administration's foreign policy.

In the White House's first official acknowledgment of the academy's conclusions, Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, told reporters today, "This is a president who takes extremely seriously what we do know about climate change, which is essentially that there is warming taking place."

Mr. Bush and many in his cabinet, who discussed the subject at length on Tuesday, have been trying to hammer out a proposal on limiting the pollutants that cause global warming."A cabinet-level working group is still working on what it wishes to say to the president before we go to Europe," Ms. Rice said. She said Mr. Bush would talk with the allies "a little bit about what we've learned thus far."

Without being specific, Ms. Rice said Mr. Bush was being guided by certain principles in formulating a proposal. "One would want to be certain that developing countries were accounted for in some way, that technology and science really ought to be important parts of this answer, that we cannot do something that damages the American economy or other economies because growth is also important," she said.

In response to critics who have suggested that Mr. Bush is ignoring an issue of mounting international concern, Ms. Rice portrayed the group as feverishly committed to educating itself and coming up with a proposal.

"It has been a matter of bringing up to speed some of the highest- ranking people in this government," she said. "I would dare say — dare challenge you to find a situation in which you've had so many high-ranking people sitting there week after week after week, understanding the challenge that we face in global climate change, everybody from the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of interior, secretary of agriculture. It has been quite something to see all of these people grappling with the issue."

Administration officials have said privately that the White House could have handled the matter with greater tact, and Ms. Rice conceded as much today. "The president had made clear when he was a candidate that he did not believe the Kyoto Protocol addressed the problem of climate change in a way that the United States could support," she said. "In retrospect, perhaps the fact that we understood that we had already said this was not immediately observable to everybody, and it might have been better to let people know again, in advance, including our allies, that we were not going to support the protocol."

This was unusually blunt talk from a White House that until now has fastidiously avoided the phrase "global warming" and repeatedly expressed doubts about the clarity of the science underlying the theory that emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes were heating the atmosphere in ways that posed a threat.

In an indication of the headwind that Mr. Bush is sailing into next week in Europe, the journal Science, published by an American scientific organization, recently carried an open letter signed by 16 prestigious scientific panels in countries around the world calling for "prompt action" to reduce the gases like carbon dioxide that trap heat like in a greenhouse.

The increase in temperatures, the editorial said, "will be accompanied by rising sea levels, more intense precipitation events in some countries and increased risk of drought in others and adverse effects on agriculture, health and water balance." It continued, "We urge everyone — individuals, businesses and governments — to take prompt action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases."

Many international business executives have been pressuring the administration to move more aggressively on the issue. And so has a powerful band of Mr. Bush's closest advisers, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Ms. Rice, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, and Christie Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Today's report reflects the increasing certainty of the scientific community here and abroad that the warming of the last 50 years is probably because of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The panel said the degree of confidence in this conclusion was "higher today than it was 10 or even 5 years ago."

Still, it said, large uncertainties limit predictions of the extent and consequences — good and bad — of future warming. But it affirmed the scientific consensus that human- caused climate warming could well be a dominant environmental problem throughout the new century, depending on how fast the gases accumulate in coming decades.

"Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century," it said. And it said that "national policy decisions made now and in the longer-term future will influence the extent of any damage suffered by vulnerable human populations and ecosystems later in this century."

The report thus all but eliminates one reason the administration has been using to forestall any action on global warming. And it deals a strong card to Democrats on Capitol Hill who have long sought more aggressive action on global warming. Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a leading advocate of action said of the report, "It confirms in stark terms the reality that many of us had accepted a considerable amount of time ago and refutes an effort by the White House to seek some sort of escape hatch from that reality."

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska and a longtime critic of the Kyoto Protocol, instead highlighted the uncertainty mentioned in the report and drew the opposite conclusion of Mr. Kerry. "This report is certainly not a prescription for the drastic measures required under the Kyoto Protocol," Mr. Hagel said in a statement.

Nonetheless, in a nod toward the unanimity of the scientific community, he added: "This report does provide us with enough evidence to move forward in a responsible, reasonable and achievable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It provides us with a basis to move forward with an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol."

Environmentalists hailed the report as a significant step in the long effort to force the United States to curtail greenhouse gases. Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said, "The president can no longer wiggle out of aggressive action by arguing that the science is inconclusive."

Mr. Clapp also suggested that the report called into question Mr. Bush's proposed energy plan, which seeks to step up production of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants. "This makes the president's energy plan look completely irresponsible," he said.

Mr. Clapp said environmental groups had estimated that if the energy plan was fully put into effect, it would increase the pollution that causes global warming by 35 percent over the next decade. The report was written by 11 atmospheric scientists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors included Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who for years has expressed skepticism about some of the more dire predictions of other climate scientists about the significance of human-caused warming.

The report was requested on May 11 in a letter to Dr. Bruce Alberts, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, from John M. Bridgeland, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Gary Edson, deputy assistant to the president for international economic affairs.

A statement from the academy today said, "The White House requested this fast-track review of the state of climate science in preparation for international discussions on global warming scheduled to take place in the coming weeks."

Initially, the White House asked two questions of the academy: What are the greatest strengths and weaknesses in the science pointing to human-caused warming? And, are there significant differences between the full scientific analysis completed recently by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sponsored by the United Nations, and the final executive summary?

There have been three assessments of global warming by the international panel since 1990, and each has drawn a more conclusive picture than the last of the link between human activities and the prospects for significant harm to agriculture, ecosystems and coastlines.

But conservatives in Congress — notably Senators Hagel and Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho — and groups representing industries whose business depends on fossil fuels have long criticized the findings of the international panel as biased, pointing particularly to differences between the voluminous chapters on complicated scientific points and briskly worded summaries that tend to influence policy.

The panel, led by Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone, the chancellor of the University of California at Irvine, met initially in California and spent the next weeks intensively sifting the existing science.

The report does provide some ammunition for critics in its description of the conclusion of the international climate group. It concluded, for example, that the international panel had a tendency in its executive summary to understate caveats and focus on the harsher possible consequences of climate warming. But over all, the panel described the international work as "admirable" and robustly supported its conclusions.

In a telephone interview today, Dr. Cicerone said he hoped the report, by spelling out the scientific basis for various predictions, would dispel some unwarranted skepticism about aspects of the warming problem.

One climate scientist who critiqued a draft of the new report for the academy said no one in the administration should be surprised at the firm nature of the result."They asked a string of questions that might have been appropriate in 1990," the scientist said.

"Hello?" he said. "Where've you been the last decade?"

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), June 07, 2001

Answers

Again the press got it wrong!

In a much-anticipated report from the National Academy of Sciences, 11 leading atmospheric scientists, including previous skeptics about global warming, reaffirmed the mainstream scientific view that the earth's atmosphere was getting warmer and that human activity was largely responsible.

Another lie. This time caught by one of the "11 leading atmospheric scientists" from the NAS who submitted the report.

========================== From, The WSJ Opinion Journal -- opinionjournal.com/editor...d=95000606

(Mr. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on climate change.)

GLOBAL WARMING

The Press Gets It Wrong Our report doesn't support the Kyoto treaty.

BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN Monday, June 11, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a report on climate change, prepared in response to a request from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol. CNN's Michelle Mitchell was typical of the coverage when she declared that the report represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."

As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This the full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long- term climate trends and what causes them.

As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary began with a zinger--that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc., before following with the necessary qualifications. For example, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long-term trends, but the summary forgot to mention this.

Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds).

But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions.

One reason for this uncertainty is that, as the report states, the climate is always changing; change is the norm. Two centuries ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from a little ice age. A millennium ago, during the Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty years ago, we were concerned with global cooling. Distinguishing the small recent changes in global mean temperature from the natural variability, which is unknown, is not a trivial task. All attempts so far make the assumption that existing computer climate models simulate natural variability, but I doubt that anyone really believes this assumption.

We simply do not know what relation, if any, exists between global climate changes and water vapor, clouds, storms, hurricanes, and other factors, including regional climate changes, which are generally much larger than global changes and not correlated with them. Nor do we know how to predict changes in greenhouse gases. This is because we cannot forecast economic and technological change over the next century, and also because there are many man-made substances whose properties and levels are not well known, but which could be comparable in importance to carbon dioxide.

What we do is know that a doubling of carbon dioxide by itself would produce only a modest temperature increase of one degree Celsius. Larger projected increases depend on "amplification" of the carbon dioxide by more important, but poorly modeled, greenhouse gases, clouds and water vapor.

The press has frequently tied the existence of climate change to a need for Kyoto. The NAS panel did not address this question. My own view, consistent with the panel's work, is that the Kyoto Protocol would not result in a substantial reduction in global warming. Given the difficulties in significantly limiting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a more effective policy might well focus on other greenhouse substances whose potential for reducing global warming in a short time may be greater. The panel was finally asked to evaluate the work of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, focusing on the Summary for Policymakers, the only part ever read or quoted. The Summary for Policymakers, which is seen as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world's foremost climate scientists. Within the confines of professional courtesy, the NAS panel essentially concluded that the IPCC's Summary for Policymakers does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S. government.

The full IPCC report is an admirable description of research activities in climate science, but it is not specifically directed at policy. The Summary for Policymakers is, but it is also a very different document. It represents a consensus of government representatives (many of whom are also their nations' Kyoto representatives), rather than of scientists.The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.

Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty--far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge--and that the NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Nor was it meant to.

Mr. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on climate change.



-- Jackson Brown (Jackson_Brown@deja.com), July 15, 2001.


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