Clinton Says Global Warming Is ‘for Real’
President Clinton launched a campaign Thursday to build support for international efforts to attack global warming, seeking to undermine skeptics who say scientists have not yet established that the Earth’s atmosphere is nearing dangerous temperatures.
“It is no longer a theory, but now a fact that global warming is for real,” the president said at an hourlong conference with three Nobel Prize laureates and four other scientists. They presented the president with a summary of data leading them to conclude that the world’s climate is indeed undergoing significant change.
Earlier in the day, however, a leading representative of the nation’s manufacturers urged Congress to resist pressure to commit the nation to binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are believed by many scientists to cause atmospheric warming.
The new focus on the issue at the White House and the Capitol signals the start of what is likely to be a drawn-out debate in Washington on whether the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels is responsible for climatic changes, and what should be done about it.
Although the scientists’ presentation was directed at the president and, seated with him, Vice President Al Gore, both have made it clear in the past that they are convinced that global warming is occurring and that it poses a severe threat.
The real purpose of the session was to build the case for measures that are likely to encounter stiff opposition from the public or industry and utilities. Such measures would likely be built around energy conservation, not just in the home and on the highways but in big factories and power plants.
The immediate point of contention is the position the United States will take into negotiations later this year among more than 150 nations. The talks, in Bonn and then in Kyoto, Japan, are intended to produce a treaty that would commit the participants to specific steps toward lowered emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases.
A wide range of scientists--but not all--who have studied climatic phenomena believe that the gases given off when oil, gasoline and other fossil fuels are burned trap the Earth’s heat much as a greenhouse traps the heat from the sun’s rays. According to advocates of stringent steps, as more fuel is burned, more gases are given off and the average temperature around the world climbs.
Now Clinton is setting out to persuade the American people that although they cannot necessarily discern the impact on their daily lives, temperatures are indeed rising and the world must take steps to reverse the trend.
“We have evidence, we see the train coming; but most ordinary Americans, in their day-to-day lives, can’t hear the whistle blowing,” the president said.
Indeed, the change in average temperatures cited by scientists as evidence of global warming is small--one-half a degree to one degree Fahrenheit since the Industrial Age began more than a century ago.
But climatologists and other experts predict that temperatures will increase at least twice that much in coming decades. As a result, they warn, icebergs will melt, glaciers will disappear, sea levels will rise, insect-borne diseases will increase, droughts will expand, crops will shrink, famine will spread, and economies will collapse.
Not so, said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach).
“Global warming is nothing more than liberal claptrap that everybody is jumping behind to be trendy,” he said at Thursday’s hearing of the House International Relations Committee. “This is so absurd I can hardly contain myself.”
Other critics, among them representatives of the American Farm Bureau Federation, organized labor and the National Assn. of Manufacturers, were more restrained, but equally adamant.
“We should avoid a herd mentality that says, ‘Sign first, ask questions later,’ ” said Jerry Jasinowski, president of the manufacturers’ group. He said the administration’s plan, to establish binding targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, “is based on woefully inadequate research and analysis.”
