Posted on 18-2-2004
Careful
with that planet, Mr President
Diana Liverman spent years as a senior climate adviser in the
US. Now back in the UK, she argues for American scientists to
be freed from their fear of speaking out on global warming -
before it's too late
In 1980, when I left England to do postgraduate work in California,
the United States was a world leader in environmental policy
supported by a respected and well funded environmental science
community. I had few regrets about leaving what seemed at the
time to be a narrowly disciplinary, unexciting, irrelevant and
rather chauvinistic British research culture.
How things have changed. Almost 25 years later, I'm back in
England, attracted by the chance to direct the Environmental
Change Institute at Oxford, with its focus on the policy challenges
of climate change, energy and conservation. It's a relief to
be in a country where climate change is seen as a high priority.
To be a scientist working on climate change in the US is to
be frustrated by the backlash against environmental science,
research budgets cuts and by the American media's general lack
of interest in environmental issues.
It's not the American scientists. More than a thousand of them
turned out last week to hear the UK government's chief scientist
Sir David King, at a meeting in Seattle, challenge the Bush
administration to take climate change more seriously. Writing
in Science earlier, he argued: "Climate change is the most
severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the
threat of terrorism." He said the US market approach doesn't
help. The "market cannot decide that mitigation is necessary,
nor can it establish the international framework in which all
the actors can take their place".
Colleagues in Seattle are pessimistic his analysis will sway
the views of the Bush administration - the leadership has used
science selectively, they say, has a narrow view of America's
global duties, and its views on global warming are influenced
by the fossil fuel lobby.
The US national academy of sciences reports released this week,
which I helped write, review the government's plans for climate
research. We praise the ambitious proposals for new work, but
question the government's assumption that "uncertainties"
must be further reduced before it will make decisions about
preventing or adapting to climate change. We are also considerably
concerned about whether the resources and will are there to
implement the plans.
I have been a cheerleader for the importance of social science
in understanding the causes, consequences and policy implications
of global change and spent years within the US government advisory
structure trying to create a space for it. It has been disappointing
to see the erosion of some of these programmes, especially at
a time when delay means it's not just a question of preventing
climate change but looking at how we can adapt to what is already
happening.
Recent surveys suggest the average American is far less worried
about global warming than the typical Briton. The percentage
of Americans concerned about global warming has fallen from
72% in 2000 to 58% in 2003. And while 83% of British respondents
disapprove of the US government's position on the Kyoto protocol,
only 44% of Americans do - and only 15% of them associate the
global warming problem with fossil fuel consumption. Why is
this so? My feeling is that it ranges from denial or resentment
about being criticised to a sense that adaptation will be relatively
easy.
A discussion with a neighbour when I moved from colder Pennsylvania
to the deserts of Arizona illustrates the attitude. "How
can you say that global warming is a problem when you deliberately
move to the sort of warm, dry climate that you are warning will
come to the northern United States? It just shows that with
enough air conditioning and imported irrigation water you can
easily adapt to climate change!" Almost everything in Arizona,
from the buildings to health systems and agriculture, is engineered
for a hot, dry climate. Even the dairy cows live in air conditioning
and are fed on irrigated clover. But you only have to cross
the border into Mexico to see what happens when people don't
have money and technology to adapt to climate extremes - where
summer brings water shortages and mosquito-borne diseases, and
where crops and cattle die from increasingly frequent droughts
and heat waves.
The controversy that surrounded a serious attempt to examine
these issues, the US national assessment on climate change,
was a dismaying episode. I was a contributor to this study,
which attempted to involve people in trying to understand how
climate change might affect different regions in the US and
how any damage might be reduced. However, perceived as a legacy
of presidential candidate Al Gore, the report became an object
of derision in the transition to the Bush administration.
Lobby group the Competitive Enterprise Institute, together
with several Republican senators, filed a federal lawsuit alleging
that the report had been shoddily prepared, using two foreign
climate models, poor data, and had not followed proper guidelines.
Several scientists were named and forced to take expensive legal
advice. Although settled - partly through adding a "health
warning" to the report's web page - the legacy of the national
assessment haunts US climate science, raising fears that scientists
will be subject to lawsuits, and raising the anxiety of those
publishing on climate change topics.
Another disturbing new trend is the pressure on the editorial
boards of climate journals, the gatekeepers of credible science.
When the journal Climate Research published a paper suggesting
20th-century temperatures were not unusually warm, the conclusions
were rapidly adopted by sceptics in Washington to argue against
evidence of global warming and to force revision of an environmental
protection agency report. When it was revealed last year that
the American petroleum institute had partly funded the authors
and that expert review of the paper's methods and assumptions
had been flawed, six editors resigned. The editorial board of
Climatic Change, of which I am a member, is debating how to
respond: unprecedented levels of proof and transparency are
being demanded by some reviewers because of the ways in which
results may be spun by political interests.
The backlash against environmental science and research that
supported international action on climate change also presented
me with some personal challenges. On one occasion I was invited
to speak to a community group in Arizona and faced a barrage
of hostile questions attacking me for promoting global warming
as a scare tactic to secure more personal research funding.
Research we conducted on the transboundary San Pedro river,
supported by a Montreal-based trilateral environment secretariat,
was seen as international meddling with the rights of local
property owners and water users. As a result, we even started
to underplay global warming in our research projects, focusing
instead on the use of past and present climate information in
order to rebuild credibility.
It's not all bad. Some American politicians are becoming more
concerned with the impacts of climate change on the regions
they represent. For example, John McCain, the Republican senator
from Arizona, was behind the Climate Stewardship Act, which
proposed a cap on carbon emissions and the creation of a market
in which credits for emissions can be bought and sold. The act
had broad bipartisan support and was only narrowly defeated.
As someone who took up US citizenship and spent much of my
career in the US, I still care deeply about the conditions for
scientific research and the environmental policies of my adopted
country - as well as the way it is perceived around the world.
Right now it looks to many as if the US is discounting the impacts
of global warming and trying to derail the Kyoto treaty.
Returning to the UK at a time when researchers are believed
and supported by government and the public is heartening - Britain
is making an effort to lead the world in CO2 reductions.
But given Britain's self-proclaimed position as a close ally
of the US, are we now in a position to influence the US to make
climate change a major theme of the G8 summit in June? Let's
see if some tough diplomacy can result in something concrete.
It really is decision time - and as David King said - we cannot
afford to wait.
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