How Hot the Greenhouse? : A hot enough question to require solutions
The industrial nations may be approaching a confrontation in which troops, bombast or peace negotiations would be of little use. If it comes, the confrontation would be with their own planet over matters of physics, chemistry and the atmosphere--items that are not negotiable.
The showdown involves the so-called greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide that result from burning fossil fuels to produce energy. Not many scientists any longer dismiss out of hand the theory that CO2 and other gases rise to the stratosphere to form an envelope around the Earth that holds in warm air that otherwise should escape to icy outer space.
One way to deal with the problem is both elementary and the most complicated task humans have ever faced: Stop burning so much fossil fuel--from oil to logs.
But the United States, the largest producer of carbon dioxide, is balking at rushing into mitigation measures. President Bush was so agitated recently by demands from environmentalists to move faster that he blasted the Sierra Club and other mainstream groups as extremists.
More and more, American insistence on irrefutable proof of risk before it takes the greenhouse problem seriously enough to do something about it is isolating the country from other, mostly European, countries. Still, the White House argues that there are too many uncertainties to justify spending money to curb emissions. It warns that trying to put caps on the gases that any country’s plants could let escape into the atmosphere could disrupt the economy.
The most recent demonstration of the gap occurred in Sweden at a meeting of scientists from 75 countries. These were not men with long beards wearing grubby robes and carrying signs that said: “Repent. The End Is Near.” They are students of the Earth’s climate and, as Times writer Rudy Abramson reported this week, this is generally what they said:
--An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks the atmosphere will be on average 5.4 degrees warmer by the end of the next century, an estimate the panel also thinks probably is low.
--If humans take no steps to curb the greenhouse gases, oceans could rise 3 feet by the beginning of the 22nd Century. This could “displace tens of millions of people, flood productive land and contaminate fresh water supplies.”
Against that background, capping emissions is precisely the direction in which the United Nations is moving. The U.N. called for the assessment of the risks of global warming that were discussed in Sweden. The final report is due in a few months, and the tentative timetable calls for negotiating an international pact to limit emissions by 1992.
To be sure, the White House has its hands full in the Middle East, but part of what that crisis is about--or should be--is teaching Americans how to live well on less fuel. That is all that the U.N.’s panel of scientists is talking about when they urge reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Facing down a daylight robber like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein is one thing. Facing down the planet itself is quite another matter.
