NY Times Editorial

EOSC 112: The Fluid Earth	NY Times Editorial
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Site Map EOSC 112 Homepage Announcements Lecture Summaries Lab Assignments Special Topics Course Syllabus Web Contact: Phil Austin Site created with Cheetah. Last updated: Dec 7 2001	NY Times, June 12, 2001 Warming Threat Requires Action Now, Scientists Say By ANDREW C. REVKIN In his speech on climate yesterday, President Bush said that a basic problem with the Kyoto Protocol, the proposed international pact for curtailing global warming, was that it laid out a timetable for cutting releases of heat-trapping gases before the threat posed by a buildup of those gases was clearly understood. But while many scientists and experts on risk management agreed in interviews yesterday that much remained unknown about the potential impact of rising temperatures, they took issue with the idea that this uncertainty justified further delay in acting to limit climate change. "There will be deep uncertainty in the climatic future for a long time," said Dr. Michael E. Schlesinger, who directs climate research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But if you wait until it's diminished to some threshold that you assign and then learn that the problem is severe, it may be too late to do anything about it." Indeed, to many experts embroiled in the climate debate, the question of how much warming is too much — which has been at the center of international climate negotiations for a decade — now constitutes a red herring. They say it is more important to start from the point of widest agreement — that rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases are warming the atmosphere, and that adding a lot more is probably a bad idea. The next step, they say, is to adopt policies that will soon flatten the rising arc on graphs of global emissions while also pursuing more research to clarify the risks. Many note that recent studies suggest a fairly high risk of significant ecological harm from a global temperature rise of less than 1 degree Fahrenheit and of substantial coastal flooding and agricultural disruption if temperatures rise more than 4 or 5 degrees in the new century. Global temperatures have risen 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 50 years; since the last Ice Age, they have risen about 9 degrees. The risks are clear enough to justify some investments now in emissions controls, they say. They say that the general quandary is no different from the kind faced by town officials who must judge how much road salt to buy based on uncertain long-term winter weather forecasts, or by countries deciding whether to invest in a missile defense system that might not ever have to shoot down a missile. "It's silly to expect that we can resolve what the future is going to be," said Dr. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a mathematician and political scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "That's like trying to do economic policy by asking competing economists what level the stock market is going to be at 20 years from now." World leaders, he and other experts say, would do better to embrace the notion that the future holds a murky mix of risks, both environmental and economic, but both can be lessened by actions taken now. Increasingly, experts with diverse viewpoints on the extent of the climate risk agree on a general solution: policies that reduce emissions, coupled with intensified climate research and monitoring, and policies created with sufficient flexibility that they can be intensified or relaxed as the warming trend's causes and consequences become clearer. "This is such a big problem, it's so long-term, with uncertainties that are so substantial, that at every stage you have to learn and adjust," said Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, senior scientist for Environmental Defense, a private conservation group. A similar view is held by Dr. Robert J. Lempert, a senior scientist and expert in risk analysis at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institute based in Santa Monica, Calif., that has for decades studied risk strategies for the Pentagon and other government institutions. "Scientists aren't any time soon going to give politicians some magic answer," he said. "Policy makers for a long, long time are going to have to deal with a situation where it's not clear what the costs and benefits are, where lots of people disagree about them, and they can't wait until everything is resolved." There is plenty to study in the meantime about aspects of the dizzyingly complex puzzle that is the atmosphere, many scientists said. They said Mr. Bush was correct to allude in his speech to the idea that atmospheric temperatures might have been altered because of efforts to reduce pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes, most notably particles of sulfur dioxide, which contribute to acid rain, and of soot. "We're clearly interfering with climate in a variety of ways, with aerosols on the one hand and gases on the other," said Dr. James E. Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a climate modeling center in Manhattan run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Hansen has briefed the Bush administration twice on the issue, focusing on the possibility of cleaning up releases of soot and methane, which both have a warming influence on the atmosphere, first, and moving to cuts in carbon dioxide, which is released by burning oil and coal, when technological advances make that change cheaper.