A new push will appear soon for the US to acquiesce in panic over global warming. Now that Russia has ratified the Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change, pressure will grow for Americans to join the futility. Although Kyoto can do very little about apparent warming, its supporters cheer it as a first step, which—to those who dare question the need for and efficacy of urgent response—only diminishes its appeal.
Kyoto will loiter in the halls of US government as a way for newly reelected US President George W. Bush to win over Europeans, who in overwhelming numbers despise him. If only he'll compromise on Kyoto, the argument will go, Europeans will warm to him and his country.
Bush isn't likely to be fooled. He knows which side of the Atlantic the people who elected him inhabit. He knows the Senate wouldn't ratify Kyoto if he wanted it to, which he doesn't. He knows Kyoto represents large cost for tiny or no gain. And he knows that whatever goodwill he might win in Europe by signing Kyoto would be fleeting. European dislike of Bush and anxiety about the US run deep.
Arctic temperatures
Energizing diplomacy on behalf of Kyoto will be new scientific affirmations that the climate changes and ice melts. One of them, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, determined that warming in the Arctic is twice as rapid as that elsewhere, corresponding with computer models that haven't predicted much else about the climate with useful accuracy.
Typically, the study implies that human activity is mostly responsible for changes that, in fact, might well have occurred no matter what people do. Its warnings ignore cycles in the arctic temperature record that show readings in the late 1930s above current levels—before atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide began their large increase after World War II. That much general warming has nonhuman causes is evident in timing of the 0.6° C. increase in global average surface temperature during the past 100 years, about half of which came before the CO2 build-up. Yet assertions persist, especially in Europe, that human activity accounts for most of the observed warming and that people therefore can reverse the trend as an act of political will. Why?
Donald F. Anthrop, a professor at San Jose State University in California, offers an explanation. Using data from the US Energy Information Administration, he compared annual carbon emissions of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, Western Europe, the US, and the world for 1990, the base year for Kyoto emission cuts, through 2002.
"Since developing countries are exempt from constraints on carbon emissions under Kyoto," Anthrop says, "it is pretty obvious who gets hurt." It's the US, where carbon emissions rose to 1.568 billion tonnes in 2002 from 1.367 billion tonnes in 1990. Western Europe's emissions fell after 1990 as several countries switched from heavy reliance on coal to natural gas and in 2002, at 1.051 million tonnes, had eased back to about even with the base year. Emissions from Eastern Europe and the FSU, at 1.295 billion tonnes in 1990, plummeted with the FSU's ensuing economic collapse and in 2002 were about 823 million tonnes. Under Kyoto, the US would have to make costly changes to reduce emissions to 1990 levels; the other regions wouldn't.
Role of population
Anthrop says he assembled the data to test his suspicion that Europeans' enthusiasm for Kyoto "stems much less from their concerns for the environment than it does from a desire to gain a competitive advantage over the US in world trade." He goes on to point out that much of the increase in US carbon emissions between 1990 and 2002 is attributable to population growth of 41 million. Most countries in eastern and western Europe have stable or declining populations. To keep Kyoto compliance from becoming "exceedingly costly," Anthrop says, the US would have to cut population growth, which would require curtailing immigration—a political challenge so far not addressed in the context of Kyoto compliance.
The politics of global warming draws too much sustenance from blind alarmism and too little from serious attention to costs and benefits. If Kyoto is just a first step, it's not too soon to ask its evangelists what might come next.
