The politics of global warming tumbled in the US but landed upright last week. First the Environmental Protection Agency provoked media delirium with a boilerplate report to the United Nations. Then President George W. Bush pointed out the report originated in "the bureaucracy."
This delectable clarification came just days after the European Union approved the horrid Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, which Bush opposes. It provided instructive contrast between bold wisdom and sheepish folly. To strengthen his position on the proper if lonely side of global-warming politics, Bush now needs to steer his administration away from pressures to regulate carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most associated with human activity, as a pollutant.
Repeated statement
The EPA report to the UN mostly strung together findings from several studies and reported how much more money the US spends than other countries do on climate-change research. And it repeated verbatim this statement from a June 2001 report by the National Academies' National Research Council (NRC): "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing global mean surface air temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise."
The EPA report appropriately credited the source of those words. But news media responded as though they'd never seen them before. Typical was this headline over a Reuters story in the New York Times: "Bush Administration Blames Humans for Global Warming." The Associated Press reported that, "for the first time, the administration puts most of the blame for recent warming on human activity."
In fact, the EPA report, other than repeating the incredibly distorted statement from last year's self-contradictory NRC study, said little about warming. It concentrated instead on CO2, which is fairly easy to measure and certainly accumulating in the atmosphere. How much the CO2 build-up contributes to observed warming, a more nebulous phenomenon, is a matter of mostly unreported scientific debate.
Indeed, last year's NRC report thoroughly qualified its flat assertion about human emissions of greenhouse gases causing warming then augmented the qualification with a warning that scientific uncertainty is so great that projections of warming are subject to change in either direction. Most of the NRC report, in fact, addressed uncertainty, making the assertion about human causes of warming seem misleadingly overstated (OGJ, June 18, 2001, p. 19). The new EPA report obligingly repeated the NRC's qualifications and noted its emphasis on uncertainty, which the general news media of course ignored, as they did last year.
In the global warming debate, too much gets ignored. Many scientists, for example, doubt that greenhouse-gas accumulation has caused much, if any, of the observed warming. And warming itself is questionable. But issues like those, which challenge popular fear, receive little notice.
A rising trend of average temperature definitely appears in the 150-year-old record from surface measurements, although half the apparent warming predates the CO2 increase. The shorter records of measurements taken from balloons and satellites indicate no significant warming of the lower troposphere. Some warming is to be expected as the world cycles out of a minor ice age. There might be some amplification of the effect from the greenhouse gas build-up in the atmosphere. But even if that's so, the human contribution to whatever warming may be occurring-unlike the human contribution to the greenhouse-gas build-up-must be minor. So there's little reason to believe that people can meaningfully influence average global temperature, no matter what they do about emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Flimsy link
Heedless of the flimsy link between CO2 and temperature measurements, several states have taken steps to treat CO2-essential though it be to life-as a pollutant. Bills in Congress would do the same. Bush's proposed alternative to draconian Kyoto mandates falls into the same trap by pursuing voluntary reductions in emissions of the gas.
Human beings, after all, can do something about their emissions of greenhouse gases, especially CO2. They can tax themselves away from fossil energy. They can look proudly forward to stabilization of greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. And they can ignore the economies that don't grow fast enough to sustain burgeoning populations and temperatures that keep rising anyway, just as so many of them have ignored reasons not to be frightened into these mistakes.
