http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0726-03.htm
Published on Saturday,
July 26, 2003 by the Associated Press
Experts at US Conference on Global Warming
Say Bush's Position ‘Ludicrous'
by Scott Sonner
CAPTION 1:
AUTO POLLUTION? NO. IT'S THOSE KILLER TREES
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham meets reporters in Washington
Thursday, July 24, 2003 to announce the Bush plan to study
global warming. Abraham, a former Republican Senator from
Michigan, was the top recipient of campaign contributions
from the automotive industry during 1999-2000, receiving
more than $700,000 for his failed Senate run in 2000 from
contributors including General Motors, Ford and Lear Corp.
The chief goal of the $130 million study is learning more
about natural causes of climate change, drawing criticism
from environmentalists who say reducing US carbon dioxide
emissions is the real problem. (AP Photo/Stephen J. Boitano)
CAPTION 2:
WRONG DIRECTION
US carbon dioxide emissions, which are considered a culprit
in global warming , increased 1.3 percent in 2002.
(AFP/File/Frederic J. Brown)
RENO, Nevada - International experts at a gathering of more than
1,000 scientists studying climate change and the future of mankind
say the threat of global warming is real and getting worse.
One leading researcher
at the weeklong conference said
it was 'ludicrous' that the Bush administration has refused
to acknowledge the increasing dangers of greenhouse gases.
"The voluntary
measures the administration is proposing are
going to get us nowhere," Raymond Bradley said Friday.
Bradley is the director of the University of Massachusetts’
Climate System Research Center at Amherst, Mass.
"Right now, we
have good, strong scientific evidence
supported by the vast majority of scientists who studied
the problem to say we are facing a serious problem,"
he told the Associated Press on Friday.
Bradley criticized
the White House decision this week
to make the study of natural cycles in climate change
the chief goal of a new 10-year plan addressing global
warming.
President Bush and
his advisers maintain that reducing emissions
through costly near-term measures is unjustified. The White House
rgues that forecasting climate change is too imprecise to agree
to long-term, international, mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas
emissions.
"It is only imprecise
if you choose to consider what I would
describe as fringe science," Bradley told AP. "Politicians
are
always faced with making decisions in the face of uncertainty,
but I think the uncertainty over this issue is relatively low."
Bradley co-authored
a study of tree rings and ice cores that
determined 10 of the hottest years globally over the past
600 years have come since 1990 - the hottest in 1998.
"We need to put
our present state in perspective for politicians
and others who are not yet convinced things need to be taken
seriously," he said in a speech Thursday.
"Most of the major
developments in this area have taken place
in the last 30 years," Bradley said.
"One-half of all
the greenhouse gases have been added since
I was a grad student," he said, mostly in the form of emissions
from carbon dioxide and methane.
"This change is
clearly unprecedented, it is abrupt and
it’s of a magnitude larger than anything we have ever
experienced. And whatever we’ve seen in the recent past,
those changes are destined to be overshadowed by changes
in the near future," he told the International Union for
Quaternary Research. INQUA was formed in 1928 by scientists
seeking to understand environmental changes on Earth since
the Quaternary Period, which spans approximately the past
2 million years.
Other papers presented
at the conference include the findings
of James Knox of the University of Wisconsin - that flooding
of the Upper Mississippi River over the past 7,000 years was
"strongly linked to relatively modest climate changes."
The high frequency
of large floods on the (river) since about
1950 have occurred during a period of rapid global warming,
he said.
David Sauchyn of the
University of Regina in Saskatchewan
said his research suggests global warming could result
in Canada’s prairie environment becoming much drier.
U.S. Energy Secretary
Spencer Abraham has said the administration
is "already engaged in an active, aggressive and multi-pronged
campaign to address climate change."
The new program introduced
this week "will find the answers
to the many unanswered questions about climate change, and
identify the most promising areas for investment in future
technology research and development," he said.
James Schlesinger,
former energy secretary under President
Carter, said at a recent Energy Department symposium that
the idea the "science is settled" on global warming
is
"far from the truth.
"We cannot tell
how much of the recent warming trend
can be attributed to the greenhouse effect and how much
to other factors. In climate change, we have only a
limited grasp on the overall forces at work," he said.
Bradley said there
were times in history where higher
levels of carbon dioxide likely existed.
"But there weren’t
6 billion people living on a knife’s
edge when those levels were reached in the past," he said.
"For the first
time in history, human beings are having a
global impact on the most remote parts of the planet.
When you go to the South or North pole, you see the evidence
of what is happening 10,000 miles away."
The INQUA conference,
the first in the United States
since it met in Colorado in 1965, is hosted by the Desert
Research Institute and continues through Wednesday.
On the Net:
International Union for Quaternary Research Conference:
http://inqua2003.dri.edu/
Copyright 2003 The
Associated Press
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