Financial Times, Friday, March 30, 2001
MOST EXPERTS DECRY US STANCE, by Vanessa Houlder
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The growing credibility of global warming theory is, in large part, due to the authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an advisory group established by the United Nations. The IPCC has won widespread respect for its lengthy reviews of climate science, which have involved hundreds of leading experts.
Earlier this year, the IPCC published a series of reports that reinforced concerns about the threat of climate change. "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities," it said in January.
It predicted that the planet would heat up by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius over the course of the century, which would be significantly faster than at any point over the last 10,000 years.
The consequences of such temperature rises would be serious for much of the world, including spreading deserts, decline in food output, floods, droughts, coastal erosion and water shortages.
Wealthy countries, notably the US, might even enjoy some benefits, such as better crop and timber yields, from a modest temperature rise. This view was endorsed by the US National Assessment Programme's study of climate change impact on the US last year which judged that "for the nation as a whole, direct economic impacts are likely to be modest".
The realisation that the US, which produces a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, could be least affected by consequences of global warming is likely to underpin Mr Bush's arguments that the costs of the Kyoto Protocol exceed its benefits.
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__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com