International Herald Tribune Editorial - Hot and cold

International Herald Tribune Editorial - Hot and cold
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: April 8, 2007


Last week began with a Supreme Court decision declaring that the U.S. government had the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and all but ordering the Bush administration to do so. It ended with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the world's authoritative voice on global warming - warning that failure to contain these emissions will have disastrous environmental effects, especially in poorer countries, which are least able to defend themselves and their people against the consequences of climate change.

One would hope that these events would shake President George W. Bush out of his state of denial and add his authority to the chorus of governors, legislators and business leaders calling for an aggressive regulatory and technological response to the dangers of global warming. They haven't. When asked about the Supreme Court decision, the president said he thought he was already doing enough.

He argued further that there was little point in America doing any more unless other polluters like China acted as well. That ignores the reality that no developing country is going to move unless the United States - which produces one-fourth of the world's emissions with only 5 percent of its population - takes the lead.

The report from the intergovernmental panel was the second of three due this year. The first concluded with "90 percent certainty" that humans had caused the rise in atmospheric temperatures over the last half-century. The most recent focused on the consequences, few of them positive.

The northern latitudes will have longer growing seasons. But elsewhere climate change will lead to more severe storms, the flooding of tropical islands and coastlines inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, the likely extinction of at least one-fourth of the world's species and, in poorer countries in Asia and Africa, drought and hunger.

Some of these changes have begun. But the report also makes clear that while emissions already accumulated in the atmosphere make some damage inevitable, the worst can be avoided if the world's nations take swift action to stabilize and then reverse emissions.

What must be avoided, the report said, is a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, the point at which truly devastating effects will begin to kick in. But such a rise is almost inevitable over the next century if the world continues to do business as usual.

The panel's next paper will discuss alternatives to business as usual. These policies will almost certainly require a major shift in the way energy is produced and used, as well as massive investments in new technologies. They will also be expensive. But what the world's scientists are telling us, with increasing confidence, is that the costs of doing nothing will be far greater than the costs of acting now.