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Opinions divided on environment report

Thursday, 7 June 2001 23:49 (ET)

Opinions divided on environment report

By KELLY HEARN, UPI Technology Writer

WASHINGTON, June 7 (UPI) -- An informal survey of conservative political watchers and others suggests that just as the scientific community is divided over the role humans play in global warming, opinions are equally split over the political impact a National Academy of Sciences report will have for the Bush administration.

The NAS report, requested by President Bush to help clarify earlier findings of a United Nations committee, was released Wednesday. It essentially confirmed that global temperatures are rising but failed to establish conclusively a link between that trend and human activity. The report stated climate changes over the past several decades "are likely mostly due to human activities" but it did not rule out "that some significant part of those changes are also a reflection of natural variability."

It came as Bush works to assemble a national policy to curb greenhouse gases. He abandoned the 1997 Kyoto global warming pact signed by the United States and 167 countries and has signaled his preference for voluntarily emissions controls. The Kyoto agreement called for mandatory emissions standards.

In that context, environmentalists see the new NAS report as proving the need for mandatory controls. Many conservatives believe scientific uncertainty over the relative roles of human and natural causes of warming obviates the need for more study.

"But it is safe to say that, given the number of reports, this won't affect the political debate," said Jerry Taylor, director of natural resources studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Washington. "This isn't the first time a scientific body has issued a somewhat alarmist report on global warming. Consider that despite all the reports on this subject, you couldn't get a third of the Senate to vote for Kyoto, for example. There is far less politically than meets the eye." Others disagree.

"The report is very important and should change the political debate," said Kenneth Green of the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. He said the report clearly shows climate change science is rudimentary in many areas.

"I think Bush will come out a loser, given the nature of the panel," said Don Ritter, chairman of the National Environmental Policy Institute in Washington. He added many of the NAS authors were largely committed to Kyoto and more basic research was needed before mitigation research. Political impacts or not, said Taylor, one thing is certain: the media will misreport the science.

"The problem is that reporters who write about this have no understanding whatsoever of the issues and are poor judges of what constitutes good or bad work," he said.

Parts of the report seemed contradictory.

"The first sentence in the report is what struck me the most because I see a contradiction between it and what is stated inside," said John Christy, a University of Alabama-Huntsville professor and one of 126 lead authors of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC report. "And I suspect and fear that people will read the first sentence and not read the text."

The first sentence of the report's summary stated that "greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." On page 17, however, it said: "Because of the large and still uncertain level of natural variability inherent in the climate record and the uncertainties in the time history of the various forcing agents (and particularly aerosols), a causal linkage between the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the observed climate changes during the 20th century cannot be unequivocally established."

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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