U.S. clash on global warming

The fate of Kyoto, in fact, could hang on the outcome of the current presidential crisis. Should Gore succeed in winning the White House, he is expected to push for ratification. George W. Bush's commitment is far less certain, given his publicly expressed doubts about whether human activity is really causing global warming. Many environmentalists hope that, in the end, the issue will become depoliticized and dealt with in a nonpartisan manner no matter who becomes president.

Global warming is already being blamed for the strange weather patterns and other ecological disturbances observed across the globe in recent years, from rising ocean levels to the melting of polar ice caps. In Canada, the food supply for the Inuit population could be threatened. Some island nations are already battling the effects of higher waters lapping their shores. NASA scientists have observed that the Greenland ice sheet melting away, and temperatures in the North Sea have risen 8.4 degrees just over the last six years.

Global warming is believed to occur when the sun's heat gets trapped in the atmosphere by carbon-based gases, primarily carbon dioxide, which are emitted from burning fossil fuels like oil and coal. A recent report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the world's temperature could climb by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years -- far more than previously predicted.

"If we don't abate greenhouse emissions, studies have shown there will be a lot of damage especially with serious storms and droughts and extreme weather, not to mention the rising of sea levels, taking perhaps a third of the Florida Everglades away from us," Brown says. "So if that's one of your favorite vacation spots, your grandchildren might not be able to take advantage of that."

The world first addressed climate change collectively in 1992 at a gathering in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where representatives adopted the nonbinding goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissons. The failure of almost all countries to attain the goals specified in the Rio agreement spurred the negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol.

One continuing bone of contention is that the treaty includes binding targets for industrialized nations but not for developing countries. The U.S. position is that the targets should be binding on everyone; developing countries counter that the West is largely at fault for the problem in the first place and should take the most responsibility in dealing with it. Binding them to emission reduction goals, they say, will severely limit their development potential.

The conclusions laid out in Brown's DOE study conclusions clearly bolster the hand of environmentalists demanding that the government take strong action. "The report is an independent view from a government laboratory and it might have a higher level of credibility than other government reports because it's clearly not intended to be in line with the U.S. negotiating position," says Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist at Environmental Defense, a nonprofit advocacy group in New York.

Oppenheimer adds that the report is significant because it is based on recent economic figures rather than those from several years ago. "Those limited number of companies that have been using the cost argument as a protection against a need to act just had the argument torn away from them," he says.

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