U.S. Steps Up Research Into Recent Climate Changes
The Bush Administration, responding to fears of a global warming trend, Thursday announced a stepped-up research effort to determine if recently observed changes in the Earth’s atmosphere are the result of human activity or largely natural.
The White House Office of Science and Technology said that the government will spend $191.5 million for research on “global change” during the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, a 43% increase over this year’s spending level.
Rather than attacking a particular phenomenon such as the “greenhouse effect,” the government is planning a broad research program to extend over a decade and study everything from ocean currents to prehistoric rock formations.
“We are hoping to gain an understanding of how this planet ticks,” said Bob Corell of the National Science Foundation.
Natural or Man-Made?
The research is necessary, officials said, because scientists do not know to what extent the climatic changes are caused by the cycles of nature extending over millions of years and to what extent they have been caused by man-made pollution.
They noted that the gases that are known to be increasing in the atmosphere, such as methane, have both natural and man-made sources.
Concern about global warming has been heightened by recent British studies concluding that 1988 was the warmest year worldwide in the 130 years since official records have been kept.
In addition, atmospheric studies have detected a sharp rise in carbon dioxide, fueling fears that the pollutant may be causing global temperatures to rise by trapping the sun’s reflected heat within the atmosphere: the “greenhouse effect.”
“Responding to these changes without a strong scientific basis could be futile and very costly,” said a Bush Administration research report on “Our Changing Planet.”
Predict Changes
A key goal of the intensified effort will be to “separate out the natural and human-induced changes,” Corell said. By the mid-1990s, scientists said that they hope to have models that can predict future changes in the atmosphere and climate.
White House Science Adviser D. Allan Bromley said in a statement accompanying the research plan that the expanded effort reflects President Bush’s concern for the environment.
“Because in the coming decades global environment change may well represent the most significant societal, environmental and economic challenges facing the United States and the world,” Bromley said, “the President has endorsed the goal of the U.S. program to develop a predictive understanding of global change.”
The research plan was put together by an interagency group called the Committee on Earth Sciences. But the dozens of separate research projects will remain under the control of a variety of agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Most of the new spending already has been approved by Congress, said Dallas Peck, chairman of the coordinating committee.
Environmental advocates were quick to applaud the expanded research effort.
“This is a significant step, a real increase in funding,” said William Moomaw, director of the climate, energy and pollution program at the World Resources Institute in Washington. “This seems to have been one of those rare times when you have the agencies working together in a good spirit of cooperation.”
Gordon MacDonald, a scientist who headed a recent study urging more support for climate research, said that some of the new research money announced Thursday may “simply be relabeling and repackaging. You have to be an accountant to track it all.”
Nevertheless, he called the research plan “a hopeful step. It’s a sign of real progress.
“It will take years of careful observation to know whether the temperature is really changing and what is causing it. Right now, we have a very poor idea of how much of it is natural and how much is man-made,” MacDonald said.
