Climate
Change Experts
Despair Over US Attitude
By Maggie Fox
16 June, 2004 by
Reuters
WASHINGTON -
Climate change experts said on Tuesday they are frustrated the U.S.
government and the public are not taking the risk of global warming
seriously.
They said even as
sea levels rise and crop yields fall, officials argue over whether climate
change is real and Americans continue to drive fuel-guzzling SUVs.
"There is going
to be large change," said atmospheric scientist David Battisti
of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The risks are very
large."
The group met at
the American Association for the Advancement of Science to try to drive
home the message that climate change is already under way.
"You hope that
somehow people will understand that we have got to do something now,"
Joyce Penner, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan,
said in an interview. "Some people get it -- some people are driving
hybrids. But there is a problem with the American public."
Climate experts
around the world agree one first step to battling the buildup of polluting
gases that is warming the Earth is an agreement called the Kyoto Protocol,
a 1997 pact aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions.
More than 120 nations
have ratified the pact or acceded to it. President Bush pulled out in
2001, arguing Kyoto was too expensive and unfairly excluded developing
nations. The United States is the world's biggest polluter, producing
36 percent of warming emissions.
Bush's advisers
also cite doubts about models that predict the course of global warming.
UNDERESTIMATING
THE THREAT
The climate experts
agreed there is debate about the models but say if anything, they underestimate
the extent of the problem.
"The models
... are good enough to tell us we ought to be starting now to do what
we can to reduce emissions," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor
of environmental science at Princeton University.
Oppenheimer said
sea levels have risen 4 inches (9 cm) already over the past century
and could rise between 4 and 40 inches (9 to 88 cm) more in the next
century.
Both the Greenland
and the West Antarctic ice sheets are "highly vulnerable"
to global warming, Oppenheimer said. If completely melted, the Greenland
ice sheet would add 25 feet to overall sea level and the West Antarctic
Ice Sheet would raise it by 16 feet.
This would be enough
to swamp most of Florida, Bangladesh and Manhattan, he said.
"The sea level
rise over the past century appears greater than what the model says
it should be," Oppenheimer said. "The ice sheets may be contributing
more than the models predict."
The researchers
said they hoped to convince the U.S. public to pressure politicians
into policy changes.
"In this country
it depends a lot on what happens in the next election," said geochemist
Daniel Schrag of Harvard University. "I don't think we can expect
to change the minds of this administration in the next couple of months."
Schrag said the
current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 380 parts
per million -- higher than it has been for at least the past 430,000
years.
"In the next
100 years, unless immediate action is taken, carbon dioxide levels will
rise to between 800 and 1,000 parts per million. The last time carbon
dioxide was that high was during the Eocene, 55 to 36 million years
ago," Schrag added.
At that time he
said "palm trees lived in Wyoming, crocodiles lived in the Arctic,
Antarctica was a pine forest and sea level was at least 300 feet higher
than today."
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2004 Reuters Ltd