Turning the heat up on global warming
From the Knight-Ridder Tribune

The heat is being turned up under those who are trying to be coolly indifferent to global warming.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is now estimating that global warming could raise Earth’s average temperature by 10 degrees over the next century. Six years ago, scientists were predicting 6 degrees.

Alarming and arresting anecdotes of the warming climate continue to roll in. The icecap on Mount Kilimanjaro is melting so fast it could disappear in 15 years, researchers reported this week. It is now 18 percent of the size it was when first measured in 1912.

The U.N. report should be a prod to the Bush administration to drop its opposition to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change and start negotiating details with the rest of the world.

The Kyoto treaty would require developed nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, which cause the atmosphere to hold more heat, to 5 percent below their 1990 level by 2012. It has been signed by 100 nations, but not ratified by any industrialized one.

The weather forecast in the U.N. report sounds like a calling card from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - famine, plague, war and death.

The report foresees more severe storms, both droughts and floods, and the spread of cholera and malaria. Count the destruction of coastal development by rising sea level as a substitute for war, and the parallel is unsettling.

The principal villains are carbon-based fuels: coal, oil and natural gas, in declining order of the carbon-dioxide their burning produces.

With energy advisers from the world of traditional fossil fuels, the Bush administration has opposed the Kyoto treaty.

One objection is that the developing countries - particularly the populous ones of China, India and Brazil - aren’t given emissions limits.

Bush needs to apply to global warming the model he’s using on tax cuts. On taxes, Bush says the rich folks get the cuts because they’re the ones paying taxes. On global warming, the rich ought to get the cuts - in this case an obligation, not a give back - because they’re the ones causing the warming.

The United States, with a twentieth of the world’s population, produces a quarter of the world’s greenhouse emissions.

The United States can get responsible about global warming by getting serious about energy conservation.

Now is a good time; the market is an ally. Gasoline, natural gas and electricity (produced mostly from coal and natural gas nationwide) are all relatively expensive compared to the recent past. America can save money and slow climate change.

The president should start the conservation campaign now.