The New York Times (pg. A1)  [Printer-friendly version]
June 7, 2001

PANEL TELLS BUSH GLOBAL WARMING IS GETTING WORSE

By Katharine Q. Seelye with Andrew C. Revkin

Washington, June 6 -- A panel of top American scientists declared
today that global warming was a real problem and was getting worse, a
conclusion that may lead President Bush to change his stand on the
issue as he heads next week to Europe, where the United States is seen
as a major source of the air pollution held responsible for climate
change.

In a much-anticipated report from the National Academy of Sciences, 11
leading atmospheric scientists, including previous skeptics about
global warming, reaffirmed the mainstream scientific view that the
earth's atmosphere was getting warmer and that human activity was
largely responsible.

"Greenhouse gases are accumulating in earth's atmosphere as a result
of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface
ocean temperatures to rise," the report said. "Temperatures are, in
fact, rising."

The report was requested by the White House last month in anticipation
of an international meeting on global warming in Bonn in July but
arrived just before President Bush Enhanced Coverage LinkingPresident
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leaves next week for Europe, a trip that includes talks on global
warming with leaders of the 15 European Union countries in Goteborg,
Sweden.

European leaders expressed outrage in March when Mr. Bush rejected the
global warming pact known as the Kyoto Protocol, an international
treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and the subject has been
building as an important test of the administration's foreign policy.

In the White House's first official acknowledgment of the academy's
conclusions, Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser,
told reporters today, "This is a president who takes extremely
seriously what we do know about climate change, which is essentially
that there is warming taking place."

Mr. Bush and many in his cabinet, who discussed the subject at length
on Tuesday, have been trying to hammer out a proposal on limiting the
pollutants that cause global warming.

"A cabinet-level working group is still working on what it wishes to
say to the president before we go to Europe," Ms. Rice said.

She said Mr. Bush would talk with the allies "a little bit about what
we've learned thus far."

Without being specific, Ms. Rice said Mr. Bush was being guided by
certain principles in formulating a proposal.

"One would want to be certain that developing countries were accounted
for in some way, that technology and science really ought to be
important parts of this answer, that we cannot do something that
damages the American economy or other economies because growth is also
important," she said.

In response to critics who have suggested that Mr. Bush is ignoring an
issue of mounting international concern, Ms. Rice portrayed the group
as feverishly committed to educating itself and coming up with a
proposal.

"It has been a matter of bringing up to speed some of the highest-
ranking people in this government," she said. "I would dare say --
dare challenge you to find a situation in which you've had so many
high-ranking people sitting there week after week after week,
understanding the challenge that we face in global climate change,
everybody from the vice president, the secretary of state, the
secretary of interior, secretary of agriculture. It has been quite
something to see all of these people grappling with the issue."

Administration officials have said privately that the White House
could have handled the matter with greater tact, and Ms. Rice conceded
as much today.

"The president had made clear when he was a candidate that he did not
believe the Kyoto Protocol addressed the problem of climate change in
a way that the United States could support," she said. "In retrospect,
perhaps the fact that we understood that we had already said this was
not immediately observable to everybody, and it might have been better
to let people know again, in advance, including our allies, that we
were not going to support the protocol."

This was unusually blunt talk from a White House that until now has
fastidiously avoided the phrase "global warming" and repeatedly
expressed doubts about the clarity of the science underlying the
theory that emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes were heating the
atmosphere in ways that posed a threat.

In an indication of the headwind that Mr. Bush is sailing into next
week in Europe, the journal Science, published by an American
scientific organization, recently carried an open letter signed by 16
prestigious scientific panels in countries around the world calling
for "prompt action" to reduce the gases like carbon dioxide that trap
heat like in a greenhouse.

The increase in temperatures, the editorial said, "will be accompanied
by rising sea levels, more intense precipitation events in some
countries and increased risk of drought in others and adverse effects
on agriculture, health and water balance."

It continued, "We urge everyone -- individuals, businesses and
governments -- to take prompt action to reduce emissions of greenhouse
gases."

Many international business executives have been pressuring the
administration to move more aggressively on the issue. And so has a
powerful band of Mr. Bush's closest advisers, including Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell, Ms. Rice, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill,
and Christie Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency.

Today's report reflects the increasing certainty of the scientific
community here and abroad that the warming of the last 50 years is
probably because of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The
panel said the degree of confidence in this conclusion was "higher
today than it was 10 or even 5 years ago."

Still, it said, large uncertainties limit predictions of the extent
and consequences -- good and bad -- of future warming. But it affirmed
the scientific consensus that human-caused climate warming could well
be a dominant environmental problem throughout the new century,
depending on how fast the gases accumulate in coming decades.

"Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to
continue through the 21st century," it said.

And it said that "national policy decisions made now and in the
longer-term future will influence the extent of any damage suffered by
vulnerable human populations and ecosystems later in this century."

The report thus all but eliminates one reason the administration has
been using to forestall any action on global warming.

And it deals a strong card to Democrats on Capitol Hill who have long
sought more aggressive action on global warming. Senator John Kerry,
Democrat of Massachusetts and a leading advocate of action said of the
report, "It confirms in stark terms the reality that many of us had
accepted a considerable amount of time ago and refutes an effort by
the White House to seek some sort of escape hatch from that reality."

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska and a longtime critic of
the Kyoto Protocol, instead highlighted the uncertainty mentioned in
the report and drew the opposite conclusion of Mr. Kerry.

"This report is certainly not a prescription for the drastic measures
required under the Kyoto Protocol," Mr. Hagel said in a statement.

Nonetheless, in a nod toward the unanimity of the scientific
community, he added: "This report does provide us with enough evidence
to move forward in a responsible, reasonable and achievable way to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It provides us with a basis to move
forward with an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol."

Environmentalists hailed the report as a significant step in the long
effort to force the United States to curtail greenhouse gases. Phil
Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said, "The
president can no longer wiggle out of aggressive action by arguing
that the science is inconclusive."

Mr. Clapp also suggested that the report called into question Mr.
Bush's proposed energy plan, which seeks to step up production of
coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.

"This makes the president's energy plan look completely
irresponsible," he said.

Mr. Clapp said environmental groups had estimated that if the energy
plan was fully put into effect, it would increase the pollution that
causes global warming by 35 percent over the next decade.

The report was written by 11 atmospheric scientists who are members of
the National Academy of Sciences. The authors included Dr. Richard S.
Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
who for years has expressed skepticism about some of the more dire
predictions of other climate scientists about the significance of
human-caused warming.

The report was requested on May 11 in a letter to Dr. Bruce Alberts,
the president of the National Academy of Sciences, from John M.
Bridgeland, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, and
Gary Edson, deputy assistant to the president for international
economic affairs.

A statement from the academy today said, "The White House requested
this fast-track review of the state of climate science in preparation
for international discussions on global warming scheduled to take
place in the coming weeks."

Initially, the White House asked two questions of the academy: What
are the greatest strengths and weaknesses in the science pointing to
human-caused warming? And, are there significant differences between
the full scientific analysis completed recently by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sponsored by the United
Nations, and the final executive summary?

There have been three assessments of global warming by the
international panel since 1990, and each has drawn a more conclusive
picture than the last of the link between human activities and the
prospects for significant harm to agriculture, ecosystems and
coastlines.

But conservatives in Congress -- notably Senators Hagel and Larry E.
Craig, Republican of Idaho -- and groups representing industries whose
business depends on fossil fuels have long criticized the findings of
the international panel as biased, pointing particularly to
differences between the voluminous chapters on complicated scientific
points and briskly worded summaries that tend to influence policy.

The panel, led by Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone, the chancellor of the
University of California at Irvine, met initially in California and
spent the next weeks intensively sifting the existing science.

The report does provide some ammunition for critics in its description
of the conclusion of the international climate group. It concluded,
for example, that the international panel had a tendency in its
executive summary to understate caveats and focus on the harsher
possible consequences of climate warming. But over all, the panel
described the international work as "admirable" and robustly supported
its conclusions.

In a telephone interview today, Dr. Cicerone said he hoped the report,
by spelling out the scientific basis for various predictions, would
dispel some unwarranted skepticism about aspects of the warming
problem.

One climate scientist who critiqued a draft of the new report for the
academy said no one in the administration should be surprised at the
firm nature of the result.

"They asked a string of questions that might have been appropriate in
1990," the scientist said.

"Hello?" he said. "Where've you been the last decade?"