GLOBAL WARMING

GLOBAL WARMING
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: President Bush is wrong as can be in his wait-and-see approach to reducing American contributions to global warming. But the research initiatives laid out at last week's Commerce Department conference of climate scientists and other experts are right on target.
Scientific measurement has established that global temperatures are climbing, and at an accelerating rate. It has shown that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are a key cause of this change. There is considerable documentation of early impacts on ice sheets, vegetation and coral reefs.
Little can be gained from arguing these points with the professional contrarians or the willful agnostics. But there is a great deal to be gained from more robust study of climate mechanisms, the probable impacts of advancing change, the best strategies for mitigation and adaptation.
By harping on the president's do-nothing approach to emissions reductions, his critics may deflect too much attention from other useful work that can be done, and must be done, in areas where scientific knowledge is less fully developed.
There is considerable disagreement, for example, about how much of the temperature trend can be attributed to natural cycles. Yes, it's unreasonable to seize on this uncertainty as an excuse for continuing to increase the atmospheric carbon load. But it's equally unreasonable to overlook the policy implications that will grow from a clearer understanding of natural variation, and how it might mitigate -- or aggravate -- human influences.
Scientific efforts
Modeling of climate change is improving but remains, for policymakers, a fairly soft science. Imprecision in their forecasts, and disagreements among them, are too often cited as arguments for disregarding what they show. The wiser course is to redouble scientific efforts at refining them.
Perhaps the least studied dimensions of climate change are the strategies nations might take to offset greenhouse gas accumulation, and to adapt to changed regimes of temperature, rainfall and weather disturbance. The importance of these subjects is heightened by the certainty that the atmospheric changes now underway cannot be quickly reversed, even if every automobile on the planet were junked tomorrow -- and by the growing recognition that catastrophic impacts on sea levels, agricultural production and storm patterns could happen rapidly, with little warning.
These are among the questions that the Commerce Department's five-year research program, designed with advice from the National Academy of Sciences, will be exploring. The president's critics correctly observe that nothing in it justifies his preference for a business-as-usual approach to emissions over the next decade. But that argument has been lost with this administration, at least for now. Focusing so single-mindedly on it risks diverting public attention from other important and praiseworthy work, and perhaps undermining support for their cause.