THE Bush administration’s plan to tackle climate change is badly defined, underfunded and scientifically ill-informed. That’s the view of one of the country’s leading scientific organisations, which has reviewed the government’s latest proposals.
The US began its climate change research programme more than a decade ago, under George Bush’s father’s administration. The current administration has now abandoned the Kyoto treaty, claiming more research is needed into global warming, and has merged the programme it inherited into a new Climate Change Science Program.
The administration has asked for comments on a draft of the plan before finalising it at the end of April. And a 17-member panel of the National Research Council that examined the draft did not hold back. “The draft plan lacks most of the basic elements of a strategic plan,” it reported last week. The proposals “overlooked a lot of existing science as a way of claiming more uncertainty than there really is”, says panel member William Schlesinger, dean of environment and earth sciences at Duke University in North Carolina.
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For instance, the draft fails to consider that consumers may affect climate change by actions such as energy and water conservation and the use of mass transport. It ignores the impact of property rights and markets on the supply and demand of resources. And it overlooks research into the impact of environmental measures by local and state governments and corporate institutions.
The proposals also fail to acknowledge research into how the burning, logging and clearing of forests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And they contain just a single sentence on the prospect that global warming might spread insect-borne diseases such as malaria over wider areas.
The draft focuses too heavily on what we don’t yet know about global warming, and that’s a mistake, Schlesinger says. We should stop dwelling on the uncertainty, and move on to how severe global warming is going to be, and what we should do about it, he says. “The basic tenets of global warming are solid.”
James Mahoney, head of the Climate Change Research Program says he welcomes the panel’s “clear call for honing research priorities”. But it remains to be seen how much heed will be taken of the panel’s criticisms.