Newsday, February 6, 2007

EDITORIAL: CLIMATE CHANGE DEMANDS ACTION

[Rachel's introduction: A major newspaper, New York Newsday, urges use of the precautionary principle in response to evidence of human contributions to global warming.]

Even the Bush White House, stubbornly skeptical about the dangers of global warming, accepts the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says it's "very likely" that human activity has caused most of the global temperature increase since 1950. Now the question is what the president and the Congress are ready to do. This is a time to start moving from debate to action.

The panel's fourth report since 1990 is not a shoot-from-the-hip screed from an activist group. It summarizes the work of hundreds of authors and peer reviewers, modified in response to more than 30,000 comments on the drafts. So it sifts out extreme findings to achieve a broad consensus. It won the approval of 113 nations, including the United States.

"It reflects the sizeable and robust body of knowledge regarding the physical science of climate change, including the finding that the Earth is warming and that human activities have very likely caused most of the warming of the last 50 years," said the top White House delegate to the panel's meeting. Still, last week a House committee heard testimony that Bush officials have pressured government scientists to remove comments about global warming from documents.

This page accepted the national decision not to join the Kyoto agreement on cutting greenhouse gases because it did not include China and India, which are becoming huge emitters. (Many on the panel wanted the new report to say it was "virtually certain" that human activity is causing the warming. But China objected, so the final result was "very likely.")

The panel will propose solutions later this year. It's time to get beyond Kyoto and reach global agreement on a menu of steps to reduce global warming. The precautionary principle dictates that, even in the absence of 100 percent certainty, we now know enough to get moving fast, to do what we can to slow down the warming.

Copyright Newsday Inc.