International Herald Tribune Editorial - At humanity's doorstep

International Herald Tribune Editorial - At humanity's doorstep
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: February 4, 2007


Should Congress require any further reason to move aggressively to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it need only read Friday's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's authoritative voice on global warming.

A distillation of the best peer-reviewed science, the report expresses more than 90 percent certainty that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have caused the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures, with the destruction of tropical rain forests playing a lesser but important role.

The report warns that if society keeps to its current course, emissions will increase to twice their preindustrial levels by the end of this century. The consequences will include rising seas, more powerful hurricanes and more intensive droughts in subtropical countries.

The report also offers hope, suggesting that what humans have caused, humans can mitigate; that even though the world is committed to centuries of further warming, the process can be slowed and the worst effects averted by swift and decisive action to limit and reverse emissions.

This is the fourth in a series of studies that began in 1990. The first left open the possibility that the warming that began with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and increased in the 1950s was "largely due to natural variability." The second and third reports detected a bigger human role, and this one lays the whole problem at humanity's doorstep.

A later paper will address specific remedies. But many climate experts believe the world must embark on a swift and sustained shift in the way energy is produced and used — away from fuels like oil and coal, and toward cleaner alternatives.

That is the objective of the many bills now circulating in Washington. The best of these would put a price on carbon through a mandatory cap on emissions from sources like power plants and cars, thus making coal and oil relatively more expensive while driving the market toward cleaner energy sources.

Talk is cheap in Washington, while meaningful action is almost certain to be expensive. President George W. Bush has brandished those very real costs of moving to a new energy-delivery system again and again to argue against mandatory caps on emissions and to make the case for his own cost- free (and demonstrably inadequate) program of voluntary reductions. Yet what the panel is telling us is that the costs of doing nothing, especially to future generations, will be far greater than the price of acting now.

This is not a report compiled by a bunch of activists or alarmists.

It is a consensus document, the inherently conservative product of three years of study and debate among mainstream scientists from 150 countries with often competing agendas. And in its modesty, it is alarming enough.