The administration of US President George W. Bush stepped into a trap this month with its proposed alternative to the Kyoto protocol on climate change. Did it somehow believe that global-warming alarmists would reciprocate its half step toward Kyoto by moderating their extremist agenda? If so, uproar from environmental groups should restore reality to Executive Branch thinking on this polarized subject.
In a Feb. 14 appearance at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., Bush announced a climate change initiative that links reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases to economic growth. It calls the relationship "greenhouse gas intensity." The aim is to reduce emissions per unit of growth by 18% in 10 years through voluntary action.
Common ground?
From environmental groups, the proposal drew howls. The Sierra Club called it "a sweetheart deal to the corporate polluters that funded his campaign." Greenpeace called it "nothing more than a wish list from Exxon to allow it to continue business as usual." If the administration was looking for common ground with environmentalists on global warming, it obviously didn't succeed with this initiative.
David G. Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Climate Center, echoed complaints of these and other groups that the proposal doesn't cut emissions of greenhouse gases. "The benchmark for global warming policy is whether it cuts global warming pollution," he said. "This plan calls for more pollution growth at the same dangerous pace as the past decade."
Hawkins's comments show what's wrong with the alarmist agenda. To combat an observed warming trend presumed to portend catastrophe, in the alarmists' view, it is necessary to reverse an observed build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The problem is the great but usually ignored likelihood that stabilization of human emissions of greenhouse gases-achievable only at great cost-would have no effect at all on average global temperature.
How can this be? Most if not all observed warming occurs for reasons other than human emissions of greenhouse gases. To the extent those emissions do contribute to warming, the effect becomes tangled in a complex of other influences, many of them offsetting. This is partly why temperature measurements don't uphold the warming predictions of computer models, which can't account for all the adjustments the climate makes to photochemical change in the atmosphere.
Many scientists in recent years have pulled away from the view that the greenhouse-gas build-up is the main cause of a warming trend indicated by surface measurements over the past century. Against what has so far been learned about the climate, in fact, the assumption that humans can affect global average temperature by tinkering with greenhouse gases appears quaint.
Still, the build-up of greenhouse gases is real, even if it relates less directly to temperature cycles than once was believed. Some scientists find the build-up alarming because they can't predict its effects. Other scientists see net benefit in growing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases-especially carbon dioxide, which promotes plant growth.
If policy is to address any of this, it should focus on greenhouse gases and forget about global warming. Policy can't do anything about temperature cycles, the human influence on which is minor, and shouldn't try.
The human influence on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is, by contrast, evident. So should policy try to do something about the build-up?
To two groups, the answer is no. In one group are those who believe that the build-up is on balance beneficial to humankind. In another group are those less certain about benefits of a greenhouse-gas build-up but who don't see hazard justifying the high costs of prevention.
Precautionary principle
To the remaining group-the one that says yes, policy should address a greenhouse-gas build-up-precautionary action is worth whatever it costs. One problem with this view, the "precautionary principle," is precedent. It implies that policy-makers should respond to every popular fear.
With his initiative on climate change, Bush aligned himself with the precautionary principle. His move is regrettable. "Whileellipseuncertainties remain, we can begin now to address the human factors that contribute to climate change," he said in Silver Spring. "Wise action now is an insurance policy against future risks."
And the pressure groups howled.
