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.