In Global-Warming Debate, Skeptics Corral Bush With a Policy of Inaction : Environment: A small group of conservative scientists tell the President there is no problem; a substantial body of scientific testimony argues otherwise.

What’s happening to the Earth’s climate is not certain. What’s happening to U.S. policy on global climate change is becoming clear. Last week President Bush ducked yet another opportunity to exert even minimal leadership on the issue. His speech Monday to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was a resolute call for more study.

Last November the United States and Japan blocked an international agreement on climate change by refusing to discuss specific reduction of greenhouse gas pollutants by any target date. At that meeting, too, Bush’s team supported only further study.

That do-nothing stance is the result of a White House power struggle being won by conservatives led by Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. Sununu is greatly aided by a group of conservative scientists who have turned technical uncertainties about the greenhouse effect into pseudo-scientific politicking. They argue, to the distress of many of their colleagues, that there may not be any global warming.

The greenhouse skeptics, according to Science magazine, “number less than a dozen . . . . Most have not specialized in greenhouse research and have only recently entered the fray.” But they are sought out and quoted liberally by anyone who wishes the greenhouse effect would go away--by Forbes magazine, for example, in a recent cover article titled “The Global Warming Panic: A Classic Case of Overreaction.”

Three skeptics--William A. Nierenberg, director emeritus of Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Robert Jastrow, former director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Frederick Seitz, president emeritus of Rockefeller University--have produced a 35-page report widely circulated in the White House. The report says, basically, that there is no evidence for global warming now, no certainty that there ever will be and even a possibility of cooling in the next century.

That’s half the argument that Sununu is putting into the President’s mouth. The other half, advanced by conservative economists, is that anti-greenhouse measures will be so expensive that only the greatest scientific certainty could justify them.

And in the opposite corner we have James E. Hansen, current Goddard director, who also produced scientific shock waves by testifying before Congress that, “with 99% confidence,” greenhouse warming is already here. We have Steve Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who puts the confidence level at 80%, and who has written a blistering critique of the Nierenberg/Jastrow/Seitz report.

We have Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who calculates that the cost of reducing greenhouse gases through energy-efficiency measures could be negative-- saving so much money and reducing so many other kinds of pollutants that the measures could pay for themselves. And a distinguished array of the nation’s ecologists--George Woodwell, Paul Ehrlich, E. O. Wilson and others--are convinced that greenhouse warming is one of the most serious threats to the Earth’s ecosystems.

The primary action necessary to combat a greenhouse effect is to use fossil fuels much more efficiently. Whether there is a greenhouse effect or not, energy efficiency would improve the environment, the balance of payments and the general economy. But it would greatly inconvenience the oil, coal, electricity and automobile industries, among others. Hence the eagerness in some political camps not to believe in the greenhouse effect, and to cite only the side of the argument that feeds such bias.

Some scientists play directly into that political eagerness. Like the rest of us, they have genes, glands, emotions, values, whatever predisposes people to prefer nature to oil companies or vice versa. Many of the protagonists in the greenhouse debate have been combating one another for decades. Whether the issue is nuclear energy or nuclear winter, population policy or global warming, they are arrayed predictably, some advocating social reform, others defending the current order. The last time Nierenberg, Jastrow and Seitz made a public statement, it was to promote the Strategic Defense Initiative. Schneider, Ehrlich, and Lovins have never taken anything but a dim view of the environmental effects of untrammeled industrial society.

That does not make them wrong or manipulative or insincere, it makes them human. Their fault comes only when they pass off their values as science. Suppose (a large supposition indeed) we had an administration or citizenry that wanted to sort out whatever truth there is in the scientific brouhaha, and choose the wisest course of action for the whole society. Would that be possible ?

It would. The way to separate values from science is to do what Sununu is not doing--listen openly and critically to all sides. Listen for agreement (scientific certainty, as far as it goes) and disagreement (scientific uncertainty, all mixed up with values).

In the case of global warming, there is absolute agreement that human activities are rapidly increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. There is near-agreement that more greenhouse gases mean a climate warmer than it would otherwise be. There is no agreement about what it would otherwise be. Other forces besides greenhouse gases--such as the sun’s energy and wobbles in the Earth’s orbit--also affect the climate. Those other forces could be moving in a warming direction just now, or they could be about to plunge us into an ice age. That we don’t know.

We also don’t know what feedbacks warming might set off. A hotter Earth would evaporate more water, which could make more clouds, which could cool the Earth again. Or a hotter Earth could release methane locked in frozen tundra--methane is a greenhouse gas; that would make the Earth still hotter. The computerized climate models, from which most greenhouse forecasts derive, include few of these feedbacks, which could bring on the greenhouse effect much faster than we expect, or much slower.

In short, we know we are doing something that, all else equal, will lead to warming. Whether all else will be equal, how fast a climate change could happen, what it would mean for rainfall and sea levels, droughts and hurricanes, ecosystems and human settlements, all that we don’t know.

Therefore we know almost nothing about costs. I have yet to see a cost estimate on this matter done honestly--which is to say, done by comparing what greenhouse gas reductions would cost versus what it would cost to endure a global warming. The job is virtually impossible. But I believe that every anti-greenhouse policy--energy efficiency, solar energy, forest preservation and reforestation, chlorofluorocarbon reduction, population control--is worth pursuing in its own right, even if there is no greenhouse effect.

So here we are, causing large changes in our atmosphere and highly uncertain about the consequences. The dynamics of the planet are such that if we wait for certainty, it will be too late to do anything--if anything ought to be done. Our choice boils down to a judgment about the value of the current society, whose blessings and faults we know, versus an attainable alternative society that could be better, or worse, or better for some and worse for others.

Who gets to define better and worse? Where should the burden of our uncertainty be placed? On a few sectors of the human economy, on the Earth’s ecosystems or to some extent on both? Sununu and Bush are letting the ecosystems bear the entire risk, a one-sided choice, arrived at in a process both unscientific and undemocratic.

The study our President is asking for will concentrate largely on the computerized climate models used by Hansen, Schneider and others. Those models are highly imperfect. Five or 10 years from now they will still be imperfect. They will never be anywhere near as complex as the real Earth. But all we have to go on, now and five years from now, is imperfect models, coupled with our values.

What the President has decided is that for the foreseeable future, the model and the values that will determine U.S. greenhouse policy are the ones in John Sununu’s head.