Climate Plan Is Criticized as Optimistic
February 26, 2002
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The White House statement
on climate change read:
"President Bush announced
today that the United States has
agreed with other industrialized
nations that stabilization of
carbon dioxide emissions should
be achieved as soon as possible.
The United States also agreed that it is timely to
investigate quantitative targets to limit or reduce carbon
dioxide emissions."
That was Nov. 7, 1989, one year after a global heat wave
made the environment a top political issue and raised the
prospect that people might be affecting the climate by
adding carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to
the air, warming the planet as if it were inside a
greenhouse.
Twelve years later, under a new President Bush, the
urgency has evaporated. On Feb. 14 the president
articulated a new approach to what has become a
lingering, complicated, politically charged scientific issue.
It relies on voluntary efforts to slow, but not halt, the
growth in emissions of greenhouse gases. Progress is to be
measured by tracking the growth of emissions relative to
the growth of the economy.
For nearly a year, the president has been saying there is
no scientific justification for the specific emissions targets
set forth in the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty that
would require participating industrialized countries to cut
emissions by 2012 below their level of 1990. The
administration says that when it comes to carbon dioxide,
the main greenhouse gas, no one has yet determined how
much is too much.
But after analyzing details of Mr. Bush's new plan, many
scientists and economists who study climate data and
policy say the scientific ambiguity that the administration
used to justify a limited response certainly exists, but cuts
both ways.
"What people sometimes forget is that the uncertainty in
the science is double-edged," said Dr. Ronald G. Prinn,
the director of the department of earth, atmospheric and
planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
"In our own studies, we estimate about a chance in 20
that the warming in the next 100 years will exceed eight
degrees Fahrenheit," he said. "There's no doubt in my
mind that eight degrees is something to deeply worry
about. The target set by the president's policy to me looks
inadequate in the face of that risk."
Under the administration's plan, carbon dioxide emissions
would rise about 14 percent over the next decade - the
same increase that took place over the last decade. "Can't
we do maybe twice what we did in the last 10 years?" Dr.
Prinn asked, suggesting that the White House should
move more aggressively against emissions. "Then you'd
have much more of a chance of real reductions."
Moreover, many climate experts said, rising productivity
and energy efficiency have been slowing the growth of
emissions compared with economic growth for more than
a decade - at the same pace Mr. Bush is proposing.
Simply continuing this course, many said, is inadequate
to promote the changes needed to flatten the curve of
growth - and eventually turn it downward.
The debate over the new plan should reach Capitol Hill
this week, when the Senate is expected to consider an
energy bill with contentious provisions on oil drilling,
gas-mileage standards and other policies that may affect
emissions rates.
Critics of the Bush approach include several members of a
scientific committee assembled last year at the behest of
the White House by the National Academy of Sciences to
assess questions about climate change.
Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone, chairman of the academy panel
and chancellor of the University of California at Irvine,
said the Bush administration was mistaken to view
uncertainty as a cause for comfort.
He said there was no longer any ambiguity about whether
humans were significant contributors to global warming,
and he noted that in the opening line of its report to the
White House, the panel stated plainly 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."
Last week, Dr. Cicerone said continued growth in
emissions would make things worse. "This situation is not
sustainable, and its trajectory is toward dangers," he said,
adding that the White House proposal "lacks ambition and
foresight" and "sets goals that are too timid."
The goals were far from modest when Mr. Bush's father
signed the first climate treaty, in 1992. Under that treaty,
industrialized nations agreed to strive to reduce their
greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
Instead, however, global emissions continued to rise.
American releases of greenhouse gases rose more than 12
percent in that period.
Last fall, most industrialized nations rallied around a new
treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, though they have yet to
ratify it. That treaty, which the Clinton administration had
signed, would require participating industrialized
countries to cut emissions by 2012 below where they
stood in 1990.
Mr. Bush rejected the Kyoto treaty last year, saying the
emissions targets were not scientifically justified. He said
that the treaty unfairly required no emissions cuts of fast-
growing countries like China and that it would harm the
American economy.
Last week, Dr. Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., a
mathematician and retired Navy vice admiral, who is the
under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere,
said Mr. Bush's new plan struck a reasonable balance
between economic and environmental concerns. "You're
playing with a $12 trillion economy here," Dr.
Lautenbacher said. "There's such a large connection with
our economy based on what we do and to what degree we
do it that we'd be foolish not to try to understand the
basic processes better."
The new policy is also attracting support from scientists
who are skeptical that global warming is a serious
long-term threat. More aggressive moves, they say, would
harm the economy and waste resources that could be
used to solve other problems. Indeed, some skeptics say
Mr. Bush's policy concedes too much by even
acknowledging that voluntary changes are needed.
"Voluntary has a nasty habit of turning mandatory," said
S. Fred Singer, a climatologist, who has long criticized the
consensus view on warming and who heads the Science
and Environmental Policy Project, a research and advocacy
group financed by private contributions.
Dr. Singer says recent studies have steadily whittled away
at the direst predictions for warming.
"Every bit of data," he said, "seems to confirm that the
climate sensitivity is well below even the lowest value
given" by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, an international scientific group that has issued
three assessments of climate science over the last 10
years.
But the lead author of one of the new studies, Dr. James
E. Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, says there is a difference between refining
projections of change and saying global warming is not a
serious problem.
In a paper in a recent issue of The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Hansen and a Goddard
colleague, Dr. Makiko Sato, plotted the changing
concentrations of various greenhouse gases and predicted
that the average global temperature would rise 1.3
degrees over the next 50 years. That is at the low end of
predictions for warming generated by most computer
models of climate, but more than temperatures rose over
the last 100 years.
The paper concluded that the warming trend was likely to
be substantially slower than previously thought, given the
slowing buildup of greenhouse gases other than carbon
dioxide. For example, Dr. Hansen said, methane, a potent
greenhouse gas that was once rapidly building in the
atmosphere, has shown a sharp decline in its growth rate
since 1980, for reasons scientists cannot explain.
The scientists also calculated that a concerted effort to
raise fuel efficiency and find ways to remove carbon
dioxide from the air could well cause emissions to stop
growing altogether later in the century and, eventually, to
decline.
But over all, Dr. Hansen said, the Goddard analysis still
means that temperatures by 2050 will be more than two
degrees warmer than they were at the beginning of the
20th century, when the accelerating Industrial Revolution
began transforming vast stores of coal and oil into carbon
dioxide.
"I could see keeping the warming relatively moderate, but
I point out that even a two-degree warming is going to
make the earth very warm compared to the history of the
last millions of years," Dr. Hansen said.
And, he noted, if emissions continue to rise just 1 percent
a year - the current rate, and the rate that would result
under the policies proposed by Mr. Bush - that adds up
to a lot of greenhouse gases by later in the century.
Still, Dr. Hansen said he remained optimistic that
societies would rise to the challenge, adding that natural
evidence of a strong human contribution to global
warming was likely to pile up in the next few years -
along with a consensus for more action to counter it.
"We'll be seeing how things are going well before 10 years
are out," Dr. Hansen said.
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