> Published on Monday, June 3, 2002 in the New York Times
> Climate Changing, U.S. Says in Report
> by Andrew C. Revkin
>
>
> In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent
> a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and
> far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the
> American environment.
>
> In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human
> actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the
> burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into
> the atmosphere.
>
> But while the report says the United States will be substantially
> changed in the next few decades "very likely" seeing the disruption of
> snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent
> disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes, for example
> it does not propose any major shift in the administration's policy on
> greenhouse gases.
This report chimes with what the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) says. The dirty little secret about global warming seems to be that even IPCC projections say that it will affect rich countries the least, and the US the least of all. So that the actors who release the most gas, and who wield the most power to fix things, will suffer the least if things are not fixed. Below are a few paragraphs from an FT article that came out just after Bush said the US was opting out of Kyoto:
<cite>
Financial Times, Mar 30, 2001
SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENT / INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY: Most experts decry US stance
By VANESSA HOULDER
<snip>
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 Degrees C and 5.8 Degrees C over the course of the century, which would be significantly faster than at any point over the last 10,000 years.
The consequences of these temperature rises would be serious for large parts of the world, including spreading deserts and a decline in agricultural production, floods, droughts, coastal erosion and water shortages.
Wealthly countries, notably the US, might even enjoy some benefits, such as improved crop and timber yields, from a modest rise in temperatures. 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.
<endcite>
Michael